Intimacy can be annoying
Lovers in dorms

By Angela Lai
It is not easy to prevent university students from engaging in intimate
behaviour in dorms despite well defined rules.

Helen Chen (not her real name) is a Year 2 biology student in a dorm
at a local university. Last semester, both of her roommates brought their
boyfriends into their room.

This was inconvenient for her.

Helen said that whenever she had to change clothes, she was the one
who was forced to leave the room.

Said she: “The men just stood there and my roommates thought that nothing was wrong with that.”

The men’s presence also affected her studies.

Said she: “I couldn’t concentrate on my work because they were wandering about.

“I had to go to my friend’s room to work and study.”

Besides being an incovenience, having men in her room also embarrassed Helen.

“Sometimes their boyfriends stayed overnight in our room,” she said. “They slept in the same bed.”

At night, she covered her face with a blanket because she did not want to know what happened between them.

Helen said, “I really felt uncomfortable about that.”

Prof. Tsui Chi Ying is a hall warden at the University of Science and Technology.

Said he: “We don’t allow indecency inside rooms.”

But he said that it was not easy to prevent students from engaging in indecent behaviour.

Hall wardens rely on students to report cases to them. However, the number of reported cases is far less than the number of actual ones.

Helen was the chairperson for her hall committee last year.

When the hall tutor asked about the men who kept appearing in her room, she did not answer honestly.

“I haven’t reported any cases because they involved my roommates,” said she.

“I had to live with them for the entire year.”

She did not want to have poor relationships with them.

However, residential hall regulatory committees have set rules for monitoring visitors of the opposite sex.

For example, Bethlehem Hall at The Chinese University of Hong Kong sets out hours for members of the opposite sex to visit.

There are also occasional room-checks to ensure that no students of the opposite sex are visiting outside the preset hours.

If the hall tutors discover visitors of the opposite sex breaching the rule, the room occupants who brought the visitors are immediately expelled from the hall.

Xuesi Hall at the Chinese University is a women’s dormitory. Outside of visiting hours, male visitors are allowed only to stay in a common room on the ground floor.

Prof. Yeung Sau Chu, hall warden at Xuesi Hall, said that it was natural for female students to be intimate with their boyfriends.

She said, “I can accept things like leaning on each other in the common room, but we have a responsibility to guide our students to behave properly in society.

“The hall is not a private place where lovers can freely be intimate.”

However, Prof. Tsui at the University of Science and Technology said it is impossible to eliminate all of the opportunities students have to be intimate in the hall.

He said, “We cannot install closed-circuit cameras in every room. We cannot put a guard there to stop men from entering women’s rooms.

“I’m not encouraging indecency, but I don’t think we have to knock on the door every 5 minutes to check if everyone is behaving decently.”

He said that students are adults and should be responsible for their behaviour.

“I think present regulatory policies are adequate,” said he.