Harvard College has now seen firsthand what “locker room talk” actually entails and has taken measures to ensure that kind of talk doesn’t happen again.

A nine-page document surfaced recently, which includes photos and individual assessments of six freshmen women’s soccer recruits at Harvard. This document was created by Harvard’s 2012 men’s soccer team and is referred to by the team as the “scouting report.” This report has continued through 2016.

The authors of the document rated the women on a scale of 1-10 based on their perceived physical and sexual attractiveness, assigned them theoretical sexual positions and objectified them in detailed, paragraphs-long analyses on their bodies and assumed sex lives.

It appears the “scouting report” was an annual tradition for the men’s soccer team at Harvard; the 2012 report compared the new recruits to previous years’ girls and mentioned the previous year’s report having been wrong.

In response, Harvard has canceled the rest of the team’s season, two games before its scheduled end, forcing the team to give up any postseason play in addition to the remaining regular season games. Had the team won their next game, it would have secured an automatic NCAA tournament bid.

Following news of the soccer team’s sexism toward and harassment of their female peers, Harvard’s men’s cross-country team came forward about past “scouting reports” similar to the soccer team’s. They also had a group message in which they discussed the report and the women in it, in explicit terms.

Unlike the men’s soccer team, the cross-country team has since “changed the culture” of its team and its spreadsheets no longer contain any lewd or sexual comments.

It appears that despite all of the strides we tried to take to end violence, sexual assault and harassment towards women, our society still seems to mostly have two extreme views toward them.

In the first, women are beautiful, majestic creatures, worthy of adoration. In the second, women are not equal to and do not deserve the same respect and human rights as men. Both are wrong.

Women are people – human beings – and they deserve to be treated as such.

A woman’s body belongs to her, much the same as a man’s does him. Any and every human being has the right to choose who does and does not use their body sexually, whether it be physical assault or the intense violation of privacy these women went through.

We’ve heard the phrase “locker room talk” a lot the past few weeks following tapes of Donald Trump talking about sexually assaulting women. Statements that occur in a locker room or other athletic setting are not excused from being classified as sexual harassment, yet it seems that’s one of the areas they run most rampant.

These men did not physically assault the six women in the 2012 “report” or the women mentioned in other years, but that does not diminish the seriousness of their actions.

When someone feels they have the right to comment on your body in any way, and expresses the desire to act sexually upon it, it feels terrible. It is uncomfortable and frightening. It is a violation of privacy and there is nothing normal about it.

Calling comments like these “locker room talk” is doing just that, dismissing them as normal.

I am constantly hearing the words “zero tolerance” when I hear about sexual assault, but I don’t often see it being enforced firmly, quickly or at all. Harvard, like most universities, has a zero tolerance policy for sexually discriminatory behavior. What differs in this case is that the university did not hesitate to punish its athletes, canceling a successful season just short of the finish line.

Harvard was able to set a positive example in this case of harassment. By enforcing their zero tolerance policy in this way, it will hopefully set a precedent for future cases of harassment and assault on college campuses. And hopefully, eventually, diminish the number of incidents.