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'They laughed in my face': Riau student says university brushed off sexual assault report
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A Riau University student has accused her lecturer, who is also a faculty official, of sexual harassment and has claimed that university officials impeded her reporting of the incident. (Shutterstock/File)
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Riau University student has accused her lecturer, who is also a faculty official, of sexual harassment and has claimed that university officials impeded her reporting of the incident.
On Oct. 27, the student visited her lecturer in his office for a thesis consultation. The two were alone and, according to the student’s account, the lecturer peppered her with personal questions that had nothing to do with the thesis. The student said she grew uneasy after he allegedly said, "I love you."
As she went to leave the room, the lecturer allegedly put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her cheek and forehead. The student said she kept her head down and that the lecturer then tried to kiss her lips, saying, “Where are the lips?”
“I was very petrified, but I managed to shove him away,” she said in a video published on the Instagram account of the university’s International Relations Student Association. “I left [his] office and rushed away from the campus in a state of shock.”
She said she tried reaching out to the department secretary to report the incident and asked for her thesis supervisor to be changed. But the secretary and the head of the department allegedly pressured her “not to tell anyone about the incident”.
“They laughed in my face about it,” she said. “There was no protection, no empathy for what I had gone through. They tried to protect [the lecturer] instead, without caring about what had happened.”
Read also: 'Big step’: Students, lecturers laud decree to fight sexual violence on campuses
