S3xual harassment: There are increasingly more female principal officers at law schools - UNICAL VC

Prof. Florence Obi, Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Calabar, has discussed some of the steps taken to resolve the sexual harassment issue plaguing the school's law faculty. 

 

Recall that the Dean of the Faculty of Law, Prof. Cyril Ndifon, was suspended following a protest by some law students who claimed he had harassed them sexually. 

On Saturday, August 26, Prof. Obi said in an interview with Channels Television that the school's administration had conducted a "clean sweep" of the law department to ensure that all of the top officers at the faculty were female.

The V.C. also stated that steps had been taken to reduce instances of sexual harassment involving lecturers and university students. She stated:

"We have put in place steps to ensure that such incidences are reduced moving forward. Sexual harassment in schools cannot be totally eliminated because it occurs in every nation. It does occur, but where it becomes a problem is in the impunity, the repeated abuse, and the method in which this is done.

"At my university, we have taken so many precautions that we know, moving forward, no one in the Faculty of Law would demand payment from students or place any female student in such a vulnerable position to engage in immoral behavior.

"We have established roughly seven committees. Because of allegations that the suspended dean took all female students under his supervision and left them open to his advances, there is a committee to allocate students to supervisors. There is now a committee in place to manage it.

There is a committee to look at mobilization to law school, and students claimed in a letter of protest to us that staff use that as a kind of intimidation to coerce some of them into giving in and threaten them that they won't be mobilized to law school if they don't. To do that, we have formed a committee.

A committee for result verification exists. We also undertook a complete overhaul of the faculty, installing a woman as acting dean, a woman as deputy dean, and a woman as faculty officer in order to protect the students.