THE Society for the Upliftment and Advancement of Women via Education (SUAWVE) – a student group at the University of the West Indies Mona – has called for measures to mandate universities to provide just and equitable treatment for victims of acquaintance rape.

Noelle Nichols, resident advisor in charge of on-campus students, made the submission to the joint select committee of parliament considering the Offences Against the Person Act and the Incest (Punishment) Act yesterday.

“[It is] time that tertiary institutions receive some external stimuli to propel them into action and to mandate that they take the matter of sexual violence seriously,” she told the committee.

In this light the group recommended the establishment of a Disclosure of Campus Security Policy, a Campus Crime and Statistics Act and a Student Right to Know and Campus Security Act.

Speaking to her experience as a UWI student, Nichols charged that in the 60-year history of the institution, which now has approximately 10,000 female students, “self-motivation has failed to stimulate proactive action in creating and standardising mechanisms for reporting sexual violence crimes”. She further noted that although the university developed a sexual harassment policy in 1993, it has yet to be enacted.

“[While] it is very obvious that rape statistics do not fit into the PR plans of tertiary institutions, SUAWVE [is equally] certain that the lack of statistical data and proper reporting mechanism do not fit into the security and wellness plans of university students,” she emphasised.

Noting that it took the rape and murder of a university student in the United States for a Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act to be enforced, Nichols said it should not take a similar crime to prod Jamaican administrators to act.

The resident student advisor also bemoaned the absence of campus security reports.

She said universities should be required to publish and disseminate an annual campus security report containing various security policies and a certain number of years’ worth of crime statistics. Furthermore, she said schools with a police or security department of any kind should maintain a public crime log of all reported crimes.

“For the matter to be taken seriously statistical, empirical data must be taken into consideration, when the onus is left on the institution, history has shown they do not take the charge,” she pointed out.

Nichols also expressed concern that “cultural myths about acquaintance rape” such as “women who don’t fight back haven’t been raped” or “behaviours such as drinking or dressing in a sexually appealing way make rape a woman’s responsibility” have impacted profoundly on how rape victims are dealt with on an individual and societal level.

“Some university administrators, students, police officers and jurors incorrectly think that a rape report is unfounded or false if the victim had a relationship with the offender, used alcohol or drugs at the time of the assault, delays disclosure to the police. does not undergo a rape medical exam or if there was no visible evidence of injury.

She said in many acquaintance rape situations, individuals do not come forward because of fear that the situation would be dealt with “flippantly”.

In the meantime, the society also called for a special briefing for jurors to help them understand the legal terms used in the case; an automatic ‘no-contact order’ to prevent the accused from initiating any contact whether verbal or non-verbal with the victim and a dedicated court to hear the cases. SUAWVE said that while it acknowledged that instituting such a court would prove costly, taking the case through the normal court process was lengthy and placed unjust amounts of secondary trauma on the victims many of whom chose not to pursue the matter after a time.

Attorney general and committee chair, Senator AJ Nicholson, said the suggestion was one which could be made to the legal reform task force chaired by Professor Barry Chevannes for consideration.

With regards to recommendations that an Act be instituted to mandate universities to introduce and enforce campus security policies, the attorney general said SUAWVE should put the suggestion to the University’s Law Faculty.

“Discuss it with them, maybe it could happen, but there are rules the universities themselves make that even though they don’t carry the force of law they help to regulate life on campus,” he recommended, noting that any policy being looked at for the universities would have to apply at the secondary level as well since “there is far too many reports of sexual offences”.

Committee member and former Commissioner of Police, Senator Trevor MacMillan, said university authorities have allowed the issues raised to go unaddressed for “a long time” even though they were prevalent.

“It didn’t just start yesterday,” he noted.

The attorney general, in the meantime, said suggestions by committee members that current laws be looked at to see if the universities could be held accountable for not addressing reported crimes would be reviewed by legal experts.

Other committee members said while it was useful that individual organisations have policies, a national policy would be needed to underpin the provisions. In this respect, director of legal reform in the Ministry of National Security, Dr Aileen Boxhill, said the national policy being worked on by the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was near completion.

Director of Public Prosecutions Kent Pantry, however, cautioned that while the concerns were legitimate, legislation by itself could not change the treatment of acquaintance rape.