WATERLOO — The women’s centre and the gay and lesbian support centre at the University of Waterloo have been closed until further notice, because student leaders are concerned they might be targets of the anonymous author of hateful attacks on women.

Students say they are fearful, knowing that this person — who uses Facebook, email and campus election posters to make the attacks — is likely somewhere on campus.

The attacker covered up election posters of female candidates for the Federation of Students elections last week. He or she also sent out a mass-e-mail, purportedly from the university president, that said, in part: “Expose the defective moral intelligence of womankind.”

And a Facebook page has been created that says, in part: “Over-educated women are truly dangerous.”

For some, this has evoked memories of the 1989 Montreal Massacre, when 14 female engineering students were shot to death by Marc Lepine.

And it has meant a heightened fear on what was once a peaceful campus.

“I feel so targeted right now that I made my stepfather walk me around campus when I had to hand something in,” said student Jaelle McMillan.

“I definitely feel targeted as a female.”

“Every day this campus is not safe,” another student, Ann Marie Begin, told a university wide meeting that was held Friday to discuss the issue.

Begin started to cry as she voiced her fears before the audience of about 150 people.

Later she said her tears were not only about fear, but about frustration.

Begin feels that University of Waterloo is a male-dominated campus, with only one in four professors being female.

And that makes it feel as if “you’re not being heard, that no one cares, no one recognizes that there are problems.”

She was also frustrated, as many other students and faculty were, to hear that even if the attacker is caught, he or she can’t be charged with a hate crime, but only the crimes of mischief and personation.

Dan Anderson, director of the University of Waterloo’s police force, told the meeting that gender is not a category included in federal hate-crimes legislation. Ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation are covered, but not gender, he said.

And also, while the comments themselves are “inappropriate” and “wrong-headed,” he said they “do not reach the standard of a criminal offence.”

Anderson told the meeting that the campus is one of the safest in the country, and it’s also safer than the Waterloo Region community in which it sits.

But he said the acts are very serious, and campus police are already doing forensic testing on the posters and trying to trace the email account from which the phoney email was sent.

“We will do everything we can to try and figure out who is behind this,” he said.

If the person is discovered, he or she can be expelled from campus under the university’s justice system, even before there is any court decision.

Natalie Cockburn, a newly elected vice-president of the federation, was one of the candidates whose posters were covered by the anti-female poster.

“It felt hard not to take it personally,” said Cockburn, who had three male opponents for the job.

“I was really disappointed the election became the tool for those kinds of messages.”

The poster used by the attacker showed a large picture of Marie Curie, the physicist and chemist who discovered radium and was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Her work set the stage for cancer treatments, nuclear technology and even a reconsideration of the fundamentals of physics.

In the poster, Curie’s face is pictured next to a photograph of an exploding atomic bomb, with the words: “The brightest woman this Earth ever created was Marie Curie, The mother of the nuclear bomb. You tell me if the plan of women leading men is still a good idea!”

Later, the fake email was sent out, purportedly from university president Feridun Hamdullahpur. It again attacked Curie and women in general.

Hamdullahpur quickly announced to the university community that the email was a fake and didn’t come from a university account.

“Of course, neither I nor any of my colleagues would support such a thing,” Hamdullahpur said. “This kind of behaviour in our community is rare and unacceptable, and one I know our faculty, staff and students don’t support.”

Student leaders of the campus women’s centre and GLOW, the support centre for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students, said they will continue to function online but are closing their physical offices until further notice to ensure the safety of volunteers and visitors.

The university will empty out next week for Reading Week, when classes are traditionally cancelled for the week midway through the winter term.

http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/489999–two-uw-centres-closed-following-anti-female-messages