University women at risk sexually?

Press, 29 May 1981, Page 6

University women at risk sexually?

Are 70 per cent of New Zealand women students subject. at some level, to sexual harassment?

Philomena Horsley, the na--4 tional women’s officer of the Australian Union of Students, believes so, at least in the Australian milieu. After a week of touring New Zealand campuses, she is inclined to believe that the same pertains here.

She is in this country at the invitation of the New Zealand Students’ Association. talking at the seven universities on the position and status of women both at university and in the wider society. After attending the New Zealand association’s May conference at Massey, she suggested that at least one rape a week occurred in the Massey hostels, most unreported because women were reluctant to get involved or

because the assailant was someone they knew’. She is not yet familiar with the Canterbury scene. For her, the “70 per cent” is more easily justified. It. is derived from surveys done in America. Canada, and Australia. In Australia, it is confirmed by a colossal “feed-back” to her women’s organisation. •‘Sexual harassment” means precisely that — the harassment of a w’oman sexually. At the mildest level, this includes subtle, or not-so-subtle, innuendoes by lecturers to their students. At the most serious level, it includes academic rape ("favours for grades”) or actual rape and physical assaults. Ms Horsley is in New Zealand to talk not just about issues but about tactics. It was necessary, she said, to force university and other authorities (“white,

middle-class males”) to take women seriously. There should be procedures for dealing with women’s grievances on campus, as well as practical innovations, such as providing better lighting, she,said. Women should know they

• 12 had support, and men should be aware that harassment would not be tolerated. One woman, who had been sexually harassed by a male librarian, had complained through proper channels at the university and had found herself faced with a $lOO,OOO defamation suit.

The tactics now proposed were often illegal. At an Australian university, an offending lecturer had found posters of himself, complete with name and description of offence, plastered all round the university. Consequently he had left “in an uproar.” Ms Horsley has other, immediate, concerns. The Australian Government has withdrawn all Federal funding for 'child-care centres, and education cuts in Australia, she says, have affected women more " than men.