NUS Approves Proposal For Night Patrols In School But Students Not Happy

2019-05-18 , 6:00 pm

Uni is the mark of “freedom” for a lot of Singaporean guys. Finally escaping the 2-year mandatory green bond, Uni is when they feel they can finally contribute to society.

Except, unless you happen to be the ones joining in this year and joined the orientation camps. You remember that joke I made about NUS becoming “like back to NS for the guys“? Turns out it’s not quite a joke.

Turns out people DID think it operated like the army.

Wait, why again?

Because Monica Baey, and that should say everything you need to know. But if you don’t, here’s a link with a summary.

Then, as in my previous post, NUS increases security. NUS Students’ Union also wants to implement something, so they introduce night patrol.

How this works is: they have one male and one female executive committee member patrolling corridors, toilets, and checking student rooms for the freshmen orientation period in June to 1st week August.

NUS Likes The Idea

It sounded like a good idea, in some ways. So on 15 May 2019, NUS said to implement it.

The approval message by Associate Professor Peter Pang, dean of students at NUS: “We welcome this ground-up initiative by NUSSU to organise student patrol teams to conduct checks during the orientation period. The safety and well-being of our students is always a top priority of NUS.”

But as you can already tell, the actual implementation isn’t quite that good.

Feels like army

And to NUSSU’s implementation of guard duty, the comments were that it was “invasive”, “heavy-handed”, “feels like the military”, “infringe their privacy”, “instil a culture of fear”. “turning NUS into a surveillance state”.

Students questioned if the patrols are “properly equipped to handle such situations” and if guard duty would actually help the situation at all.

Some also said that it disrupts the purpose of orientation camps, which is for students to socialise and make friends.

Facebook Satire rationalises reasons why NUSSU’s guard duty is bad

Don’t judge me, but I find ~~hate-fueled~~ criticism posts incredibly ~~entertaining~~ educational because these ~~mark the birth of villain posts~~ usually cut out a lot of the political statements and go directly to the point.

So leave it to the Satirists at NUS Students United to construct a beautiful piece of literature describing the implementation as “classic insincere tokenism”. The entire post should be read here.

But Here’s A Summary

Current patrols would have prevented past cases if it’s effective already. It also doesn’t do anything for sexual misconducts like upskirt filmings and harassments.
Why only during orientation? Past offences are not even committed during orientation but spread through the academic year.
There already are patrols. What’s the actual purpose of duplicate work by untrained personnel?
What is NUSSU’s credibility for doing so? They are a “joke” to most of NUS students.
NUSSU “can’t transform from an irrelevant Santa Claus wannabe to an effective police capable of policing social behaviour overnight.”
NUSSU doesn’t seem to know what actually goes on during orientation.
Seniors are known to flirt. What’s preventing patrols in abusing powers?
With all the reasons above, NUSSU just wants to be seen doing “anything”.
NUSSU needs to actually come up with proper measures and be fierce advocates of sexual victims, instead of them resorting to social media

Reason 7 is more eloquently shown in the following image:

Image: NUSSU – NUS Students United Facebook

And to end off any Monica Baey related article, once again to the perverts out there: Stick to porn.