It is one of the most feminized engineering schools – with 65% of female students – but AgroParisTech does not escape situations of sexist and sexual violence. The awareness and information unit on sexuality (Cassis), a student association, publishes on Tuesday June 21 the results of a survey carried out by email in December 2021 among 970 students, from the first year of the engineering cycle to the doctorate. . With 58% of respondents, the study paints a fairly precise picture of the violence committed, especially during integration events and festive evenings.
The result is alarming: it identifies 17 rapes (16 women and one non-binary person) during schooling, 526 behaviors or remarks that are discriminatory or with a sexual connotation, coming mostly from students, but also, in about forty cases , teachers and school staff. In total, 141 students, or 24.7% of respondents, said they had been victims of “contact” sexual assault, including 10 during a “stealthing”, a surprise condom removal without consent.
On reading the results, Laurent Buisson, who has been running the school since November 2021, seized the Paris prosecutor on Monday June 20. “I was very surprised by the magnitude of a phenomenon that cannot be explained simply by the consumption of alcohol. It is together, with the students, that we must work on a solution”he urges.
” Drink like a fish “
At 58.8%, sexual violence “with contact” was committed by men, this rate being 36.3% for acts and behavior “without physical contact”, the majority of testimonies not knowing whether the aggressor was male or female, due to excessive consumption of alcohol and/or narcotics.
The Cassis cell questioned the students about festive life at AgroParisTech, the scene of the vast majority of violence. It’s necessary “to drink like a hole to be integrated/greeted/popular” and conversely, not consuming alcohol generates a form of“exclude”, notes the study. Predominate the “trivialization of sex in festive life” and “the pressure felt to always kiss the most people”. Survey points to students entering rooms on campus “unhinging the doors” or who film and take pictures in the evening “at embarrassing times and when consent was not asked”. And Cassis concludes: “We deduce that our privacy seems too little respected at AgroParisTech, which highlights a fundamental problem of respect between students. »
At the start of the school year in September, in addition to awareness training on gender-based and sexual violence, a new listening system will be put in place with a view to professionalizing the mission and “remove too much responsibility” assumed since 2019 by the association. “We had to go through this stage of appropriation of the subject by the studentssays Laurent Buisson, but we must now turn to an external partner or to internally appointed staff, who will have the task of carrying out this type of survey each year. »