At Home: The Hell is Wrong with You Guys?Among various venues, the CBC is reporting on a recent story where the president of the University of Ottawa’s student federation was threatened with a law-suit when she found out, and was going to reveal, comments made by other student leaders at the university of Ottawa suggesting that she should be sexually assaulted, orally and anally, and likely had STDs.
She decried this as evidence of a “rape culture” present on the U of Ottawa grounds, a comment that seemed to gain extra weight when it came out a few days later that members of the university Hockey Team may well have raped a woman back at the beginning of February, although the senior management didn’t hear the news until February 24th. When it did hear about it, the university bravely decided to suspend their participation for the remainder of this season, causing the team to miss all of zero games, having been already knocked out of the playoffs before the allegations ever reached the senior management.
The five individuals who made the comments subsequently defended their statements as being a joke, and no harm was ever intended. Fortunately for them, the University of Ottawa has chosen to address this issue not by handing out charges of non-academic misconduct, but rather to create a task force to look into what the response of the university should be. The results of the task force should be completed in the fall, well after this current year has completed, and the students involved finished the various courses that they are currently in.
One of the things it is not expected the task force will do is take up the question of who is more spineless; the men who made these “jokes”, threatened a law-suit about it when they were going to be outed, and then backed down completely when the student federation president didn’t cave to their craven attempt at silencing her, or the University of Ottawa that is desperately trying to sweep this under the rug while handing out absolutely no punishment or penalty for this behavior at all.
