Her body tenses at the sight of him. She prays that he will not see her. Apprehension creeps into her body like a cold chilling wind no matter how hard she tries to keep it out as he looks her way. Fear comes thundering down on her, all at once. He has just spoken to her.

No one ever thinks that harassment actually happens around them. I too, once held that naive opinion. I was four. I realized at a young age that the world around me was not the nice place that I once though it was. Here, in engineering, many people try to claim that the environment around us is harassment free and is a wonderful place to be. Only part of this statement is true. This is a great place to go to school, but it is definitely not harassment free. Why would a school need harassment advisors if it were harassment free? These positions exist for a reason. Harassment can be anything from an offensive off-hand joke or an offensive e-mail, it can be as severe as slander on a black board or altered files. Harassment can be related to your race, gender, or sexual orientation but whatever the reasoning behind it, harassment is alive and real all around us.

Harassment is defined as constant annoyance and irritation through ongoing attacks on a person. In today's world and in the engineering school environment, harassment is the fine line between friendly teasing and the cruel comments and inappropriate actions that undermine a woman's self confidence, day in and day out. To joke around with people that you are close to and who can joke back is different than when you hardly know someone and they start making degrading comments and physical advances on your person. This type of action is more frustrating than anything else. To have to put up with this sort of degradation when you are well aware that you are as good as the next person at what you are doing is frustrating. These actions only go to show the true ignorance that survives in our society.

"Some men do not even realize when they have committed an offensive act."

The unnatural fear that still haunts our society is caused by ignorance. Even in this liberal day and age, the "boys club" of engineering has managed to keep graduating women engineers to under 15% of all graduating engineers. Engineering has remained one of the last professions to stay relatively free of women. As a result, harassment is a common, everyday experience of many women engineers at universities today. Some men do not even realize when they have committed an offensive act. They are oblivious to the fact that their comments and actions can be painful. They do not realize that their actions undermine a woman's self confidence and her will to survive. These comments, when committed on a regular basis, can tear women apart.

Harassment is not a pleasant experience. On an everyday basis, one should not have to be afraid of the people they are around. However, the reality is that this fear is extremely tangible, at least for some people. For me, as a student at Simon Fraser University, I feel comfortable around the faculty and students most of the time. The atmosphere is friendly and enthusiastic, but even such healthy and positive environments are sometimes not what they seem. Looking under the surface of such environments reveals a hostile and cruel attitude that desecrates the female will and massacres a woman's self confidence. It hurts a person's ego a little when friends throw around insulting comments in good fun, but everyone needs a little deflation now and then.