FSC holds first sexual harassment awareness session for faculty

Sunday November 3, 2013

BY SALMA EL SAEED

The AUC Faculty Services Office held the first sexual harassment awareness session for faculty members last Tuesday.

During the information session, representatives from the Office of Equal Opportunities and Affirmative Action (EOAA), which is concerned with issues of discrimination and harassment at AUC, provided the attendees of the session with basic information regarding sexual harassment.

The EOAA representative informed the attendants that the first step that must be taken is to confront the issue with the harasser, and demand that this inappropriate behavior stops.

If the harassment continues, on-campus, the harassed party or a responsible witness should take the case to the EOAA office in order for a formal investigation against the harasser to be conducted.

However, if the harassment takes place off-campus, such as in the harassment-prone Tahrir Square, the EOAA representative advised reporting such incidents to HarassMap or Tahrir Bodyguard, which are amongst the anti-sexual harassment initiatives recently founded in Egypt.

Louise St-Laurent, the Faculty Services Coordinator, believes it’s important for students to be exposed to a similar information session.

“I think it’s important for students to have a special sexual harassment awareness session at the beginning of each semester,” said St-Laurent, adding that the EOAA is invited to give a presentaiton to incoming freshmen during the First Year Experience (FYE) orientation at the beginning of every semester.

She added that the increase of sexual harassment incidents, both on-and off-campus, encouraged her to arrange the information session.

Several harrassement incident were reported on campus; the most two recent incidents took place last semester .

Also the rate of harassement off campus has increase. A report published in April 2013 by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women indicated that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women have experienced sexual harassment, and 96.5 percent reported experiencing sexual harassment in the form of touching.

This is an increase from the numbers reported five years earlier by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, which indicated that 83 percent of Egyptian women experienced sexual harassment.

St-Laurent found a lack of awareness among faculty regarding sexual harassment and the methods of dealing with such incidents so she decided to remedy it by inviting them to attend the session.

Tuesday’s event was the first session regarding sexual harassment the Faculty Services Office organized, but St-Laurent hopes to make it a regular occurrence.

They also informed the faculty members in attendance of how a case of sexual harassment should be dealt with and reported, both at AUC and throughout Egypt.

Despite various attempts to introduce a university-wide sexual harassment awareness orientation in the past, including a sexual harassment awareness campaign carried out by Heya, an on-campus student initiative aimed at highlighting women’s issues, there has yet to be a regular orientation or information session provided for all members of the AUC community.