Police in Waterloo are currently investigating a series of anti-women messages being spread throughout the University of Waterloo campus that have caused two student centres to shut down.
Posters were pinned around campus, placed over campaign posters for female candidates in the school’s student union election and featured a photo of Marie Curie, a chemist and physicist whose research in radiation led to the creation of cancer treatments as well as nuclear technology, according to CTV News.
CTV reported the posters showed Curie beside a photo of a mushroom cloud, and read “the brightest woman the earth has ever given was Marie Curie, mother of the nuclear bomb. You tell me if the plan of women leading over men is still a good idea.”
A fraudulent email with the poster attached was also sent to students, allegedly from the university’s president, Feridun Hamdullahpur, saying the university was attempting to “expose the defective moral intelligence of womankind,” according to the Kitchener Record.
Waterloo’s student newspaper, the Imprint, said two student centres, the Women’s Centre and the gay and lesbian support centre, known as GLOW, have been shut down until further notice out of fears that these centres will become the next victims of these attacks.
Representatives from the two centres could not be reached for comment.
A Waterloo student, Jaelle McMillan, told the Record she no longer feels safe on what the newspaper describes as a once-peaceful campus.
“I feel so targeted right now that I made my stepfather walk me around campus when I had to hand stuff in,” McMillan said. “I definitely feel targeted as a woman.”
Hamdullahpur described the incidents as “profoundly disturbing and unacceptable” in a statement made on Feb. 24.
He also said a criminal investigation is underway and the authorities are taking all of the necessary steps, including forensic analysis of the posters, review of school security cameras and collaboration with computer specialists, to find the identity of the person responsible for the attacks.
The Record also reported that students are extremely frustrated because the culprit, if caught, cannot be charged with a hate crime, as hate crimes only cover, race, religion and sexual orientation.
Despite this definition reached by a council that met in Waterloo to discuss what action to take, Maclean’s implied the culprit could be charged.
The magazine cited section 319 of the Criminal Code, which addresses hate crimes, and said “everyone who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace” is committing a hate crime.