Singapore—School of the Arts Singapore (SOTA) said on Facebook on Wednesday ( June 2) that, contrary to earlier media reports, only one faculty member and a few former students are alleged to have been involved in sexual harassment.
SOTA said the incident with the faculty member allegedly occurred before he joined the school. But it added that “since being alerted to these allegations, SOTA has engaged the teacher and will ensure that he has no contact with students until this matter is resolved”.
While the latest statement did not identify the teacher, SOTA’s Facebook post on June 1 (Tuesday) named Mr Jason Lim, a Visual Arts teacher from the school.
The school assured the public that it “works to ensure” a safe environment for its community and does not condone harassment or abuse in any form.
Any report of such actions would be investigated and sanctions would be imposed if needed, SOTA added.
The school also provided an email address, histleblow@sota.edu.sg, for anyone wishing to report such incidents so they can be investigated.
The school also encouraged abuse or harassment victims to report to the police. “SOTA will cooperate and assist with any such police investigation as required,” it added.
The accusations of sexual harassment came to light earlier this week via an Instagram account called durian.dot.
Posts on the account have since been removed and it seems that it has been deactivated.
The posts alleged that at least 20 men had been guilty of sexual harassment, assault, and statutory rape.
In a related incident, an artist named Chand Chandramohan wrote that Mr Lim had accused her of being responsible for the durian.dot posts and had doxxed her.
She wrote on May 31 that he had “taken to doxxing me online, sending harassing messages to followers of durian.dot and me, doxxing my face taken from my google account, making false claims that I am behind durian.dot when I have literally never heard of durian dot until yesterday.”
Ms Chand told news site Coconuts that she had shared a post from durian.dot but removed it after only half an hour out of concern for the victim.
She wrote in her Facebook post, “durian dot on Instagram posted a post describing an account from an anonymous survivor 10 years ago where Jason sexually harassed them and subsequently bullied them out of the arts. As much as I don’t agree how durian dot went about the whole thing, I did repost the post on my stories which I subsequently deleted as I found out they were a really problematic account especially dealing with this survivor’s testimonial.”
The survivor apparently asked durian.dot to take the post down.
Ms Chand then sent SOTA screenshots of the alleged doxxing from Mr Lim, asking the school to “take action”.
“I can always continue blocking his burner accounts but until you step up, or the rest of the performance people step up, he will continue harassing young girls,” she wrote.
In an update, Ms Chand wrote that the school had contacted her and that she had already filed a police report concerning the incident.
“I urge everyone to keep putting pressure on Sota to investigate this and whatever institution exhibiting him. What he did was break the law by doxxing and harassing me. This should not be swept away and again letting him get away with violent behaviour,” she added.
/TISG
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