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Oct. 2nd, 2010 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccI heard about the suicide of Tyler Clementi both online and on SBS news yesterday. The whole thing is appalling.
It still surprises me that American uni students go off to uni and are then expected to share a room in residences. Having a look at the Rutger's housing - holy crap, it's almost as small as the room I lived in in first year, only it's shared with 3 people.
I kind of wonder how the whole sharing bedrooms thing started - a space issue? We can fit more students in if we cram them? Stopping undergrads having sex? (Well that failed to work.) Teaching undergrads that they just have to get on with other people they've been semi-randomly matched with? (God they could learn that in share housing - and they'd have their own bedroom to retreat to.) Preventing students from becoming too isolated? That one I can kind of see as being possible, although having spent three years living in a residential college, the problems were usually less isolationism and more too much partying. Which is not to say there wasn't problems with students becoming isolated - I know of at least one case where the tutor opened a room fully expecting to find that a student no one had seen for a week had suicided. Fortunately she hadn't - she'd just gone away without telling anyone - but it was entirely plausible given her state of mind at the time. Then again it's possible to be completely isolated in the middle of a group with no one the wiser and I can't see how that would change with sharing a bedroom.
Yes, I still find the shared rooms thing totally weird.
It does seem that this entire tragedy could have been prevented if everyone in the housing actually had their own bedroom, and some level of privacy. (It could also have been prevented if the roommate hadn't been such a homophobic arsehole as well, or had decided that if he'd been asked to be absent for a couple of hours then it really was none of his fucking business what was going on... but then again if they'd had separate rooms there wouldn't have had to be any asking, and the roommate probably wouldn't have had access to set up a webcam.)
Poor guy. Away from home, feeling free to experiment with and express aspects of himself for the first time, what should have been the start of a mostly good time in his life. I really wish he could have just gone to the counselling service, gone to a friend's place, holed up with someone, anyone and hung in there. Because it would have passed. And his family and friends would much rather have had him outed and alive, even if humiliated, than dead.
I do hope that this means the university - and other universities - focus on harrassment and bullying in their residences and on their campuses. And for God's sake, give everyone their own bedroom!
Edit: I should say that I'm not trying to say that having separate bedrooms would end bullying and harrassment, because no, it won't. The only thing that would AFAICS is cracking down on it when it happens, and coming down hard - and the only way to do that is to ensure that people feel safe enough to report it. But seriously still - I don't understand this whole shared bedrooms thing! At uni! FFS!
It still surprises me that American uni students go off to uni and are then expected to share a room in residences. Having a look at the Rutger's housing - holy crap, it's almost as small as the room I lived in in first year, only it's shared with 3 people.
I kind of wonder how the whole sharing bedrooms thing started - a space issue? We can fit more students in if we cram them? Stopping undergrads having sex? (Well that failed to work.) Teaching undergrads that they just have to get on with other people they've been semi-randomly matched with? (God they could learn that in share housing - and they'd have their own bedroom to retreat to.) Preventing students from becoming too isolated? That one I can kind of see as being possible, although having spent three years living in a residential college, the problems were usually less isolationism and more too much partying. Which is not to say there wasn't problems with students becoming isolated - I know of at least one case where the tutor opened a room fully expecting to find that a student no one had seen for a week had suicided. Fortunately she hadn't - she'd just gone away without telling anyone - but it was entirely plausible given her state of mind at the time. Then again it's possible to be completely isolated in the middle of a group with no one the wiser and I can't see how that would change with sharing a bedroom.
Yes, I still find the shared rooms thing totally weird.
It does seem that this entire tragedy could have been prevented if everyone in the housing actually had their own bedroom, and some level of privacy. (It could also have been prevented if the roommate hadn't been such a homophobic arsehole as well, or had decided that if he'd been asked to be absent for a couple of hours then it really was none of his fucking business what was going on... but then again if they'd had separate rooms there wouldn't have had to be any asking, and the roommate probably wouldn't have had access to set up a webcam.)
Poor guy. Away from home, feeling free to experiment with and express aspects of himself for the first time, what should have been the start of a mostly good time in his life. I really wish he could have just gone to the counselling service, gone to a friend's place, holed up with someone, anyone and hung in there. Because it would have passed. And his family and friends would much rather have had him outed and alive, even if humiliated, than dead.
I do hope that this means the university - and other universities - focus on harrassment and bullying in their residences and on their campuses. And for God's sake, give everyone their own bedroom!
Edit: I should say that I'm not trying to say that having separate bedrooms would end bullying and harrassment, because no, it won't. The only thing that would AFAICS is cracking down on it when it happens, and coming down hard - and the only way to do that is to ensure that people feel safe enough to report it. But seriously still - I don't understand this whole shared bedrooms thing! At uni! FFS!
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 03:58 am (UTC)And yeah, what an utterly dickish thing to do on the part of the room mate. I'm sorry but the whole 'oh, they're just kids, they don't realise what sort of effect they will have' thing is a load of rubbish.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 06:52 am (UTC)To a point I agree with you - but there is also research about brain development that indicates that cause=>effect doesn't fully develop in some people until around 25. Not that I think this should necessarily be a legal defence either. *sigh* Sad as it is, I can see that it wouldn't necessarily occur to an 18 year old idiot that putting something on the internet would cause someone to commit suicide, or - come to that - that that means it is available pretty much forever.
Mostly it does come down to safe space, and people feeling that they can bring up harrassment issues. And just general education I suppose.
Apart from anything else I don't see how anyone would get any study done in a shared room!
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 08:33 am (UTC)And now one's dead and the other is likely to end up jailed. Which isn't a great outcome for either of them, particularly not Tyler. The other guy at least has a chance to learn from his mistakes - which he'd also have had if he'd been expelled or suspended because of the harrassment complaint.
And yeah, you'd think that there'd be some vestiges of civilisation - but you're also looking at a demographic who are frequently living away from home for the first time, have come from small town backgrounds and are now having their prejudices and assumptions challenged, as well as having the freedom to make decisions and try things that they couldn't do at home (although not alcohol, which is another one of my huh?? moments).
It's interesting to wonder - would the roommate have done the same thing (activating his webcam remotely) if Tyler had brought back a girl? Possibly. But more likely not. I do wonder how often that happens though.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-03 05:21 pm (UTC)I remember touring one university where the housing had 2 rooms, but you had to go through one room to get to the other, so students who got along well, rather than dealing with the awkwardness of having unequal privacy, moved both beds into the inner room and turned the outer one into a sort of sitting room for their computers and TV and stuff (and presumably would stay there if their roommate needed privacy for whatever reason).
It's all considered a rite of passage. Everybody lives on campus for the first year, but in that first year you're expected to find friends and move off-campus into a shared house or apartment with them the next year. People generally think it's weird if you choose to live on campus (even if you can score a single room, which I did) after your first year without being an RA. It's also considered weird NOT to spend your first year living in campus housing sharing a bedroom with a stranger, to the extent that freshman commuters are often not included in social events (or whatever you want to call binge drinking in large groups) just because they're not on campus 24/7.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 02:31 am (UTC)!!!!
Here's it's more common for students to live at home while they go to Uni, most people don't go to interstate universities so that's possible. Where people do move (like me!) they tend to either go into colleges or residential housing (depends on the Uni) or they join share houses. It used to be that share houses were the cheaper option, but given the current rental market in Melbourne I'm not sure that's still the case. Colleges and Residences usually have people living in them for 2 years, then moving into share houses. Some people (like me, again) stay for three years (less from college pride than inertia.) Either way both residences and colleges almost invariably have single bed rooms - I can think of only one college at University of Melbourne which has shared rooms, and there was one shared room at the college I went to (which they split into two the following year). The longer you stay at a residence/college the better quality of/larger room you get - though the bathrooms are always shared by everyone on that floor.
A large number of uni social events are not on campus for some unis - not least because it's too hard for people to get home from there. So they're at nightclubs with better taxi/public transport options. heh.
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Date: 2010-10-28 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-10-28 11:09 am (UTC)