Campus Violence

A student at the college where I teach was murdered last month; Naomi Sturrock was studying massage therapy, and her loss is being felt profoundly.

From the Times-Colonist coverage, this sentence caught my eye: “The attack is believed to be isolated and poses no ongoing risk to public safety, police said.”

But femicide is, of course, not isolated.

And with misogyny documented to be on the rise in the country just across the border, I’m also thinking about the recent sentencing of a young man, a former student, who sought out a gender studies class at the University of Waterloo with the avowed intention of mayhem. He stabbed several people, including the professor. And he’ll serve his several sentences concurrently.

He also won’t be charged with terrorism, and I’m not sure why; the judge stated that his actions were not “ideologically motivated,” and I’m baffled by that assessment. The police, at the time, held a very different view.

Not all campus deaths are linked to gender. There are reports this morning of the murder of a homeless man on the U of T campus. And, again, the police are calling it an isolated incident, even though attacks on homeless people seem to be more prominent lately.

Working on campus fiction that’s about crime has given me a particular impression of its prevalence; so, too, did learning about the Montreal Massacre during my first year of university.

More broadly, violence against women on campus was a lively issue during my undergraduate years, which were marked by conflict between U of T.’s student paper, The Varsity, and the campus engineering society, which the newspaper accused of misogyny and of promoting what we would call today rape culture.

But there’s been apparent progress, including a monument to gender violence championed by engineering students. The culture I remember, and shiver at, has changed due to concerted efforts of, mostly, female engineering students and faculty. Some male students are sharing their concerns about misogyny in U of T-linked online spaces and, through their efforts, helping to dispel it.