Early in August, Stephanie Kloepfer was in a summer course lecture when a female classmate came to the front of the room to tell the class she’d just heard about a serial sexual attacker operating on campus. The woman had learned of the man’s presence from a CityTV reporter who asked if she had heard about his assaults. Another woman spoke up to say she’d been approached by him on her way to class earlier. Kloepfer soon heard that a third woman she knew had also been approached by the man.
Police call the attacker “Steve,” the name he sometimes uses to approach victims. News media soon reported that he operated by luring women to secluded areas under the pretext of shooting a school photography project, then assaulting and photographing them. No one Kloepfer knew fell for the man’s shaky ploy, but what alarmed her was that, short of rumours and secondhand accounts, no one knew to watch out for him.
“I did an Internet search and found out that the campus police had some sort of alert out, but I couldn’t find that alert anywhere on campus,” she said. Seeking information on the attacker, Kloepfer called the campus police and was referred to their media relations office. That office typically takes calls from news media, at best providing statistics and procedural background. Kloepfer left knowing no more than before.
She tried the Campus Safety Office next, and got some answers about U of T’s safety measures, but not about Steve.
Kloepfer recalled: “When I called the Campus Safety Office I asked ‘What are you doing to tell people about this sexual predator,’ and they’re like ‘Which one?’”
The safety officer explained the university’s policies in such situations and told Kloepfer what measures they were taking. The police were putting up alert posters in some high-priority areas, an internal alert had been issued to various university workers with safety responsibilities, and the campus radio station CIUT was broadcasting an hourly warning.
“No one listens to the radio anymore,” said Kloepfer, who thinks the university’s efforts to alert the community were too easy for students to miss.
“I don’t want to hear about every little thing,” she said. “But if somebody is sexually assaulting people, in my book that’s pretty serious.”
Steve has been around for years, according to Jane Seto Paul, an administrator at the Arts and Science Students’ Union. She said she first heard about the man soon after joining ASSU 18 years ago.
“Yeah, it’s been forever,” she said. Paul described an incident from early in her time here. “At one point they had an article about him,” she said.
“Someone actually came into my office and reported that this guy is over in the UC quad. I called the U of T police and said ‘This guy, the one that you’ve been looking for, he’s in the UC quad right now talking to some women.’ I can’t remember what was going on at the time but they were just too busy to check it out.”
She shared Kloepfer’s criticism about the flow of safety information on campus.
“It’s not like people don’t take things seriously, because we’re a huge campus in the middle of a large city, so anything that’s happening in the city, crime-wise, is probably happening here at U of T. Are we told about a lot of things that are happening here? No.”
At the time Kloepfer was investigating the campus safety network, Binish Ahmed was UTSU’s VP university affairs (Ahmed has since resigned.) When Ahmed heard from Kloepfer and several other female students who had encountered the attacker, she sent a concerned letter to U of T’s president David Naylor. That resulted in a meeting with Jonathan Freedman, the school’s deputy provost of student life. Ahmed went in to argue that the university wasn’t doing enough to inform students.
Rob Steiner, U of T’s assistant VP of strategic communications, spoke to that.
“At the university we get threats all the time,” Steiner said.
The university relies first on outside experts—police, firefighters, health workers and so on—to assess the risks and potential targets of a threat to the campus community. After hearing which people the experts think are endangered, a U of T crisis management team focuses its efforts on alerting those specific people, Steiner explained. According to him, this is both to speed up the alert process and prevent confusion.
“One thing you’ll learn if you’ve done this over and over again is that for every situation there are pros who can tell you what you have to do to ensure a safe environment,” he said. “There are professionals out there who know what safety means under different circumstances. Sometimes it means ‘get out of the building now,’ other times it means ‘stay where you are so we can get our fire trucks through,’ other times it means ‘don’t mention this to too many people because the public health guys have to focus on twelve folks and not be overwhelmed by 200 false alerts.’”
After meeting with Ahmed, Freedman took the extra step of emailing colleges, faculties, and other student hubs across campus, asking them to inform their students of Steve’s presence and mode of operation. They discussed implementing a multi-staged safety alert system, with such models as the AMBER child abduction alert network and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s colour-coded terror advisory chart. Freedman has since reached the end of his term as deputy provost. Contacted by The Varsity earlier this week, he offered to speak about campus safety plans next week after returning from a trip and consulting with other university staff. Regarding those ideas, Steiner—who sits on the crisis management team—said he was unaware of any current developments.
Ahmed said she plans to brief her successor on the issue when UTSU’s executive selects him or her. She remained displeased with the campus safety network’s philosophy on disclosing information about potential dangers.
“They don’t think it’s important to tell students these things as soon as they find out. I think it’s really important.” The low-key approach to disseminating threat reports, she argued, not only leaves students in the dark but also leaves them unfamiliar with the role campus agencies play in a crisis.
“What do students do if there is a safety risk?” she asked. “Do students know what they’re supposed to do? I don’t think that they do.”
Steiner contended that the professionals U of T counts on know when and how the public should be alerted to danger. As for Kloepfer, her encounters left her worrying the network of campus safety providers were not doing an acceptable job of deciding when students should and should not be informed, and, sometimes, that they weren’t adequately informed themselves.
