February 3, 2012

By Sean Nahlik

I’ve become attached to an acronym that I usually claim as my own creation: TFD. “Total fucking disaster.” It’s useful for describing exams, dates and car accidents. Why do you need to know this? That’s how I choose to describe the MU Equity Office’s bias incident reporting system.

In case you weren’t aware, witnesses and victims of bias incidents can report them online at biasreport.missouri.edu. The reporting website defines a bias incident as “an act of intolerance which is committed against any person, group or property and which discriminates, stereotypes, harasses or excludes anyone” based on some part of the person’s identity such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, group affiliation, etc.” Very cute, but the system sucks, and students recognize that.

Recently, the MU Equity Office has put in a lot of work to promote the online form since no one actually submits them. Why? The system is completely illegitimate. You fill out a bland, online form and get a confirmation email for submission. The form doesn’t need to be fancier, it just lacks substantially in the department of _being a real thing_.

The problem with collecting “hate data” is that hateful shit is triggering for people, and typey-typing it into a gradient blue form is a robotic and emotionless response for what is often a traumatic experience. Attacks on identity, whether based on race, gender, sexuality or other marginalized identity, should be recognized as intense incidents. If you don’t know the feeling, consider yourself lucky. I digress.

Submitted incidents go to an inbox. An email inbox. This is what makes me really angry. There is no aggregation of data. No matrices, no compilations, no database. What the fuck.

From 1996 to 1999, an annual “Hate Report” was published. A collaborative effort led by real humans, it catalogued hateful words and incidents from campus for that year. In 2007, MSA pushed for its resurrection as a means to collect such data again. That data is being collected now. By Microsoft Outlook.

Changes need to be made to make the reporting system a real thing. For one, there needs to be someone to assist students and staff who fill out the repair, preferably a social psychologist or someone else educated in areas of identity and maybe with some counseling background. That person would help students and staff on an individual basis to fill out the report and connect them to psychological, legal and educational resources to deal with the incident internally and externally.

The coup de grâce of reform is the creation of a hate database. This database would keep student data anonymous but would plot the type of incident, the identity targeted, the date and time of day and its campus location. That way, administrators could look at the data and go, “Oh, race-based hate crimes keep happening on Lowry Mall,” and then, I don’t know, respond accordingly by upping MUPD traffic in that area. There are numerous other applications, from tracking periods when hate crimes increase, keeping check of sexual assault locations and observing which social identities are the most targeted at MU. With all of this data, the university can develop strategies to better handle incidents and do more to prevent them in the first place. Seriously, why aren’t we doing this already?

The MU community deserves better than the half-assed system that’s currently in place. If we want to improve the safety of campus, the MU Equity Office should focus less on marketing and more on creating something that’s worth utilizing. They need to be serious about collecting real data to make informed strategies to counter biased incidents. Until then, we have to make due with the TFD that is the MU Bias Incident Report.