Student files protest over explicit chat
Took screen shots of Facebook conversations
• When MeiLing (not her real name) campaigned and won a position on the executive of Concordia University’s largest student association in the spring of 2013, she had just turned 20 and was full of optimism about what she could accomplish as a leader.
But after a few weeks in the position, Mei-Ling began to encounter what she describes as a toxic environment, fuelled mainly by two male members of the Arts and Science Federation of Associations (ASFA).
“They made blatant sexist and racially discriminatory remarks, and if you didn’t laugh, or if you showed your uneasiness, they would just make you feel worse,” she said.
Mei-Ling’s ethnic background is Chinese and Italian. She is prominent in Montreal’s Chinese community and speaks five languages (English, French, Italian, Cantonese and Mandarin).
Mei-Ling appealed to members of the ASFA executive for support, but was advised to just ignore the offensive behaviour. But near the end of her term, something happened that MeiLing said she could not ignore.
On March 29 of last year, a few months before completing her mandate, she sat down at a public computer in the ASFA office. She noticed one of the male students had left his Facebook account opened to a chat about Mei-Ling between himself and the other student.
“I saw my name and I clicked on it and that’s when I discovered many more conversations about me as a sexual object, discriminating against my Chinese heritage, not my Italian heritage. I felt like to them, I was not an equal. I was not a human being to them. They dehumanized me and that made me understand how they viewed me.”
Mei-Ling took screen shots of the conversations and has filed a complaint with the Quebec human rights commission against both students and the student association. She claims she was the target of offensive racist and misogynistic slurs, sexually graphic insults, degrading sexual imagery and sexual violence.
Mei-Ling has requested her real name not be used for this story, because she is afraid of becoming a target of cyberbullying.
On Feb. 25, 2013, soon after she applied for her position on the executive, one of the students wrote to the other, “Dude, we HAVE to f--k her” and “if she doesn’t suck our d--ks ... impeached.” One wrote: “She must get so much D.”
In other conversations, the men referred to Mei-Ling, as well as another woman on the executive, as a “whore.”
Mei-Ling went to Concordia’s dean of students, Andrew Woodall, for help. She said he called the director of the university’s Office of Rights and Responsibilities, who determined there was nothing the university could do because the messages she had seen were private.
Mei-Ling then got help from Concordia’s Centre for Gender Advocacy and the Concordia Student Union Legal Information Clinic, which put her in touch with the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR).
CRARR, which filed the human rights complaint on behalf of Mei-Ling, is seeking moral and punitive damages for her, as well as mandatory sensitivity training for the two men. The men did not return requests Tuesday for interviews.
The human rights commission has determined the complaint is within its jurisdiction, and will be assessed.