Incident team responds to bias reports

Ask any undergrad: first-year residence halls are a breeding ground for crude whiteboard drawings, jokes that cross the line and whispered comments about peers.

Many of these incidents seem harmless, but the IU Incident Teams know they aren’t.

They know harassment happens every day.

Thursday afternoon, five representatives of the Incident Teams discussed the reports and trends of bias-related incidents in Bloomington, particularly among IU students.  

The panel was planned as part of First Year Experience’s “Conversations on First Year Student Success,” which will play host to three more panels during the spring 2014 semester.

“We were created to give students a safe place to report (bias-related) incidents,” said Sarah Nagy, representative of the Racial and Religious Bias Incident team and assistant director of Residential Programs and Services.

She said the team began much of its work after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when people began harassing Muslim students. More than a decade later, the situation has not been remedied.

“A lot of our international students are hesitant to report incidents,” Nagy said. “When incidents of racial discrimination are reported, there is a trend in people ­— assumed to be students — shouting profanities and racial slurs out of the windows of residence halls, greek houses and cars.”

Eric Love is a member of the GLBT Anti-Harassment team and said their team generally receives reports more often than the others – usually weekly.

Incidents reported span from slurs about peoples’ sexuality to crude or phallic drawings in residence halls.

“A lot of graffiti,” Love said. He laughed dryly. “We have a lot of artists on
campus.”

Katie Grove, a representative of the Gender Team, also mentioned this.

“You might say penis drawings are kind of popular these days,” she said.

Love noted there has been a considerable increase in incidents related to transgendered students’ status on campus over the past two years.

Transgendered students who have changed their name might be listed under two different titles in databases, and this often leads to complications in identifying them, Love said.

Professors might take attendance and they might be listed under the wrong name, leading to an unintentional outing of that student as transgendered.

Nagy said many incidents have been occurring in the virtual world recently.

It’s hard to penalize someone for what they say online under non-IU aliases, she said.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t have a conversation,” she said, “But we can’t really say, ‘Take your Twitter account down.’”

Other incidents through the years have included students damaging and urinating on
Jewish library books and male students walking into study lounges and asking females to lift up their shirts and pose for photos.

Love said it’s important to note the Incident Teams’ job is not to penalize.

“We’re not a disciplinary body,” he said. “We’re the education body.”

Several members of the panel said they knew of situations in which the victim reported the incident and wanted to talk to and teach the aggressor why what they did was hurtful, rather than just penalizing them.

Anybody can report incidents, whether they are victims, friends of the injured party or strangers, Nagy said.

Now, she said, they get most of their reports through their mobile app, because it’s easy for victims to take pictures and file reports.

Payne said reporting an incident does not mean someone is in trouble, but it is important to report situations that call for some outside help.

“Our priority is anything that affects students,” Payne said. “Even if it doesn’t involve students, the response could have an effect on students’ lives.”

Follow reporter Anicka Slachta on Twitter @ajslachta.