Campus safety, experiences and ideas

At the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia there is a man who volunteers there every night between about 8pm and Midnight, driving a shuttle van around the campus from the student residences to the faculty buildings and back again, getting students where they need to go safely. The reason he does this is because his daughter was raped on campus one night while walking back to her resdience. It’s a really valuable service, but it also is a reminder that university campuses are not always safe places.

So I read today in the news about a young woman who was attacked last night while walking through the Massey University Wellington Campus at about 10pm and it brought back a lot of memories from my experiences at Uni in Wellington and getting to and from it, which I’m sure many others can relate to. I did a degree that was pretty time intensive and often meant that I was on campus into the wee hours of the morning. Walking home from uni in the middle of the night was something that filled me with anxiety.

When I was at Victoria University there was the Campus Angels service, which I found really useful. It operated between about 8pm and 11pm, and the Angels would walk with you to your bus stop or down into town to ensure you were safe and got home ok. I certainly think Massey could benefit from a service like this. But as it was run out of the Student Union at Vic, and the unions are likely to have even less money next year, the possibility of getting funding for this seems slim. Perhaps we could turn this into a volunteer service of some sort? Something to think about…

I also take a bit of an issue with the ‘Ivory Tower’ aspect of university. I think course coordinators themselves have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the time commitment required for a course is reasonable and that due dates for major hand in times fall within business hours. I regularly had to submit assigments and projects on campus between 12 and 1 am, which lead to an issue of safe transport home. This issue was really a massive piece of beef that I had with my Computer Science Department, but I’m sure could also be applied to the Design School for example. I don’t think it’s fair on students to set deadlines that late at night.

More needs to be done to make university campuses safe for everyone. I think there are several ways we could approach this, and I know we are not helped by Univerisity budgets already being tight and the recent passing of the VSM bill will be extremely damaging to the ability of our student unions to provide additional services.

Hollaback International is currently working on a concept paper to think about a system similar to the hollaback sites for University campuses, and any ideas or experience that you can contribute to this will be most welcome! Leave any thoughts you have in the comments or email us at wellington@ihollaback.org