Media and feminists can rescue students hounded by sex pests

Consider these two scenarios: Lecturers at a university giving better grades to attractive female students, and lecturers giving better grades to their female students for sexual favours. The first scenario is not often heard about, but many students are rudely familiar with both. The first is often implicit, and the second intentional and coercive. Is there a moral equivalence between the two scenarios? Perhaps there is. But they show a spectrum of bias with the direct and physically abusive variety at one end, and the less direct and relatively painless favouritism at the other. A Swedish study published earlier this month finds that attractive students, especially female students, receive better grades from their lectures than those not too good-looking. This kind of bias is referred to as beauty premium. Initially coined to describe better salary for the good-looking, the term now generally refers to people who are physically attractive being favoured over those who are considered less attractive. As proof of this bias, the study found that switching from face-to-face classes in a lecture hall to full online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in deteriorated grades for attractive males and females, though females have a slight edge. The implication is that online classes are an equaliser. Removing the physical interaction of the classroom eliminates the beauty premium, echoing previous studies demonstrating professor bias. There doesn’t seem to be a similar study conducted in an African country. What we have instead is ample evidence of is the more insidious and exploitative sex-for-grades in the second scenario. The operative term for it in Rwanda is gender-based corruption but is also known as sextortion or sexploitation, a blend of sex and exploitation first coined over one hundred years ago but gained prominence in the media and film industries in the West beginning in the early 1940s. This year’s corruption report by Transparency International Rwanda notes that gender-based corruption in higher education in the country ranks second at 42.6 per cent after the private sector at 57.3 per cent. This is an alarming number that is important to take in because it gives a sense of scale to the problem in the country. But it is also an Africa-wide problem, with some of the more memorable exposés in higher education being the sting operations by the BBC Africa Eye undercover journalists posing as students that captured lecturers on tape in Nigeria and Ghana. The disgraced lecturers were deservedly suspended by their universities. It seems obvious, but it could be argued that a similar sting operation by Rwandan journalists, perhaps even a well-publicised threat to undertake such an exposé, would do much to deter the lecturer sex pests on campus. Note that many of the affected students admit that they are too scared to report their ordeals for fear of reprisals. The media could come to their aid by ferreting out the pests like in those examples in Nigeria and Ghana. The government should hasten to put in place a clearer policy, picking the cue from Rwanda’s Executive Director for Higher Education Council who told The New Times there exists no specific policy on how to handle gender-based corruption in universities. The local feminists as well. They have been known to raise a ruckus on social media, though a question may be raised as to whether their voices are loud and forceful enough. Remember that sexploitation has been with us since the introduction of the modern school, yet it only relatively recently that gender-based corruption seems to have attracted some much-needed attention such as during the 2019 extraordinary senate meeting probing the issue. The feminists must be as concerned, but they appear not loud about it given the depth of the problem. Not appearing too keen on the female student’s cause risks opening the feminists up to some of their detractors who might unfairly accuse them of being more adept at posturing on social media. Yet the point can still be made that they should be more like Nigerian author Wole Soyinka’s tiger which doesn’t proclaim its tigritude, but pounces. There’s no bypassing the fact that the feminists as well as the media and other players including the universities should be more proactive.

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Media and feminists can rescue students hounded by sex pests