"Sexual Harassment in Ontario Universities, 1980-1995", MRP defence of MA student, Jeremy Isead.

A student who experienced sexual harassment in an Ontario university prior to the early 1980s had few options. No formal channels existed to lodge a complaint, and sexual harassment itself

 

was still a new concept and had not been defined or explicitly prohibited on university campuses. This began to change in the early 1980s, when student activists started to pressure their

 

university administrations to take action against the problem, and by 1990 universities in Ontario had undergone significant changes in sexual harassment awareness and policy. This study

 

analyzes the discursive construction of, and institutional developments around, sexual harassment on Ontario university campuses from 1980 to 1995. Examining student newspapers

 

at the University of Toronto, York University, Queen’s University, and Carleton University, this analysis shows that a deep divide emerged over how sexual harassment should be understood.

 

Disagreement centred on whether sexual harassment should be attributed to individual ‘deviant’ offenders or as representative of a broader sexist society, and, most importantly, whether it

 

should be narrowly understood as the abuse of authority to elicit sexual favours, or if it should ​also include a variety of behaviours and attitudes that create a “poisoned environment” for

 

women collectively. These competing conceptions of sexual harassment echoed larger societal debates about feminism, women’s agency, permissible limits of freedom of speech, and the

 

nature of systemic injustice.