On Aug. 29, the Ottawa Citizen published a column by Robert Sibley, a journalist and lecturer at Carleton University. In the column, Sibley tells students that when they attend Carleton, they will “likely find themselves subject to propaganda aimed at convincing them the campus is rife with sexual predators.”
This “propaganda” is part of the province of Ontario’s Sexual Violence and Workplace Harassment Action Plan, which universities and colleges are expected to comply with by the end of 2016. Carleton, like other universities, is creating or changing their policies to comply with the plan, with the aid of academics, social workers, students and survivors who have been calling for the university to admit the existence of rape culture on campus and adjust policies accordingly.
Sibley’s disdain for all this is very clear in his column. Though he says he realizes that there is a “widespread exploitation of women” in our society and a clear issue when it comes to the justice system and sexual assault victims, he seems to think that these issues do not pervade the university campus.
He admits that as a man, he can’t know what it’s like to be a woman on campus. He admits that “some may well feel themselves under constant threat.” But he goes on to invalidate these two statements by saying “individual feelings, or even individual experience, don’t necessarily reflect collective reality.”
His proof? Carleton’s safety department received only 58 reports of sexual assault between 2007 and 2015. He goes on to define sexual assault, as if the women whose anger boils over reading this piece need to be told what sexual assault is.
“Even a single sexual assault is one too many,” he says, as if that statement can rescind what he’s just done. Does he not realize that this column is the epitome of the reason that most sexual assaults go unreported?
A university campus is not a bubble. It’s not any different from the rest of society or from any other community—except that the people here are the future of our society. If we can’t admit that the same problems our society faces are also present on campus, those problems will not go away.
Sibley wrote that he thinks if Carleton admits to the existence of rape culture on campus, the university will look bad. Parents won’t send their kids there. Oh, and every man on campus will be “insulted” at being viewed as a potential “sexual predator.”
Maybe they wouldn’t be viewed that way if Sibley and others like him were less worried about being insulted and more worried about the safety of the people around them, especially those who might already feel like reporting an assault is futile. This is not his battle, and the irony is that by denying the existence of rape culture on campus, Sibley is perpetuating that culture and further preventing it from being eradicated.
