Holmes: Our Role is Not to Punish, but to Maintain a Safe Campus
By: Hayam Mahran
@hayamabdallahh
AUC is the first university in Egypt to develop mandatory anti-sexual harassment training for all members of its community.
The training is fully online and provides an overview of AUC’s anti-harassment and non-discrimination policy and the filing process for harassment or discrimination complaints.
This training was developed by the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) and is part of AUC’s SpeakUp initiative.
“It is important to have this mandatory training to make sure that every member of the AUC community is aware of our anti-harassment and discrimination policy and knows where to go if they experience any kind of discrimination or sexual assault,” Vice-President for Student Life Deena Boraie told The Caravan.
Boraie added that the ultimate goal is to have a safe campus where all AUC community members feel comfortable and are not worried about being harassed or discriminated against.
The training includes videos of hypothetical scenarios about different situations and scenarios to make participants aware of the different actions that are considered sexual harassment.
At the end of the videos, there is a small quiz to test the understanding of the participants, and they are able to view why their answer was right or wrong.
“We included these hypothetical scenarios because sometimes there are certain behaviours that happen around us and we are not sure whether it’s prohibited or not, so we wanted this training to raise awareness for all our community,” Reem El-Mogarby, AUC’s Title IX coordinator, said.
El-Mogarby appears in one of the videos in the training where she explains the different ways to report a case and the process for each one.
All members of the AUC community can submit complaints through an online form, by email or by requesting a one-on-one meeting with the Title IX Coordinator.
Those who do not want their identities to be revealed can submit their complaints through two different reporting channels: the advocate system and the ethical helpline. Both are third-party systems and are very well-known software used by top universities in the U.S.
The advocate system is an online form where complainants can submit reports without revealing any personal information like their names or emails.
“Anyone who submits reports through the advocate system will not be able to follow up about the report,” El-Mogarby said.
The ethics helpline is a confidential and unbiased system that allows complainants to communicate with the OIE and get updates about their cases by transferring the reports to the OIE to handle the situation and keeps track of the process to get a speedy response.
The system provides them with a username and they can set their own password and login into the system to submit reports and request updates.
There is also a section in the training where Sunanda Holmes, AUC’s first general counsel and chief compliance officer, explains sexual harassment in Egyptian law and the Title IX.
Holmes says that confidentiality is a core aspect of the policy. The identity of the victim is only disclosed to individuals who are responsible for handling the university’s response and resolution process.
“The only situation where I need to know their identities is when there is a possibility that harm might befall others. I would then need this information to protect the university as a whole,” Holmes said.
The policy also includes sanctions for harassment or discrimination of any kind, ranging from a warning to suspension or expulsion. This depends on the degree to which there has been a policy violation as determined by the Title IX coordinator.
“Our role is not to punish or put people in jail; our role is to maintain a safe campus by setting policies that prevent harassment, change individuals’ behaviour, and build awareness about sexual harassment,” Holmes told The Caravan.
The policy applies to everyone who has access to the campus such as students, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors. The university can also investigate past cases if a report is filled.
AE, an undergraduate student who participated in the training and asked to remain anonymous, found it to be organized, covering several issues, and providing new information that is very useful.
“One new thing that I was surprised by and learned from the training is that harassment could also happen between two consenting individuals, especially if there is a significant age difference,” AE told The Caravan.
AE added that he wishes that the university produce an Arabic-language version of the training to cover everyone in the AUC community.
The OIE is planning to conduct the training on a yearly basis and will further develop the training based on the feedback they receive from participants.
