The UG can and should do more to increase students’ social safety, said student parties SOG and Lijst Calimero during a university council meeting.
SOG and Calimero received ‘worrying reports’ about the lack of help in various instances of inappropriate behaviour. Students who experience this often don’t know how to report it and talking about it is difficult.
Others don’t realise the behaviour is inappropriate, or they don’t know how to intervene when they witness it.
In the fall of last year, the Young Academy Groningen submitted a report that showed that the university isn’t very good at handling complaints of inappropriate behaviour, and Amnesty International published one on sexual harassment and violence in higher education.
Break the silence
It was time for the parties to ‘break the silence’. Late last year, they sent a memo to the UG board of directors saying they wanted to discuss the topic of sexual harassment and violence among students. The university council will do so on Thursday. The board of directors has already promised it is taking up all recommendations the council has.
One of them is to provide more Active Bystander courses for students. In these, students are trained on how to respond when they see inappropriate behaviour taking place.
‘We’re very happy with this decision’, says Tessa Klimp with SOG. ‘These courses provide guidelines on how to talk to people. If the UG contributes to that, it will actively help bring about a cultural shift.’
Share the knowledge
The parties are also asking the UG to create a platform for confidential advisers at student associations, who are often students with no previous experience, so they can share knowledge and learn from each other. They also want the university to put the information on ‘facilities and procedures’ in a much more accessible location on Nestor, making it easier for students to lodge a complaint.
Plans for this are already underway. The UG is working on setting up an awareness campaign, improving information, and setting up a committee that will explore the options for creating a central point to report inappropriate behaviour. The latter will be done in collaboration with the Hanze University of Applied Sciences.
Input from students
The university will also create a task force on student well-being this year. This task force will explore how the UG and student organisations can work together and what role student organisations play in student well-being.
Klimp is happy with the board’s response. ‘They took up almost every single recommendation we had, or they will at least seriously include them in the board’s existing plans’, she says. ‘They’ve also emphasised how important the input of students is, which is very important if we want to improve the situation.’