TORONTO (Reuters) - Backstreet Boys' music and other pop songs are being used by University of Toronto campus police to ''torture'' students into ending a sit-in in the president's office.
For six days, a group of students has occupied the offices of vacationing university president Robert Prichard and other administrative staff, demanding a campus-wide ban of the sale of clothing made in Third World sweatshops.
Of the 20 students who started the sit-in, eight were left Wednesday.
Phones in the offices have been cut off and the students receive food from friends in a pail they pull up from the second-floor window.
At night, pop music is played loudly in hopes of ``making life a little more uncomfortable,'' said Jane Stirling, a manager in the university's public affairs office, on Wednesday.
``This is probably the first time the Backstreet Boys have been deliberately used as a form of sleep deprivation torture,'' the National Post newspaper quoted protester Sonia Singh as saying.
``The university is willing to talk to the students, but not while they are inappropriately occupying someone's office,'' Stirling said.
University shops buy clothing from China and Mexico, but the protesters, who call themselves Students Against Sweatshops, have no definitive evidence that any of the logo clothing sold on campus is produced by sweatshop labor. They argue, however, that without a code of conduct, there is no proof of where the clothing is made.
Ian Orchard, vice-provost, said the students are ``quite a peaceful lot.'' He said the university has been working for about a year on implementing a policy on sweatshops and that the governing council plans to discuss a code of conduct on May 11.