When will universities wake up to this epidemic of sexual harassment?
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Version 0 of 1. On my first day as a student union vice-president, amid a flurry of introductory meetings, briefings and bits of paper, I was given the names. There was a tour of the office space, a demonstration of the annual leave booking system, and stuck somewhere in between a list of staff at the university with a reputation for inappropriate behaviour who I should avoid where possible. One, I was told, had invited two female officers to the pub under the guise of building a good working relationship. It was a bonding exercise that had ended with him following one of them home. It was recommended I didn’t attend his committee or accept the invitation for introductory drinks that would (and did) arrive on my desk within the first month of my term. Now, how to work the photocopier. These largely blase and commonplace conversations will be familiar to women everywhere. They are the culmination of a code we are conditioned to master from youth, where an ally’s furtive glance across a table or request for a quick word outside afterwards are immediately recognisable as the warnings they are. My own mastery of this code began in childhood but it was perfected throughout my degree and the year I spent at the student union following its completion, which is why my reaction to the Guardian’s investigation uncovering “epidemic” levels of sexual harassment within the UK’s universities is one of anger, sadness and disappointment – but not shock. The investigation, based on freedom of information requests sent to 120 universities, has uncovered much-needed hard data documenting the large numbers of allegations made against staff in the past five years. Perhaps most striking are the testimonies provided from female students and staff members who have experienced harassment first-hand. “They offered me a settlement on the condition that I drop out of the programme and accept that no internal investigation on the member of staff would take place,” says one graduate student. A junior staff member notes that “simply putting in a formal complaint will not do anything but make life hell for me and other women”. Tales of minimisation, cover-up and intimidation abound. The identity of predators becomes an open secret. Women rely on the code. Furtive glances and quiet words outside do not an institutional response make Lawyer Dr Ann Olivarius, quoted in the investigation, is correct to criticise the inability of reporting and disciplinary mechanisms in higher education institutions to deal with issues of staff-on-student harassment; the National Union of Students has roundly criticised British universities’ strategic approach to sexual harassment and violence in the past few years. The existence of clear and fair guidelines and accompanying processes should be a bare minimum for institutions with a duty of care to a young and often vulnerable student body. But even where such mechanisms exist, attitudes are often slow to catch up, leaving victims of harassment and gender violence in a no man’s land between a piece of paper that ostensibly protects them and an institutional culture that doesn’t back it up. At my own university I met a great number of brilliant staff entirely committed to tackling inequality, even working with them to create, scrutinise and implement robust policies and processes to do just that. But for every one of them, I encountered a senior academic who put his arm around me after a meeting, a lecturer who held my handshake too long or a respected professor who thought it a vital and noble mission to slip a rape joke into a departmental address. These were staff with responsibility for handling complaints, implementing policies and representing their subject areas in equality discussions. A nicely formatted flowchart highlighting that the university has a zero tolerance approach to sexual harassment means little when it directs you to those who have already proved otherwise. The crux of the issue is that this combination of rampant abuse, inaccessible processes and a culture stacked against victims doesn’t just result in inaction but in the bolstering of a structure where predatory staff are protected by power while the access of women to employment and learning within higher education is seriously threatened. Victims’ lives and careers take the hit while abusive staff hide largely in plain sight, not so much taking a gamble on the chance that they might get caught, but being confident in the knowledge they will face little repercussion even if they are. It’s no surprise that this investigation uncovers only “the tip of the iceberg” when victims understandably have more faith in informal support networks than in the institutions designated to protect them. A friend taking a postgraduate degree at a top university told me recently that she had been warned by eight separate peers about a lecturer who is known to systematically groom and engage in sexual relationships with first-year students. This university has a clear and comprehensive policy on sexual harassment and abuse. My friend’s reaction was to drop the lecturer’s course and continue to warn others against him. Furtive glances and quiet words outside do not an institutional response make. But while we wait for our universities to catch up and commit to large-scale cultural and structural shifts, however uncomfortable, they might just be the best strategy we have. |