Daily BrewSex assaults, troubling student chants mar UBC’s top-flight image
The University of British Columbia is one of the top-ranked schools in the country, home to world-class researchers and a list of alumni that includes two prime ministers and a Nobel laureate economist.
But the sprawling oceanside campus has been in the headlines recently for altogether less laudable reasons.
Women living and working on campus are nervous after a string of unsolved late-night sexual assaults, including three in the last four weeks.
The latest took place just after midnight Saturday when a man tried to drag a 17-year-old girl into some trees, punching her in the face and ripping at her clothes. Her screams eventually scared him off, CBC News reports.
The UBC student newspaper, the Ubyssey, says it's aware of another attack early Saturday morning that's so far not been reported to the campus RCMP detachment, which would bring the total to four.
The Mounties' Major Crimes Unit now has taken over investigation of the attacks, which have a similar pattern – women alone, late at night, targeted by someone apparently lurking nearby who tears at their clothes and gropes them.
The assailant is described as white, between 20 and 30 years old, six feet two inches tall, slim and speaking with an American accent.
The RCMP said in a weekend news release that these attacks have become the university detachment's top priority.
"We are engaged with many partner law-enforcement agencies to attempt to identify and apprehend the person or persons responsible for these attacks," Sgt. Drew Grainger said. "The RCMP would also like to reinforce the continued strong message to all citizens who walk through the campus at night to exercise every precaution to ensure their own personal safety."
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Sex assaults are not unheard of in a campus that hosts more than 50,000 students and staff.
"I know in previous years some of the attacks have been not quite as compressed, so it's causing us that much more concern because of the frequency of the attacks," Grainger told CBC News.
Police are also investigating whether these attacks are linked a three similar ones in September on Cambie Street, a busy corridor a few kilometres east of UBC, CTV News reported.
“That is something our investigators are looking into,” Vancouver police Const. Sandra Glendinning told CTV News. “We are going to be liasing with UBC investigators to see if there can be a connection made.”
Meanwhile, women on campus are being warned to walk in groups. CBC News said demand for UBC's SafeWalk program, where students are escorted at night, has soared.
"What we've seen following the incident on Saturday is the community really coming together and putting in place buddy systems and ways in which they're committing to look out for each other," Louise Cowin, UBC's vice-president of students, told CBC News.
"We're simply not going to be able to post a police person on every corner. Certainly the university and campus security have increased their levels of patrols."
The administration is also looking at installing more lighting and video cameras, CTV News said.
One of the victims has spoken out about her experience. The second woman targeted for attack wrote in a Ubyssey article published Monday that she naively thought the man standing behind her as she prepared to unlock her apartment building's main door might be a neighbour or fellow student also waiting to get in. She even waved at him.
"It never occurred to me that he intended to harm me," wrote the woman, whose name was not published.
She said friends and family, unaware she was the victim, sent her news stories about the attack. The incident comes up in class, too.
"Imagine sitting in class and having the professor bring up your sexual assault," she wrote. "I wanted to stand up at say, 'Yo, this is my story. Who are you to talk about how I could have prevented this? Don’t I have the right to walk home alone?' "
Being labelled a victim makes her angry, she said, because it makes her seem weak and dependent.
"It makes me angry that we don’t live in a society where I can walk home free from fear. Instead, I have to fear men because I am a woman. Instead of ending rape culture, we perpetuate it through television, through music and through our own words."
"Rape culture" came under scrutiny at UBC this fall after it was revealed first-year business students had participated in a frosh-week "rape chant," like the one that scandalized St. Mary's University in Halifax. Dozens of student leaders involved in frosh-week activities were disciplined.
[ Related: UBC curriculum to make students more culturally aware after 'Pocahontas' chant ]
The fallout from that, and the continuing publicity over these sex assaults, has overshadowed a followup report about other business students doing a faux aboriginal chant.
According to CTV News, the first-year students were divided into teams based on Disney films. Members of the "Pocahontas" group, none of whom were aboriginal, formed themselves into a drum circle and chanted "white man steal our land."
Beyond the insensitivity of this, participants seemed unaware the university sits on un-ceded territory of the nearby Musqueam First Nation, Prof. Daniel Justice, chairman of UBC's First Nations Studies program, told CTV News.
The university's Sauder School of Business announced this week it is setting up workshops with the First Nations Studies program, introducing indigenous topics into its curriculum and redesigning first-year orientation events.
“Our students are entering a world where business leadership requires much deeper cultural intelligence, and not just in Canada,” said Robert Helsley, dean of the business school.
