Correction appended.

In a string of incidences spanning three academic years, there has been another occurrence of an unidentified individual peering into women’s shower stalls in some of East Quad’s bathrooms, according to an April 13 email to East Quad residents from Ariel Hernandez, the quad’s area coordinator.

This incident marks one of several in East since the 2013 to 2014 academic year, a trend Hernandez said was “due to its’ [sic] proximity to the greater Waltham area,” though he noted that this was the first incident in this particular academic year.

His email added that the University has taken several steps to educate residents and prevent future incidents, including training community advisors to speak with residents about “gender-based targeting of victims, sexual harassment, stalking and intimidation,” increasing Community Living and University Police patrols in and around the building and putting up more signs with contact information for area coordinators and University Police.

The doors for the East bathrooms are locked and are able to be unlocked via students’ room keys — a feature added in February 2014 after a separate incident. The most recent incident occurred in August 2014, after the locks had been installed.

In response to this most recent incident, Gaby Yeshua ’17, who has personally been the victim of voyeurism twice, took to Facebook to reach out to fellow students in an attempt to gain attention from University administrators and prompt them to action.

“I didn’t really want to get involved in any of this for a while,” Yeshua said in an interview with the Justice. “I was really hoping that the two times it happened to me would be the last time. … But when I was told by someone who it recently happened to, … I kind of realized that I really shouldn’t just let it slip through the cracks. I was ready to just let that happen for myself.”

While she has not received any personal accounts of voyeurism incidents, she has received suggestions for potential solutions, including security cameras, bathroom stall-style doors that latch and cannot be seen through and bells that ring as the door to the bathroom is opened. “Every time that it had happened to me, I was lucky that I was listening, because someone was walking in very slowly, and trying to open the door very carefully, and so if there was something like bells, it might prevent them from wanting to carry through with what they’re doing.”

In terms of the number of responses she has received, Yeshua said that she did not expect a large number of people reaching out to her, though she noted that she is still interested in receiving messages and emails from individuals with stories or suggestions. “It’s a sensitive topic to begin with, especially for people who it may have happened to recently,” she said. “It’s even harder for me to talk about it, even though it happened last year. Some people can forget about it in a day. Some people can take a lifetime to forget about something like this. So like I imagined, responses have been pretty limited.”

She added that her efforts so far have included creating a sort of “task list” with steps the University might be able to take to prevent similar incidences in both the short term and long term. This work has included researching potential solutions enacted at other universities — like security cameras — and how much those solutions might cost to implement. Once she has finalized her list, she plans to schedule a meeting with Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Andrew Flagel to present her findings and suggestions.

Yeshua has been in contact with Flagel on and off throughout the last year, and he emailed her at the start of the academic year in response to her multiple emails to administrators in the wake of the first incident in which she was the victim. While she has set no specific date, she said she is hoping to meet with him sometime during finals week or sometime early in the fall semester.

Still, she said, she does not have high expectations going into the meeting. “I’m not expecting it to go particularly well. I know the kind of person Andrew Flagel can be. In instances like this — things dealing with sexual harassment and sexual assault — I have heard from sources that he will put on an act of crying to show solidarity and care, and he will not go through with anything that could possibly help. … I expect him to say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, we’ll do everything we can,’ just like he’s been saying without actually doing.”

However, she explained, “I am relentless, and I am going to keep bothering him about it, even when I graduate. If that’s what it takes, I’m going to come here until it happens.”

As for what she would like to see come out of this meeting, she said that, in an ideal world, she would want to ensure no future incidences of voyeurism occur on campus. At the very least, Yeshua said, she wants to see a noticeable decrease in occurrences. According to the University’s crime statistics webpage, there were 26 sex offense incidents between 2012 and 2014, though it is unclear what kinds of offenses this total includes, and does not distinguish whether these were only the incidences in which an individual was prosecuted by Waltham or University Police. “If we can cut down a number like that, that would be wonderful,” Yeshua said.

Yeshua added that while she wants to see the University pursue the voyeurism suspects — the first time she was targeted, she said, she provided the University with a detailed description of the individual yet saw no results — what she wants to see most in the community is increased dialogue about sexual harassment on campus.

“I want this to become a conversation on campus, because in talking about sexual harassment and sexual assault, it can be very easy to forget things that seem small, like this. So the administration, and teachers, and even our own peers very easily dismiss things like this,” she said. “I really want to have open communication with everyone, in terms of reviewing what we think about this so we can best help each other, best make each other feel safe and not like we’re just complaining about something.”

—Editor’s note: Yeshua was an editorial cartoonist for the Justice until May 19, 2015.

An earlier version of this article errantly used a feminine pronoun for Ariel Hernandez when citing his email to East residents.