FREDERICTON – New Brunswick university sexual assault policies vary, including how extensive they are and how long they’ve been around.
Both St. Thomas University and the University of New Brunswick are working on improving and/or establishing their sexual assault policies this year.
“I would say by the end of this academic year that we will have something really, really very good,” said Rice Fuller, Director of Counselling Services at UNB.
“I’m feeling very confident about the will of the people on campus to really take good action on this and to really develop something excellent in terms of policies and procedures.”
Fuller has been training faculty, students and athletes on a program called “Bringing in the Bystander.” He said it’s to ensure they know what to do if a sexual assault occurs on campus.
“We’re actually approaching 600 people on campus now that have had that training. This is compared to zero last year,” he said.
St. Thomas University is planning to move two new sexual assault policies forward this month, said spokesperson Jeffrey Carleton.
“We have a new, non-academic misconduct policy that lays out the procedures you follow in case there’s an allegation and we have a sexual violence policy that has an important protocol over the steps that we have to take if there’s an allegation of sexual violence,” he said.
Mount Allison University says they’ve had one since 1994.
“We were one of the first universities in Canada to recognize the need for such policies and to implement them,” said Laura Dillman, spokesperson for the university.
Mount Allison has also had a sexual harassment advisor for 17 years.
At the Universite de Moncton, there is no specific policy on sexual assaults.
“Our policy on sexual harassment, as well as our code of conduct, aim to prevent sexual assaults through awareness and education,” said university spokesperson Jean-Luc Thériault.
At that campus, victims of sexual assault are encouraged to lodge a complaint with “proper university authorities or the police.”
They have had a sexual harassment and sexist behavior policies since 2001.
Sexual assault witness: ‘No one working for the university knew how to respond’
The university’s policy improvements, Hannah Gray says, would have helped her and her roommate four years ago.
It was 2011 and Gray’s first year of university. She says she walked into her residence room to find her roommate being sexually assaulted by a male student.
“The first thing we wanted to do was just to make sure we did everything that we were supposed to do,” she said. “So we thought, go to the hospital, report to the police, let the university know.
“So that was all of our first steps, and then we were just kind of waiting and waiting for the steps that the university was supposed to take.”
She says those steps never came from the university.
“No one working for the university, residence life on up, really knew how to respond to it.”
From then on, she says she pressured university officials until they responded. In a letter dated April 18, 2011, former STU President Dennis Cochrane replied to Gray:
“Based on your research and along with my own review, I share your belief that we are lacking in appropriate policies and procedures regarding incidents of sexual assault involving students,” the letter read.
That led to the beginning of a sexual assault policy for St. Thomas University. It was first approved in 2012.
Reported cases of sexual assault on campus:
- Universite de Moncton: 1 in 2013, 1 in 2014
- University of New Brunswick (Fredericton): 1 in 2014
- University of New Brunswick (Saint John): 1 in 2014
- Mount Allison University: 5 complaints in 2013, 3 complaints in 2014
- St. Thomas University: 6 between 2009-2013
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