The tragic events at Western University highlight an institutional failure to protect female students
Content warning: sexual assault
This week, news out of London, Ont that up to 30 female students were drugged and sexually assaulted at Western University evoked widespread reactions of shock and horror. In its wake, the question now remains and echoes across the province: how could an institution that is supposed to protect its students have allowed this egregious violation of their safety and well-being?
While the story is shocking, it is surely not unfamiliar to female students at Western and beyond. In fact, I fear we have all dreaded but expected such a story. While the scale is unprecedented, the story is not. It circulates in one form or another between female students every fall.
I was drugged during my frosh in 2018. I heard through the grapevine of several other such cases. I was not sexually assaulted — I was taken home by a 101 Week volunteer. I have no recollection of this. I do recall chanting “no means no” on the bus to Gatineau, but I don’t recall ever being told to cover my drink. I think it was assumed it had already been conditioned into me (which begs the question, does that mean they then assumed that the message “no means no” had not yet been conditioned into the male students on that bus? What does that mean?).
Every time I tell this story, I include that I finished my friend’s drink which had been left on the bar. It’s an inclusion designed to hedge my allegations — it’s an admission of liability. It’s another way to say, “I should have known better. It’s my fault.”
In the coverage of this type of crime, it’s always “a woman was drugged,” and never “someone drugged a woman.” It’s a subtle turn of phrase but it completely shifts the placement of agency in the sentence — it becomes passive, the subject is that it happened, not how. A crime without a criminal.
So where should the blame fall? On the instigator, of course, on the person who put the drugs in the drinks. But also, to some extent, on the institutions that allow it.
When I started at the U of O, I thought myself so lucky to have a wet frosh. While my friends at other schools sat in a circle on some itchy lawn rolling their eyes at icebreaker games, I was drinking vodka sodas on a rooftop in Quebec — a proper teenage fantasy.
The problem with wet frosh, in my opinion, is there is an implicit social pressure to engage. There are dry events, but they are much smaller and poorly attended, and besides, the biggest, most anticipated, and most inclusive events are the nighttime events: the bar crawl, the evening at Camp Fortune.
I moved to Ottawa on my own — I didn’t know anyone. I had never been to a bar without my parents. I was nervous to go to the bar crawl alone, but I hadn’t yet grown past the social conventions of high school. If everyone was going to be somewhere, then that was the place to be. My last memory from the night was a male stranger asking me if I was alright.
Looking back, I wonder about the ethics of wet frosh — maybe frosh in general. Who does frosh as we know it serve? The kids who take part obviously don’t want to see it changed — I certainly wouldn’t have. It’s a sacred ritual, an inviolable rite of passage, a step on the staircase to adulthood As Seen On TV.
But at what cost?
We’ve all known that this has been happening. The girls whisper it every year. We hedge it with excuses. We amputate the blame from the narrative. Violence against women is not only expected but accepted. A few have to suffer so the show can go on — the sacrifice is shrugged off, as if to say, “that’s just the way the world works!” But aren’t you so free? Aren’t you having so much fun?
The University of Ottawa — or any university, for that matter — is not going to prevent this from happening by prohibiting alcohol. Kids want to drink, and they will. But I think the entire concept of frosh week as it stands now fundamentally entails at best, an apathy towards, and at worst, an acceptance of the endangerment of female students. And I think that warrants some serious reflection on the state of feminism and what we prioritize as a culture.
