National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday was reprimanded by the Control Yuan for failing to protect whistle-blowers involved in two alleged sexual harassment cases involving students, and a university dorm counselor and an assistant professor.
Control Yuan members Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲), Chi Hui-jung (紀惠容) and Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) said the assistant professor had allegedly harassed multiple students, while the dorm counselor allegedly harassed students serving as dorm staff.
The university’s Gender Equality Committee said that reports against the assistant professor and the counselor were made as early as September 2022.
Photo: Taipei Times
The counselor allegedly harassed a student serving as dorm staff in the early morning of Oct. 4, 2022, and was indicted by the district prosecutors’ office for contravening the Stalking and Harassment Prevention Act (跟蹤騷擾防治法) and Article 304 of the Criminal Code.
Dorm counselors are among the people who are informed when instances of alleged harassment occur, but the university failed to implement measures to keep the counselor away from the victim, the Control Yuan said.
The Control Yuan said the university also needed to implement measures to ensure that standards are in place for such incidents and train counselors to enhance their professional knowledge.
In the case of the assistant professor, while the committee had helped the alleged victim transfer to a separate instructing professor, it failed to act on potential intellectual property disputes, the Control Yuan said.
The Control Yuan said that failing to do so resulted in the student being forced to rewrite their thesis prior to their oral defense and constituted a failure of the university’s due responsibility to protect the student’s rights to education.
While the university has drafted new regulations that allow students to find other instructing professors in the event of rape, sexual harassment or sexual bullying, the new rules fail to state whether approval depends on the committee’s recognition of the incident in question as an act of sexual harassment.
The Control Yuan said the regulations also need to state what other measures should be taken and how student-professor relationships should be handled should the accusation fail to be sustained.
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