UBC sexual assault policy incomplete: critic

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The new sexual assault policy at UBC has some flaws according to one critic.

Glynnis Kirchmeier was one of the women who pushed for an updated policy. She says the adjustments don’t go far enough.

“I think it’s resulted in a lot of PR and legal bills, but as far as structural accountability being locked in when somebody like me isn’t around, I don’t think that it’s there yet.”

Kirchmeier says a better policy would be both transparent and easy to understand.

“So that someone, who didn’t know anything about how UBC operates, could look to it and say ‘this is what is going to happen next’,” she says. “It needs to be transparent, clear and provide a road-map for anybody who is looking at who can know what the university can do with their information.”

She was one of three women who filed a human rights complaint against the university.

Kirchmeier, who says she witnessed inappropriate behaviour but was not assaulted, alerted the university in January 2014 about what she had seen and was repeatedly dissuaded from filing a formal complaint because she had graduated and was not herself a victim, the complaint states.

When Caitlin Cunningham reported her claim of assault to the university in July 2014, it was not acted upon for months, apparently due to a misunderstanding about whether she had filed an informal or formal complaint, the documents say.

Ultimately, no action was taken against the PhD student until May 2015 when he was restricted from campus, the complaint says.

Cunningham, who has consented to having her name made public, says she was told in November last year that he was no longer a student. The complainants only learned the man had been expelled through media reports, the human rights complaint says.

But Kirchmeier did find some positives in the new policy.

“I think that there are some good articulated commitments in it. I think it’s not complete, it’s not covering some of the issues it needs to cover. When I’m looking at it I want to see that people aren’t going to fall through the cracks, or that there is going to be ways for the university to get out of considering evidence that is put before them, I don’t see how this policy will force them to look at things that might be uncomfortable.”

“UBC already has the Sexual Assault Support Centre, which works as an advocacy centre for students and I only see their role as expanding and that’s great.”