There was a foreign male student who came for exchange to Aalto University. Some day we were chilling with a big group of people on a beach. He tried to multiple times touch my legs pretending he wanted to cover me with a blanket from a cold (I didn’t want him to do that). Asking him to stop didn’t help.
With time I learned that other women in that group of students and friends were scared of him for the same reasons. There was a time when a drunk group of girls wanted to go to the beach after some party, that guy heard it and made some juicy comment about how he will “follow them, stay, and watch”. Two of more sober girls of that friend group had to persuade the girls to cancel the beach plan because it felt very unsafe to go there at night after his comment. He was also referring to one of the university female tutors like “big boobs” and there were many other disgusting situations like that.
The worst part was that male Aalto students heard all of that, but no one ever did anything to anyhow help us or shut him up. They went on inviting him to the parties. They tried to downplay his words and actions by “he is just joking”. I tried to tell one of those men, who was kind of my friend, how my “don’t touch me” didn’t stop that creepy student from touching me, to what my “friend” replied: “Well, with your accent it sounds so sexy, no wonder he didn’t stop”.
That’s how it went on till the end of the exchange period. Women were feeling unsafe, were telling each other not to go alone somewhere where that guy may be, and were watching their drunk female friends, while the male students were enjoying his company, smoking weed, and playing volley with him. Aalto University men, we don’t need your startups, we need your solidarity and active fight with harassment.