In January 2020, McGill student Elizabeth* settled into Redpath Library’s Cyberthèque around 6 p.m., across from an unfamiliar man. Around 10:30 p.m., he began looking at her repeatedly, bumping his foot against hers. She moved her chair away to avoid the contact.
As closing time was announced over the loudspeakers, the man began mumbling at Elizabeth with a distressed, urgent expression. She asked him what was wrong, but he continued to mutter, so she moved closer to hear him. He was attempting to make small talk.
Elizabeth didn’t want to chat, but also didn’t want to be rude. So, when he began to ask Elizabeth about her program and what she had been working on, she answered. When she asked reciprocal questions, he said he was a “graduate,” but deflected her other inquiries, including what his name was. This set off Elizabeth’s alarm bells, and she backed away.
Immediately, the man began asking questions about where Elizabeth lived, who she lived with, and how she would get home. He called her “very pretty.” Elizabeth felt that the man had purposefully waited for the library to start closing before making an advance. She told him she was in a relationship, worried he might “become irate or violent” if she rejected him. The man didn’t care, stating that he wanted to become close to Elizabeth because he didn’t have a woman in his life. He told Elizabeth he’d been watching her all night, and that he had stayed behind at the library to talk to her.
Elizabeth’s phone had died, and now the man was watching her computer. She continued loudly telling him to stop in hopes that other students would step in.
Finally, help appeared to arrive: A McGill security guard on his rounds began checking people’s student IDs. The man became nervous, saying he didn’t have his
When the guard approached their table, Elizabeth mouthed “help”, and tried to show fear with her body language as he scanned her ID. Yet, when the man told the guard he didn’t have his student card, the guard walked away without escorting the man out, simply saying he should leave. Elizabeth’s hope was gone.
Elizabeth’s harasser began saying he wanted to take her home, describing what he would do to her. He asked her to “make out” despite her now-constant “no’s”. He told her he would follow her home, then stood “looming over” her. She told him she was going to call security because he was scaring her, which finally persuaded him to leave.
Elizabeth quickly used Facebook on her computer to ask her boyfriend to pick her up. As she made her way to meet him outside, she encountered another security guard at the exit. As Elizabeth told the guard about her situation, he repeatedly said she should have called security, and should have been less friendly with her harasser. When Elizabeth explained her dead phone, her fear of provoking the man, and another guard’s failure to help her, the guard began to make excuses. Elizabeth asked him to make security aware of the situation, then left. As she and her boyfriend drove away from campus, they saw her harasser lingering near the library complex.
Elizabeth submitted a nine-page document of explanation to McGill Security, asking them to review camera footage to identify the man. She described him as dark-haired, around 5 feet 10 inches. She also noted his dark-coloured backpack.
Elizabeth never encountered the man again—in person. But this past month, she saw a poster that had been plastered around Milton-Parc: “CALL 911 IF YOU SEE THIS MAN, 5’10-5’11, MCGILL GHETTO STALKER: TRIED TO BREAK IN AND HAS BEEN LOOKING INTO GIRLS WINDOWS”. The man? Elizabeth’s harasser and his backpack, five years later.
Elizabeth’s story is an example of Campus Public Safety’s frequent apathy towards sexual harassment in the McLennan-Redpath complex. More broadly, Campus Public Safety’s selective security approach—failing to protect women students, despite visibly employing many guards around campus—directly undermines the university’s core values of freedom and inclusion.
Why do students feel there is such a large security presence at McGill, yet still not feel safe in the biggest library on campus? Campus Public Safety must start taking those who report harassment in these core McGill spaces seriously.
Elizabeth’s story is not an anomaly. In October 2023, second-year Jessica* was studying on the second floor of McLennan. It was relatively empty, but a man sat across from her, adjusting his body to match her every move for over an hour. Eventually, he appeared to start filming her chest.
After around 10 minutes, Jessica found a security guard, telling him she suspected she was being filmed. The guard told her to call McGill’s security office “to take care of it.”
The man who appeared to have filmed Jessica suddenly exited the library past her and the guard. Jessica urgently told the guard that the man was right there, but the guard did not act.
“I’m paying this university so much money, I would expect them to invest in security that wants to do their job and would actually be able to keep me safe,” Jessica said in an interview with The Tribune.
As Jessica left McLennan, she passed her harasser. When she turned around a few moments later, he was walking behind her. Jessica re-entered the library complex through Redpath, then re-exited through the McLennan doors. The man was still behind her. She booked it to the metro station, managing to lose him on the way.
In the coming days, the man frequently began leaving McLennan at the same time as Jessica. She continued making loops around the library complex on her way out, and he continued to tail her. After a few weeks, he stopped. She has not seen him since.
Jessica told The Tribune that, considering how apathetic a McGill security guard had been when she had reported her situation, she “wouldn’t ever go to [security] ever again” for help.
“Had the guy maybe stopped him that first time and just been like, ‘You’re not allowed in this building,’ at least, I might have felt safer,” she said. “But obviously, they didn’t do anything.”
In a written statement to The Tribune, the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO) confirmed that details about how Campus Public Safety operates are not public.
“In terms of complaints about how we dispatch resources, we do our best to serve our campus communities and their various needs,” the MRO wrote. “When we receive complaints, we take them seriously and seek to address the issues of concern.”
Yet, Elizabeth reports that she didn’t receive a supportive follow-up from McGill after submitting her complaint, beyond an email exchange saying her situation was being investigated. The emailers referred Elizabeth to the Office for Sexual Violence Response, Support and Education, which had a waitlist at the time.
The MRO stated they were unable to speak about situations like Elizabeth’s and Jessica’s.
“We do not comment on them, notably out of respect for [their] privacy,” the MRO wrote.
If Elizabeth’s perpetrator is the same 39-year-old man believed to be the “McGill Ghetto Stalker” charged this month with voyeurism, then he has a documented history of sexual crimes, including against individuals under the age of 18. His multijurisdictional charges date back to at least 2010.
“They have cameras they could use to identify this man,” Elizabeth told The Tribune. “Do they really think my situation is the first time he’s come here?”
Jessica echoed Elizabeth’s frustrations.
“You have all this proof in front of you that there’s at least one guy who’s doing this, and it’s just like, you have a description, you’ve seen him,” Jessica said. “If [they] were to check the cameras, they would see it all happening [….] It would be so easy for them to just do their job.”
“Something is directly wrong with where [McGill’s] money goes,” Elizabeth said. “They make too many millions to keep letting these guys slide.”
The MRO said they were aware that a man was arrested in Milton-Parc, and that he had possibly harassed McGill students.
“Our understanding is that it may be the same person who appears to have targeted some of our students, living off campus, in a privately administered housing earlier this year,” the MRO wrote.
The Students’ Society of McGill University’s Vice-President University Affairs Abe Berglas described claims they’ve heard in an interview with The Tribune that campus security is both unequipped for and unfocused on serving students.
“There’s a lot of justified concern about […] importing security guards who traditionally have been security for concerts or malls, and bringing them to a university environment,” Berglas said. “They’re stationed to buildings, and not people. So you’ll have them outside windows that were previously broken or outside the James Administration Building.”
Berglas addressed how people in favour of campus security often explain to them that the presence of guards makes them feel there are “‘reliable witnesses’” on campus.
“When things like discrimination or sexual and gendered violence happen to students, it makes me empathize with the desire for [...] security that would step in,” Berglas said. “I also think that does not need to be a security agent.”
Security’s failure to maintain libraries as open, accessible spaces for all is affirmed by the myriad of McGill Reddit threads describing the sexually inappropriate behaviour that students have experienced there. Meanwhile, reports of private security forces contracted by Campus Public Safety detaining actual McGill attendees or McGill calling on the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal to use force against student protestors raise major concerns among certain contingents of the student population about the aggressive tactics deployed by security who do take action.
While students were required to present their IDs to access campus around Oct. 7, 2024, a man with a history of sexual crimes posing a threat to students in the library was allowed to stay there without any student card. Campus Public Safety’s priorities are out of line.
Berglas explained that a campus safety model they would like to see would be an “active bystander culture.”
“I think we should just responsibilize every McGill member, and that way, we will be safer,” Berglas told The Tribune.
Active bystanders indeed successfully helped protect an Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill member in December 2024 from security guards who had physically detained her. Onlookers who recorded this incident helped hold the guard accountable and prevented escalation—Campus Public Safety’s supposed job. Holding security accountable can only be achieved by this kind of collective action.
McGill keeping its libraries open to all is essential. It is a civic duty for such a major institution to foster accessible spaces that give back to the community. But free access to university libraries does not mean they should be “free-for-alls.” In the written statement Elizabeth submitted to security, she expressed how guards’ inaction emboldened her harasser’s behaviour, rather than resolving it. Her experiences have coloured her sense of safety on campus ever since.
“Since the incident, I am hesitant to carry on coming here at all hours by myself, and feel that I am not as safe on campus as I had assumed,” Elizabeth said. “At the end of the day, security guards are the centre of public safety on school grounds, and need to be more observant and compassionate instead of assuming things are alright or getting defensive.”
Instead of focusing on building new student spaces, McGill needs to focus on improving its security in existing ones before threats to call Campus Public Safety like Elizabeth’s fail to deter perpetrators. As we move into exam season and spend more late nights in campus libraries, effective and compassionate security intervention must be McGill’s priority. In the meantime, we as a student community must act on our peers’ pleas for help, and call out insufficient or harmful reactions from security guards when we see them.
*Elizabeth and Jessica’s names have been changed to preserve their anonymity.
If you have experienced sexual violence, you can seek support through the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society, or the Centre pour les victimes d’agression sexuelle de Montreal