Sexual Harassment Rife At Universities, Warns EOC

The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) has called on universities to step up measures against sexual harassment – after almost a quarter of university students it surveyed said they had recently been victimised.

The watchdog interviewed more than 14,400 full-time students of nine local universities between March and April last year and found 23 percent of them had been sexually harassed in the previous 12 months.

Many of the victims said the harassment involved people making sexually suggestive comments or jokes, while other cases had to do with unwanted sexual advances or bullying.

More than 10 percent of respondents also said they had been asked to participate in sexually suggestive games during student activities such as orientation camps.

The watchdog said the survey found that LGBT students were 1.7 times more likely to be sexually harassed on campus than others, while students with disabilities were twice as likely as those without disabilities to be exposed to such harassment.

Students from the mainland or overseas were 2.9 percentage points more likely to have experienced sexual harassment at a university in Hong Kong than locals, the EOC added.

Broken down by gender, as many as 27 percent of female students reported harassment, and 18.4 percent of male students.

The reported perpetrators were male in 80 percent of the cases, with the allegations levelled against fellow students or staff on campus, as well as online abuse.

However, the equality watchdog said only 2.5 percent of people who said they were victims of harassment had actually lodged a complaint with their universities.

The commission's acting chief operations officer, Ferrick Chu, said many students simply do not know what can constitute sexual harassment.

"If they are not aware of the whole action or what the definition of sexual harassment is, of course they'll commit it. They even ignore what they are doing because they don't think it's serious."

The deputy convenor of the watchdog's policy, research and training committee, Rizwan Ullan, added that the city's sex education policy is outdated.

"I think the existing sex education is more about understanding what sex is and like what contraception should a person take. There should be a deeper level of education and those values should also go a little more in depth as far as the issue of respect is concerned."

The EOC called on universities to step up their anti-sexual harassment policies and publicise them on campus, so that students can better understand their rights and know what to do if they are victimised.