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SPECIAL REPORT ON
CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES
Protecting
Our Kids
on Campus
Which institutions take complaints seriously?
Which have zero-tolerance policies? Reader’s
Digest looks at schools of higher learning
across the land. Here’s what you need to know.
E
BY ERIN MILLAR
Early on a September morning in 2007, two men entered a Canadian university residence undetected. It was just hours after a campus pub night
that followed the second day of classes. Students in the coed dorm had reportedly posted their names on their doors to introduce themselves to their new
residence-mates—which may have helped the intruders find female-occupied
rooms.
Students later reported that the men entered several rooms, but left after
being scared away or discovering a group of people inside. Eventually they
found an unlocked room where a lone woman slept. They took turns raping
her, raped another woman in a second room and then fled.
Less than two weeks later, police arrested two men. They were charged
with break and enter, sexual assault and forcible confinement. Important questions remain unanswered: How did they gain access to secure dorms? Why
were the victims’ rooms unlocked? Why didn’t other students report the suspicious men roaming through the dormitory?
P H O T O - I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y A N A S T A S I A V A S I L A K I S
43
While the campus rape case may
be an extreme example, it shows how
potential holes in security and students’ trusting natures can combine
to make them easy crime targets. To
students, universities feel safe and secure, and they often leave dorm rooms
unlocked and property unattended.
“Students go into places like student
pubs and believe that just because
others are there, they are safe,” says
Bob Ferguson, director of campus
safety at the University of Saskatchewan. “It isn’t necessarily so.”
Any illusion that Canadian campuses are safe
havens from serious
crime was shattered on
the day of the Montreal
Massacre—December 6,
1989—when a gunman
killed 13 female students
and a school employee at
the Ecole Polytechnique
before committing suicide. Then, on August 24, 1992, professor Valery Fabrikant shot four
colleagues to death at Concordia University in Montreal.
The city reeled in shock once again
on September 13, 2006, when a man
opened fire at Dawson College, killing
18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa and
injuring 16 others.
These shootings, and the 2007 rampage at Virginia Tech that claimed 33
lives, including the shooter’s, were
wake-up calls to Canadian universities, which have been rethinking security for two decades now. “Virginia
Tech shook us to the bone,” says Lanny
Fritz, director of campus security at
the University of Calgary. “Now we
are trying to figure out what more we
can do.”
So, just how safe are universities?
In Canada, that’s a well-kept secret.
Unlike in the United States—where the
rape and murder of a 19-year-old student in her dorm led to the 1990 Clery
Act*—Canadian universities are not
required to disclose crime statistics.
And many aren’t willing
to: When Reader’s Digest
asked 52 public universities for crime statistics
and safety information,
19 schools refused or
didn’t respond to repeated requests. The
majority of those 19 responded only when we
went through freedomof-information procedures. These universities
included some of Canada’s most
prominent ones: the University of
Toronto, the University of British Columbia, Ryerson University, Dalhousie
University and the University of Ottawa. (And some of the 19 schools
never responded at all.)
National figures are no easier to
Students’
trusting
natures
can make
them easy
crime
targets.
44
* In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Crime
Awareness and Campus Security Act, later
renamed the Clery Act in memory of Jeanne
Clery’s 1986 murder at Lehigh University in
Pennsylvania. The act requires all post-secondary institutions that participate in the federal student financial-aid program to disclose
crime statistics and security information,
available at http://ope.ed.gov/security/.
readersdigest.ca 10/09
come by. Statistics Canada doesn’t
track data specifically about crime in
post-secondary communities.
Yet Canadian students face unique
personal safety risks at university.
Forty-five percent of female college
and university students say they’ve
been sexually assaulted—meaning any
unwanted sexual activity—since leaving high school. About one third of
Canadian students report heavy drinking patterns. And 29 percent of students report experiencing “elevated
psychological distress.”
Students are more at risk during the
first three months of the academic
year, and first-year students away from
home for the first time are the most
vulnerable, according to Rod Curran,
director of Special Constable Service
at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., and president of the Ontario Association of College and
University Security Administrators.
“Security was really heightened at Ontario universities after Dawson College. In the last four years, we’ve made
strides like you cannot believe,” Curran says. “But don’t forget: Universities
are open facilities. You can’t have
doors locked and have guards running
around all over the place.”
Residence Security—
Personal and Property
Ultimately, staying safe on campus
often comes down to common sense.
“The biggest problem that we have
with students, especially first-year stu-
dents, is that they don’t want to lock
their doors,” says Curran. “They go
visit a friend for three minutes and
when they come back, their laptop is
stolen.”
A key or pass card is now often required to get into many Canadian
dormitories, but criminals gain entry
by “tailgating” (slipping in behind a
student with a key). Curran empha-
Campus
Safety Profile
Dalhousie University
Statistical Highlights
Dalhousie University received 13
percent fewer calls about security
incidents in 2007 than the average
of the previous three years. New
alarm systems in classrooms and
campus buildings led to a 46-percent drop in thefts. However, in residences and offices without alarm
systems, break and enters increased
by 35 percent.
Safety Programs
Dalhousie conducts a safety audit of all
campuses yearly. Security officials implemented a new computer-based system in 2006 in which personal and
university property is registered in
case of theft or loss. Free self-defence
classes are offered to female students.
Room for Improvement
In the university’s 2007 annual report,
the director of security reported that
recruiting and retaining qualified and
experienced personnel continued to
be a major problem.
45
45
sizes how education is key to prevent- one, with potential long-term conseing criminals from entering dorms. A quences. Victims report experiencing
couple of years ago, Wilfrid Laurier anger, confusion and fear; the vast mawas struggling with laptop theft from jority are traumatized for up to a year
dorms, but since implementing an ag- or more, have trouble concentrating
gressive education campaign, Curon their courses and sometimes
ran has seen more students
drop out.
locking their doors and reWhile cases like the
porting strangers, and says
dorm rapes attract a lot of
Join the Debate
theft has decreased. “Most
media attention, rapes by
Do you think
of the residences house
strangers are not the most
universities should be
required to report
only 300 people, so you
prevalent:
A full 82 percrime rates? Tell us at
know everybody,” he says.
cent of sexual assaults on
readersdigest.ca/
report.
“If you recognize someone
Canadian campuses involve
who shouldn’t be there, quespeople known to each other.
tion them and then call campus secur- “Stranger-to-stranger violence is
ity.” Curran says that safeguarding nowhere near as common as sexual
residences against theft makes them assaults committed by dates and acsafer overall.
quaintances,” says Walter DeKeseredy,
However, while theft is a problem, a criminology professor at the Unisexual assault is a much more serious versity of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa. In a 1993 national
study looking at abuse in university
and college dating relationships,
DeKeseredy and co-researcher Mar-
Online
Campus
Safety Profile
McGill University
Statistical Highlights
Safety Programs
Room for Improvement
Twelve assaults were reported on campus in the
2007-08 academic year at
McGill University, compared with four the previous year. Eleven incidents
of threats or harassment
were reported, while five
occurred in 2006 to 2007.
Theft and break and enters
were relatively stable between 2006 and 2008, although theft under $5,000
was significantly lower than
in 2004 and 2005.
McGill has 20 emergency
telephones scattered
throughout the outdoor
campus that connect directly to security personnel. Emergency phones are
also available in all elevators and near the main
entrance of almost all
buildings. Through the
McGill Walksafe program,
student volunteers are
available to escort other
students alone at night.
Although courses in Nonviolent Crisis Intervention
Training (for university
employees) and Rape
Aggression Defence (for
female students and employees) are available, participants must pay a fee to
take part.
readersdigest.ca 10/09
tin Schwartz found that 28 percent of
female students reported being sexually assaulted in a 12-month period
by someone they knew. Fifteen percent had given in to unwanted intercourse when under the influence of
alcohol or drugs.
Nor does the problem seem to be
going away. In a 2004 Statistics Canada
paper, students age 15
and over reported
177,000 incidents of
sexual assault, up from
145,000 in 1999. Yet
schools are hesitant to
address the issue, says
DeKeseredy. “University and college administrators try to
present the dangers as
being rare and coming
from outside,” he says.
“Most are reluctant to
say that sexual assault against female
university and college students is a
problem. They are scared that this will
affect their enrolment, that parents
will be reluctant to let their kids go to
these schools.”
moaned later to the now-silent room.
“It felt like I was being buried alive.”
Luckily, this isn’t a real situation, but
rather a scene in SEXXXY 2008, an
orientation-week performance at the
University of Calgary. The play—which
takes on difficult topics such as sexual
assault, eating disorders, substance
abuse and discrimination—was conceived at the University of Waterloo in
1988 as Single and
Sexy, and has since
been adapted at 16
other colleges and
universities across
Canada.
“In the early days,
when the University
of Calgary had their
first orientation programs, I would get
maybe 40 students
who would sign up for sexual-harassment clinics,” says University of Calgary harassment advisor Shirley
Voyna Wilson. “There had to be a better way to reach students and let them
know that if they run into a problem,
there are on-campus resources that
can help.” This fresh approach helped
draw 2,500 students to the play last
year.
82%
of sexual
assaults on
campus
involve people
known to
each other.
> BEST PRACTICES
Dance music was pumping, the bass
so loud it shook the room. A large
crowd laughed at the dancing silhouettes of four students who twisted their
hips and flailed their arms to the
groove—but the laughter stopped
abruptly when one of the students was
seen to slip a date-rape drug into another’s drink. “I didn’t understand. It
was only my second drink,” the woman
Mental Health
“Mental health is a huge issue on
our campus and most others right
now,” says Phil Wood, dean of students
at McMaster University in Hamilton.
He points to three trends: “A greater
47
Safe, Not Sorry
To learn which questions you need to ask about campus security measures, Reader’s Digest spoke with Rod Curran, president
of the Ontario Association of College and University Security
Administrators and director of Wilfrid Laurier University Special Constable Service.
> CRIME
> ALCOHOL AND DRUGS
• Is there a well-defined alcohol-and-drug
• Does the university have a security website? Does it post crime alerts and does it
have prevention programs, such as Crime
Stoppers or Neighbourhood Watch?
• Does it have crime prevention through
environmental design? Has the school
done a campus-security audit?
• Does it have a properly trained security
service equipped to respond to security
situations?
• Does it conduct 24/7 campus patrols?
• Does it have a closed-circuit camera
system monitoring the campus?
• Is the campus equipped with emergency telephones that connect with
security at all hours?
• Does it have a properly trained medical
response team for medical emergencies?
• Does it have an emergency plan (for
armed attacks, severe weather or electrical shutdown) that has been tested,
and does it have a lockdown procedure?
• Is there a strong partnership with the
local police service?
• Is the emergency dispatch centre
staffed 24/7?
“The trick is to keep it safe without interfering with students’
freedom of speech and personal
expression,” concludes Curran.
“It’s a fine line. They have
enough to worry about without
having to worry about safety on
campus. That’s our job.”
incidence of significant mental-health
issues, things like bipolar disorder and
schizophrenia; students who are a
threat to themselves or others; and a
general decline in student mental
health.”
Data from the few Canadian universities that collect mental-health
statistics are telling. At the University
of British Columbia (UBC), 13 percent
of male undergraduate students and
11 percent of female undergrads ser-
48
policy? How vigorously is it enforced?
• Are residence staffers trained to spot
abuse and offer help?
> FIRE
• Are there smoke detectors and carbonmonoxide detectors in all buildings and
dorms?
• Are there sprinklers and fire
extinguishers?
• Are there two exits? Do the windows
open?
• Are there regular fire drills?
• Does the furnace get annual maintenance, and is the electrical system up-todate?
readersdigest.ca 10/09
iously considered suicide at least once
in 2008. According to UBC Student
Health Service director Dr. Patricia
Mirwaldt, students said stress affects
academic performance more than any
other issue. In fact, six of the top seven
reasons UBC students gave for academic difficulties were mental-health
related: stress, sleep problems, depression, anxiety, concern for troubled
family and friends, relationship difficulties and nonacademic use of the
Internet.
Sometimes even the most energetic
and engaged students struggle with
their mental health. Eighteen-year-old
Nadia Kajouji of Brampton won prestigious awards in the National Defence
youth Cadet program, volunteered at
a soup kitchen, was a top member of
her school’s debating club, earned excellent marks and was accepted into
Carleton University’s public affairs
and policy management program, with
a goal of attending law school. All
seemed well until March 2008, when
her mother, Deborah Chevalier, received a call from the university informing her that her daughter was
missing.
Kajouji’s body was found in the
Rideau River six weeks after her disappearance—an apparent suicide.
Chevalier later learned that her daughter had been treated for depression at
Carleton and that her roommate had
alerted security that she was suicidal.
Yet the family was never contacted.
“This is not someone who didn’t seek
help through the proper channels,”
Chevalier says. “Families should be
advised when a doctor feels that a student is suicidal.”
> BEST PRACTICES
Navigating privacy laws while trying to help depressed or suicidal students is a tricky balancing act for
universities. On the one hand, first-
Campus
Safety Profile
University of
Alberta
Statistical Highlights
While the number of security incidents
at the University of Alberta has stayed
relatively stable over the past few years,
break and enters in university offices
and residences significantly increased
in 2008 from 2007.
Safety Programs
A full-time residence liaison security
officer focuses on safety and building
rapport with students living in dorms
to prevent crime. Because the main
campus is located near nightclubs, the
security service has developed a close
working relationship with city police to
ensure student safety. This year, the
university held a contest in which students made videos about responsible
alcohol use.
Room for Improvement
Statistics from the first half of 2009
suggest that the rate of break and enters will spike again this year. As of June
2009, there were ten residential breakins, compared with a total of nine incidents during the whole of 2008.
49
year students away from home for the
first time may benefit from the university contacting their families, but
students 18 years old and older are
adults under the law and are entitled
to privacy.
British Columbia Information and
Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis recognized this dilemma when he
heard about a suicide at UBC four
years before Kajouji’s death. After Kajouji died, he approached his counterpart in Ontario about creating a
resource tool to guide universities and
colleges in interpreting privacy laws
and to identify when it is permissible
to contact a student’s parents. The
document was published last fall for
use in Ontario and British Columbia;
the University of Victoria is currently
considering it.
“The number one lesson to be
learned from those types of tragedies
is that privacy laws aren’t a barrier to
saving lives,” says Loukidelis, explaining that privacy laws can be overridden when a person is determined to
be a risk to themselves or others. “In
crisis, err on the side of life. Life
trumps privacy.”
The University of Waterloo has
approached the problem by taking
suicide prevention outside of the
counselling centre. As a part of its
QPR (Question, Persuade and Refer)
Suicide Prevention Program, the university has trained 1,400 students, staff
and faculty members to recognize suicidal tendencies and how to help. Waterloo also has a dozen counsellors
stationed in buildings where students
50
Campus
Safety Profile
University of
British Columbia
Statistical Highlights
The SAFE@UBC program appears to
have led to a decrease in personal
safety threats. Sex-related offences—
including sexual harassment, indecent acts and sexual assault—have
fallen from 34 in 2005 to six in 2007 to
none in 2008. General safety
threats—such as assaults, uttering
threats and personal harassment—
also fell from 31 incidents in 2005 and
2006 to 19 in 2007. However, incidents of mischief jumped from 50 in
2007 to 111 in 2008.
live and study. These counsellors are
able to identify students, faculty and
staff in need who might not otherwise
approach a central counselling office.
Last year, a professor newly trained
in QPR noticed when a female student
left the classroom, visibly distraught.
Another student alerted the professor
that she might be in danger; he ended
the class and alerted counsellors, who
found the woman in a bathroom stall
cutting herself. Because he was wellinformed about Waterloo’s services,
the professor was able to quickly get
a counsellor there to help the student.
Alcohol Abuse
Liquor is a contributing factor in
many campus safety incidents, such
as sexual assaults and other forms of
violence. Two in five Canadian underreadersdigest.ca 10/09
Safety Programs
Campus security patrols the
grounds 24 hours a day, seven days
a week, using officers on foot, on
bicycles and in cars. The university
installed outdoor lighting and
changed landscaping features on
campus to improve sightlines. A
text and voice-message emergency
notification system was implemented in 2008.
Room for Improvement
Campus buildings and residences
lack security cameras.
graduate students report at least one
symptom of hazardous drinking, such
as memory loss. The University of
Calgary’s Lanny Fritz has come to believe that “if we didn’t have alcohol
establishments and events on campus,
security costs could be reduced and
calls for police assistance and ambulance calls would likely be reduced by
30 percent.”
Where you live can determine how
much you drink. Students in Quebec
and British Columbia are less likely
to develop harmful drinking habits,
while the heaviest drinkers are found
in Atlantic Canada, a 2004 national
survey showed. Last year, Memorial
University in Newfoundland identified alcohol abuse as a major issue to
tackle when another survey revealed
that 56 percent of its students binge
drink. This was the highest rate among
the universities that participated.
Twenty-eight percent of Memorial
students were injured under the in-
fluence of alcohol and 25 percent had
unprotected sex. Since 2006, the university has offered a confidential online or in-person alcohol-screening
program to help students determine
if they have a drinking problem.
A study conducted by the Centre
for Addiction and Mental Health
found that heavy drinking was “significantly higher” for students living
on campus. It also found that campus
environments, with campus-bar promotions such as happy hour and allyou-can-drink events, are conducive
to heavy drinking. Peer pressure
is also a problem, as students may
base their drinking decisions on false
perceptions of how much others are
consuming. In a study of three universities, for example, 67 percent of
students thought the typical student
had had five or more drinks the last
time they partied, while in reality only
24 percent of students did. Most students—65 percent, it turns out—never
drink five or more drinks in one
sitting.
> BEST PRACTICES
First-year Queen’s University student Robyn Meilleur* was partying on
campus one night during frosh week
last year. It was her first experience
drinking alcohol; she didn’t know her
limit and became very intoxicated.
Her friends brought her to the school’s
Campus Observation Room, a nonmedical detox centre intended to
minimize the risk of alcohol-related
*Name changed to protect privacy.
51
injury or death. There, she met student volunteer Elizabeth Kellett, who
comforted her as she fell asleep, crying and drunk.
“I remember her saying she was so
sorry, over and over again,” Kellett
says. “I just sat there and held her
hand, trying to be comforting.”
Meilleur’s embarrassment quickly
turned to gratitude and she approached Kellett on campus a few
days later to thank her.
The key to the centre’s success, says
Kellett, is that it’s confidential and
nonjudgemental. “Volunteers and staff
are not people who are going to frown
upon this,” she says. “It’s people who
really care about you.” During the last
academic year, 168 students were assisted; some students who used the
service later became volunteers.
Campus Emergencies
In October 2008 a man in Britain
came across a troubling message on
the Internet: a death threat against two
Memorial University professors. The
writer detailed how she planned to
act out the threat later that day during
a specified class. The man immediately contacted St. John’s police.
Within minutes of the call, officers
were on campus and, working with
university officials under Memorial’s
emergency response plan, located the
threatened professors and cancelled
their classes. The campus computer
where the threat had been typed that
morning was quickly identified and a
suspect was arrested.
52
Campus
Safety Profile
University of
Toronto
Statistical Highlights
The University of Toronto launched a
bait-bike program (where bicycles are
placed under surveillance to nab
thieves) in late 2006 and installed
cameras and better lighting, measures
that have led to a decrease in stolen bicycles on the downtown St. George
campus. Eighteen percent fewer bikes
were stolen in 2008 than in 2007.
Meanwhile, break and enters on the
St. George campus increased from 39
incidents in 2007 to 56 in 2008. Theft
of property (excluding bikes) on the
Scarborough campus nearly doubled
between 2007 and 2008.
Safety Programs
Security personnel and a call centre
are available 24 hours a day. The university has assembled a team to assess and respond to individuals who
may be “high risk”—dangerous to
others. As part of the WalkSmart program launched in 2007-2008, students are available to escort other
students who don’t want to walk
alone at night.
Room for Improvement
St. George campus police identified a
significant increase of criminal harassment over the past two years. In
2008, there were nearly twice as
many incidents as in 2006.
readersdigest.ca 10/09
Memorial’s prompt response is borders or discourage access to vula testament to how seriously univer- nerable places, such as ground-level
sities take potential violence, and windows.
In the fallout of the Virginia Tech
schools have been turning to technology to make their campuses safer. In rampage, the governor of Virginia
the past four years, Wilfrid Laurier issued a report stating that university
University has expanded from ten to staff knew of numerous incidents involving the shooter that warned
236 security cameras that are
of mental instability and
monitored 24 hours a day.
threatening behaviour. Yet
York University boasts
university staff and faculty
more than 600 cameras.
Campus
didn’t communicate their
The University of WaterSafety
concerns with one another
loo has implemented a
For more about safety
issues on a campus near
or act on indications that
multimedia emergency
you, visit
the shooter was disturbed.
alert system that can conreadersdigest.ca/
safety.
In response to these revnect with students and facelations, McMaster University
ulty by text message, phone,
voice mail, central speakerphones and created a Behaviour Response Team.
A small group—representatives from
computer alerts.
residences, security and counselling—
discuss students who may be a threat
> BEST PRACTICES
Although high-tech security is the to themselves or others, share infortrend on campuses, there are also mation and determine a course of
simpler strategies to mitigate risks. action. When a teaching assistant reYork University has embraced secur- cently reported a threat she spotted
ity principles known as Crime Pre- on Facebook, the team was quickly
vention Through Environmental able to assess the risk, bring in police
Design. For instance, windows can be and suspend the student. The school
installed between a lab and a hallway then performed a psychological risk
to increase “natural surveillance.” assessment and determined the stuOutdoor landscaping can be tailored dent could return to classes, with
to improve sightlines, define campus mandatory counselling.
Online
TA L K A B O U T A S O F T R E A L E S TAT E M A R K E T…
Our neighbourhood newsletter published this warning: “Bikers and
walkers, wear clothing when out after dark.”
D ennis Mulder
After reading the ad for this lakefront property, it’s no wonder that
RE/MAX was pushing it so hard. “Two bedrooms, one bath. Comes with
docking and mooning rights.”
Submitted by Gl e nn Krui th of
53