Humber seeks ‘sex victim’
Web user claiming links to college boasts of sexual assault
Humber College and Toronto police are investigating a Facebook page, claiming to be linked to the school, on which an anonymous user boasted about sexually assaulting a young woman. The page, titled “Humber Epic Hookup Fails,” featured the school’s logo as its profile picture and went online Wednesday night. But by Thursday morning its content had prompted disgusted Humber students to complain to school administrators, who contacted Facebook and had the page de-activated. According to CBC, which quoted the page before it was shut down, a Facebook user purporting to be an unnamed male, wrote about meeting a woman so intoxicated she could barely walk, then bringing her back to his house. Once there, the user writes he had sex with her before inviting his roommate to do the same. The poster writes that his roommate received oral sex from the woman. “No verbal consent was needed,” he wrote, according to the CBC report. The post caused a student backlash that spurred the school and police to shut down the page and investigate whether a crime in fact took place. Either way, shock and disgust that Humber College had been connected with such a vulgar Facebook account registered immediately among students and administrators.
“It doesn’t speak for the broader student body,” says John Mason, Humber’s vice-president of student services. “The students are proud of their school and don’t want to see this kind of thing happen any more than anybody else (does).”
The incident highlights an issue that has received intense attention in recent months, after several high-profile cases dealing with the volatile combination of cyberbullying, social media and sexual assault.
Last month, two teenage football players in Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of rape after a series of sexual assaults committed against a drunken 16-year-old girl during a wild night of partying. Instead of intervening, several witnesses snapped photos of the victim, and later shared them on social media while joking about the assaults.
And this week, the death of Rehtaeh Parsons has prompted a flood of sympathy, outrage and headlines after the 17-year-old Halifax-area resident hanged herself. Her family says she has suffered from debilitating depression since November 2011, when photos of a drunken sexual encounter between her and several male acquaintances circulated around several area high schools.
But in the Humber College Facebook case, details remain hazy.
Mason says school and police investigators still haven’t verified who the anonymous poster was, whether the incident recounted on the Facebook page actually occurred, or if the people running the account are even Humber students.
If an assault did in fact take place, Mason says all of Humber’s support services will be made available to the victim.