CAMPUS CULTURE: CRUDE, DEGRADING, DANGEROUS
After a fall session rife with stories of sex assaults and sexualized initiations at Quebec universities, the province is vowing to get serious about sexual violence on campus, and it wants to lead the way in North America.
Quebec’s minister of higher education, Hélène David, was already working on her response to sexual violence on university and college campuses when news broke of a string of alleged break-ins and sexual assaults at a residence at the Université Laval in mid- October.
In the early hours of Oct. 16, one or two men went door to door at Alphonse-Marie-Parent Residence, looking for unlocked rooms, entering without permission, and in some cases, slipping into the beds of sleeping women and sexually assaulting them, according to police. Two men, both students at the university and one who lived at the residence where the incidents occurred, were arrested days later and expelled. One faces 12 charges, including four counts of breaking and entering with commission of sexual assault. The other was released on a promise to appear at a later date.
The Université Laval incidents were by far the most chilling in David’s first autumn as minister responsible for universities and colleges. They were part of a depressingly familiar litany of headline-making misogynist and crude events on Canadian campuses.
In the first week of September, we learned of the infamous “12 Labours of Hercules game,” organized at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, which involved students getting points for meeting such challenges as kissing a girl, photographing breasts, drinking a shot from someone’s cleavage or participating in a wet-T-shirt contest.
Then on Oct. 17, a reporter at the University of Ottawa’s student newspaper La Rotonde reported she had infiltrated a top-secret pub crawl, apparently a long-standing annual tradition organized by the Science Students’ Association.
Here, once again, points were awarded for such dubious feats as being scantily clad or naked in a bar, eating a doughnut off a teammate’s penis or “eating pubic hair while making sexual noises,” La Rotonde reported.
Participants had been carefully selected by organizers and signed releases saying they would not hold organizers responsible for bodily harm, but some told the newspaper they had no idea what they were getting into and felt pressured to participate against their will.
And closer to home, the Université de Montréal law students’ newspaper published an editorial on Sept. 20, on a similar initiation tradition in the law faculty where students got points for removing their clothing in public and were encouraged to sing crude songs that objectified women.
David told reporters she was shocked and outraged to learn these kinds of things, which she characterized as idiotic and degrading, were still going on, considering the many awareness campaigns and training efforts that many campuses have put in place. She seemed particularly outraged by the incidents in the law faculty of her own alma mater, where she had spent the better part of two decades as a professor and administrator.
“These are students who will one day be lawyers, maybe even judges, who will defend women and men who are victims of sexual abuse, who will defend people who are sexual abusers. And this is how they start their law course?” David told La Presse.
Sexually explicit behaviour, crude games and offensive chants have been more or less prominent features in “frosh week” activities and other campus functions for a very long time. What seems to be changing, however, is the frequency with which these activities are being reported and denounced.
Some students still defend them as a kind of harmless bonding with classmates and a necessary shrugging off of parental shackles to embrace the freedom and fun of campus life. It’s tradition, it’s (mostly) consensual and all in good fun, they argue. But others say such traditions should have died long ago, as they are rooted in misogyny, homophobia and rape culture.
The editorial in the U de M law school newspaper, Le Pigeon Dissident, illustrates this burgeoning change in attitude:
“Initiations are a controversial subject. It is hard to speak objectively, especially when we’ve been there, done that, and especially when we enjoyed it. Let’s admit it, many of us chuckled when we saw the headlines about the famous ‘list of challenges’ at UQO earlier this month, thinking ‘If only they knew what we did here’ ... We must raise a delicate issue that has occurred to us during past initiations and struck us again this year: when we show the ropes to new students (this way), we are perpetuating rape culture and trivializing sexuality.”
In fact, a rising chorus of humanrights advocates, sexual-assault survivors, university administrators, student leaders and politicians are drawing a link between the frequency of sexual assault on campus and off, and the casual acceptance of sexist attitudes, victim blaming, objectification of women, harassment and discrimination against women and certain marginalized groups. David is certainly among them. The events at Université Laval’s residence moved the minister from disgust to anger to action.
A few days after those incidents, David announced in the National Assembly her plan to hold five days of consultations on the issue of sexual violence on campus this winter in Montreal, Quebec City, Saguenay, Gatineau and Sherbrooke.
“I want Quebec to hold a real societal debate about the serious problem of sexual violence in our CÉGEPs, private colleges and universities,” she said.
David promised to introduce a law, or a policy framework, that will force all of the province’s postsecondary institutions to develop standard polices and procedures to deal with sexual-violence complaints and provide adequate support to victims, based on best practices. Manitoba and Ontario have both recently passed such laws, and David wants to match or surpass what those provinces have done.
“We want to become, with these measures, among the most engaged, among the most progressive in North America in offering to our students the best conditions to pursue their studies in our institutions free of sexual violence.”
But if a recent survey about sexual violence at six Quebec universities is any indication, ridding campuses of this scourge is a very tall order indeed.
More than one-third of 9,294 respondents to the Enquête Sexualité et Interactions en Milieu Universitaire said they have experienced some form of sexual violence, which includes unwanted touching, sexual harassment and sexual assault committed by another person affiliated with the university since their arrival on campus.
The ongoing research project, led by UQÀM sexology professor Manon Bergeron, polled male and female students, faculty and other university employees at UQÀM about their experience of sexual violence since arriving on campus.
In all, 37 per cent — 41 per cent of the women surveyed and 26 per cent of the men — said they have experienced some form of sexual violence committed by someone associated with the university.
SILENCE
Co-researcher Martine Hébert noted participation in the survey was voluntary, so not a random sample of the whole university population. But a key finding, she said, was that more than one-third of those who said they have been victims of some form of sexual violence have never mentioned the incident to anyone, not even a friend. And only 15 per cent reported the incident to university authorities.
“So official numbers that say how many complaints were received at a university represent the tip of the iceberg when we know that only a tiny minority of people will denounce it to university authorities,” said Hébert.
“I think universities have no choice but to open their eyes, to position themselves and to offer adequate services,” said Hébert, a professor of sexology at UQÀM.
Almost half of those who identified themselves as victims of sexual violence in the survey said they suffered consequences because of the incident, such as harm to their academic or professional success, personal or social life, physical or mental health.
This is why universities need to step in to stop sexual violence from taking such a toll on its victims, or survivors, as many prefer to be called, said Ariane Litalien, 25.
She is one of four survivors of sexual violence who founded a new advocacy group this fall called Quebec Contre les Violences Sexuelles.
“Schools have the power to accommodate victims in ways that police have no ability to act on,” she said, such as providing counselling and help to navigate the complaints system, giving extensions on assignments, issuing no-contact orders, etc. “There is a strong argument for universities to take this on, even though they don’t want to.”
Litalien, originally from Sorel-Tracy and now in her second year of medicine at McGill University, caused waves at Harvard University in the spring of 2014. She was a student at Harvard when her anonymous account of being sexually assaulted by a fellow student in her campus residence was published in the Harvard Crimson under the title “Dear Harvard: You Win.” It detailed Litalien’s frustration with Harvard’s administration, which she said discouraged her from launching an official complaint and did little to help her avoid her alleged attacker when they both returned to residence the following year.
Litalien managed, with great effort, to struggle through that year in residence and graduate from Harvard. But she is still angry about the university’s handling of the incident, describing it as “just as traumatizing as the assault itself.”
Litalien said that victims of sexual violence on campus are too often dissuaded from making formal complaints to the university authorities by friends, family members and even members of the administration, as she says she was.
And when victims do make complaints, often university authorities tend to bend over backward to accommodate the accused, she said, without offering enough support for the victim. She notes more and more Quebec students are turning to the Quebec Human Rights Commission for help after their universities have let them down.
The Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations is helping four Quebec university students take sexual harassment and sexual violence cases to the rights commission, said director Fo Niemi.
“This is new for us, and it’s new for the commission, that students are filing human-rights complaints when they can’t get results at their universities.”
“CATHY”
A case in point is a former Concordia University student, whose story the Gazette has been following since 2015. We are calling her “Cathy” to protect her identity.
Cathy made a formal complaint to Concordia’s Office of Student Tribunals in March 2015, after her ex-boyfriend struck her on the buttocks and upper thigh during a dispute on campus. At the time of the incident, the ex-boyfriend was awaiting trial on an earlier assault against Cathy, to which he eventually pleaded guilty in court.
According to a decision issued by Concordia’s Student Tribunals office last May, Cathy’s ex-boyfriend violated the university’s Code of Rights and Responsibilities when he struck her. (The document, obtained recently by the Montreal Gazette, shows the parties agree that he struck her, although he characterized it as a slap, while she said it was a smack with enough force to leave a bruise.)
Concordia’s code states that a hearing is normally convened within 20 days of a formal complaint being filed. Instead, the process took more than a year.
First, the hearing was postponed until after the spring exam period.
Then it was delayed until the fall because the ex-boyfriend had plans to be out of town for the summer, and the code says the hearing should be held at a mutually convenient time for both the complainant and the accused.
Waiting through the summer for a resolution was not at all convenient for Cathy. She did not sign up for classes in the fall because she was afraid to be on the same campus as her ex-boyfriend and did not know whether he would be returning.
Next, the office of student tribunals told her the hearing would be postponed until the court proceedings involving the first assault were over. Then, after her ex pleaded guilty to the first assault in the late fall of 2015, Cathy was told the hearing would be postponed for two more years because one of the conditions the judge had imposed was that the accused could not communicate with Cathy, so a face-to-face hearing would not be possible.
After Cathy’s lawyer asked the judge to modify the conditions to allow the student tribunal to go forward, the student tribunals office informed Cathy that since she was no longer a student at the university, the hearing could not be held. Cathy objected to that decision, and the hearing was finally held on May 9, 2016, more than a year after her complaint had been lodged.
In the end, the Student Hearing Panel decided Cathy’s ex-boyfriend was guilty of threatening or violent conduct under the code. The sanction he received was 30 hours of community service to be served by the end of 2016-17 school year.
Cathy, meanwhile, has not returned to Concordia and is undergoing therapy to handle her ordeal.
Like Litalien, she found the university administration’s handling of her complaint to be almost as traumatizing as the incident itself.
She got the impression that Concordia, even though it has put in place more policies and resources for violence victims than many other institutions, really just wanted her to drop the case and go away.
Cathy, who suffers from a disability that makes all of this more of a challenge, doesn’t feel she was given the support she needed to get back to school, while her assailant has been able to continue his studies with a light sanction.
“Apparently, the consequence of being found to be (guilty) of threatening and violent conduct, which is what came to pass, is 30 hours of community service at Concordia. That’s telling to me of how seriously they take it,” she said.
Concordia’s administration has refused to comment on this particular case or any individual student disciplinary case, except to say through a spokesperson that the university takes the issue of sexual violence and the safety of its students very seriously.
The provincial government announced on Oct. 28 that it will spend $200 million on a five-year strategy to prevent sexual violence.
Of that, $500,000 will go toward resources and campaigns on postsecondary campuses.
Institutions, student associations and unions have until Jan. 6 to consult their members and submit ideas about best practices on three themes: complaints procedures, safety and prevention/awareness to help the government prepare for the coming consultations on campus sexual violence.