The MU Equity Office is launching a campaign to encourage students to speak out against bias incidents on campus.
If anyone within the MU community feels they have experienced or witnessed a biased act, they are encouraged to submit a bias report online through the new “See-it, Hear-it, Report-it” campaign so the university can help students evaluate the problem and take the necessary steps to resolve it.
Anyone can submit an anonymous report at [BiasReport.missouri.edu](BiasReport.missouri.edu) or pick up a self-mailer form at several locations on campus, including the Multicultural Center and the LGBTQ Resource Center. There are also plans to have signboards put up all over campus, table tents set up near the residential halls and advertisements on plasma screens, Equity Office Director Noel English said.
The reason for the push for the office to be more visible is there is a fear people are experiencing problems but might not be aware the services exist to report these problems, she said.
“It’s not that we expect that there is a lot of problems on campus,” English said. “When I was at a university a third of this size I was getting about one inquiry a week, and I don’t hear anything like that here.”
There is speculation that some people are reporting their problems, but are doing so elsewhere. The Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention Center is a place on campus that specializes in dealing with the survivors of relationship and sexual violence as well as the friends and family of those affected. Although it is possible to report relationship and sexual violence to the Equity Office, people could be going the RSVP Center to report these problems instead.
“Our goal, our aim when working with a survivor is to empower them and give them as much choice and control over the rest of the process as we can, so I explain all the different options that folks have including the Bias Report and including MU Police Department or Columbia Police Department depending on where the crime occurred,” RSVP Center Coordinator Danica Wolf said.
Sometimes people who seek RSVP Center services choose not submit a bias report, she said.
Even with resources like the RSVP Center, there could be other reasons why people aren’t reporting problems, English said.
“It could be that they don’t want to report, that they don’t think anything will come of it, or they are afraid of retaliation or some other reason that they don’t want to report,” English said. “Or it could be that people still don’t know about the site.”
To help spread awareness of the report, some students plan to discuss the bias report in meetings with their student organizations.
“With new people coming in, they really don’t know their way around campus (and) they don’t know where programs are like this,” said Carlos Huezo, social chairman of the MU Chapter of the Hispanic American Leadership Organization. “This is a very basic report. It’s very simple and it’s not like they have to go through a huge process or something.”
English said that if students don’t report issues after the campaign has taken off, then the office will look into other ways to reach students who experience bias but aren’t speaking out.
