Helen Catherine Walter
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Boasting about being called the "Mother of Cunts", she wears a vagina necklace to celebrate the fact.
If you've read some of the other pages on this site, you may have noticed a pattern: she tends to be behind most of the corrupt or criminal activities that the college engages in.
As described in the section about nepotism, she aggressively drove the former gym manager away and installed her own student in order to get away with letting her friends use the gym for free.
As described in the section about censorship, she made herself the sole authority on what is allowed to be posted in the Common Room discussion group, and deletes without warning anything she does not like.
Walter has a long history of abusing and harassing students. What's disgusting and bizarre is that she seems to have weaselled her way into the position of "Welfare and Equalities" officer when she has a number of well-known discriminatory beliefs, and has a history of harassing students. What's further disturbing is that she is the first point of contact for all college harassment complaints. That is, if you want to complain about harassment, they tell you to contact Catherine Walter.
Walter squanders vast amounts of college resources to promote her own interests, for example she runs a women's weightlifting club which has a higher budget than any other activity in the college. She sells out the college gym in order to give free access to her friends.
Furthermore, Walter abuses her position of power within the college to harass members of the gym, particularly male members. She seems to view them as a threat, and take considerable actions to humiliate and harass them, as well as interfere with their workouts, often for no reason other than pure spite.
Here is an account from Hamed, a male college student:
Catherine was aggressive toward all men at the gym, often taking away their equipment or asking them to move. Her primary excuse was because "we need them", referring to her weightlifting club. When asked which pieces of equipment she was using, her answer was always "ALL OF THEM". She had a hoarding tendency, for example she would collect 3 large barbells and leave them empty and unused on the floor for an hour, while not allowing anyone else to touch them. She would walk across the gym and ask someone to vacate a bench, because she "needed" it, yet the club typically wasted 1-2 benches for storing paper. Furthermore, she broke agreements that had previously been made over which areas of the gym her club was allowed to use.
Most of the guys backed off and simply chose not to use the gym when she was in the gym. (This incidentally, was what Nick Brown, the college president suggested that I do when I brought the matter up.) Well, running away is not an acceptable solution to me.
Catherine saw this as a threat and began targeting me directly. She would stare at me and follow me around the gym. She would often invade my personal space. In one situation she physically blocked my path at the gym and did not let me pass, asking me where I was going. She also made snide comments such as "don't worry about him, we're going to force him to leave soon". She would move my equipment or weights when I turned my back. She accused me of filming them, and demanded to check my phone. It was outright childish.
This behaviour stands in stark irony and hypocrisy: while "Equality" is part of her job title, if the genders were reversed and the head of men's weightlifting club behaved this way toward a female student, there is no chance in hell he would have gotten away with it.
The last straw was one day when I took two plates off the plate rack, and she screamed at me, saying that I can't take them, and tried to physically remove them from my hand. I had to remind her that adults don't try to grab things out of other people's hands. I then explained to her that she has no understanding of gym etiquette, and she began screaming and throwing a tantrum, kicking weights around and shaking the plate rack. The gym manager at the time was witness to this, and later said that he had to calm her down as he was afraid she was going to have a heart attack.
I have trained at over a dozen different gyms around the world, ranging from fancy leisure/fitness centres in London's Soho and Canary Wharf... to dirty "spit-and-sawdust" gyms where nearly everyone is a heavily tattooed steroid user and people throw 60kg dumbbells around. However, in over a decade of training I have never seen anyone try to pull gym equipment out of someone else's hand. Catherine wins first prize for that.
I looked into making a formal harassment complaint, but it turned out that she is the person who handles harassment complaints.
In the end, through various complaints and meetings, I managed to get it across to the college management that this behaviour is unusual, and an agreement was reached (again) on exactly which pieces of equipment her club would use, only this time they were made to write it out exactly on a large poster and post it at the gym door. Most college gym users will have seen this sign at some point -- now you know where it came from.
See below email written to Jane Chanaa, in which Catherine Walter describes that they must appear "squeaky clean" when harassing students, "especially" when someone might be litigous. It begs the question: Is it OK then, to be lax with the rules, when a student lacks the resources to fight back against injustices?
