SHOULD WE BE SURPRISED?
CONTENT WARNING: This content includes a description of sexual harassment.
One thing I’ve never done in my nearly six years at U of O was volunteer as a frosh guide. I’ll be honest, I was pretty content with never experiencing this, as I wasn’t a huge fan of the frosh week I had to endure in my first year. But I chose to anyway.
Being a guide for a Recognized Student Government (RSG) is no easy task. At the very beginning of the week every first-year student who had purchased a frosh-kit had to attend a presentation on consent.
If a student did not attend the presentation, they wouldn’t receive a wristband that would permit them access to all the events. I had to escort a group of 60 first-years through campus and get them into a presentation. Some of them weren’t happy about having to sit through a presentation like that, but I’d like to think all of them knew why it was needed.
Is frosh week well-organized? No, not really; but we try our best. There are a lot of active components to frosh week. Each program has an RSG that represents them and attempts to provide them with activities to do during frosh week, and then you have the University of Ottawa’s Student Union (UOSU) in the mix to help try to piece it all together.
And even then on top of all that you also have the University of Ottawa whose main contribution is UOShow; a concert for first-years that happens each year. This show is fully organized by the administration of the University.
Some mistakes happen no matter what you do – some are due to an administration that simply does not care about the well-being or safety of students. UOShow, which was a concert put on by the University administration, had an opening act by Nic Gignac, a “magician”.
Gignac called on five female volunteers, some of whom were under the age of 18. He then proceeded to guess which colour their underwear was, fully embarrassing and humiliating those first-year university students up on stage. UOSU and various RSG’s pleaded with the University to end his act, to which they did not comply and Gignac’s act continued.
Originally I wanted this piece to be a funny account about how exhausting my week was as a guide. I wanted this to be something light-hearted and to provide people with a perspective of frosh week that they might not know much about.
But I can’t overlook that the administration of our university chose to welcome new students by telling them what the rest of us already know; they do not care. They just care about your money and they know you won’t go through the effort of switching schools. They won’t even bother to make it a good environment let alone a safe one.
According to the university’s own policies, it describes sexual harassment as “unwanted sexual attention from a person who knows or ought reasonably to know that such attention is unwanted”. I know this because all guides were made to read the University’s policies on sexual violence, assault and harassment in-depth, and were quizzed about it.
What happened at UOShow shows that the University is completely willing to contradict its own policies. If not even the administration is following policies on sexual harassment, it sets a terrible example for new students and an awful precedent for following policy on campus.
The university offered a measly apology – but it isn’t good enough. The university needs to now actually demonstrate that they care about the sexual violence, assault and harassment that takes place on our campus each year. They can do that by investing more money in proper support and further prevention efforts to protect our community. Apologies are no longer good enough – the University must apologize with action.
If you’re concerned like I am; make your voice known. Be loud until you are heard. After all, we require and expect our first-years to understand what consent is. Shouldn’t that also apply to the administration?
