Featured image from UN Women: https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/unite/16-days-of-activism
Today is 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. On this day every year, researchers and activists around the world come together to tell the very real story of gender-based violence as it is experienced by people from different locations, contexts, and backgrounds. This story is told through a series of blogs authored for the 16 Days Of Activism campaign, running from 25 November (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) to 10 December (Human Rights Day).
This year’s blogathon is focused on sexual violence and harassment in higher education institutions. In the last ten years, the reality of pervasive sexual violence and harassment on university campuses around the world has been increasingly exposed. Student activists on campuses have been advocating for universities to act to prevent and respond. However, universities are entangled in bureaucracies and legal requirements, a process we call “committee-ization.” In this Introductory blog, we briefly introduce the country-specific contexts of our curators, writing from Australia, the UK, and India.
The issue of sexual violence on Australian campuses gained momentum with the screening of The Hunting Ground, a critically acclaimed US documentary that focusses on the personal stories of students who have experienced sexual assault on campuses. The Hunting Ground Australia Project used the documentary to raise awareness about sexual violence on Australian university campuses. This led to the first national survey on sexual assault and sexual harassment at Australian universities, leading to the instrumental Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2017 Change the Course. This was followed by national surveys, the most recent of which is the 2022 ‘National Student Safety Survey’. This survey found that one in six university students have experienced sexual harassment since starting university. This is not only a student issue as outlined in the 2023 study by the National Tertiary Education Union which found that three in ten university staff members had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
The Higher Education sector in the UK too has been slow to acknowledge the problem of gender-based violence and sexual harassment on campus, and reluctant to respond to the calls of generations of student activists and their allies for action. It is only since the 2010s that momentum for change has grown in the face of a growing research and evidence base, increased scrutiny from national and media, sustained student campaigning, and zeitgeist moments like the screening of the US documentary The Hunting Ground, the international truth-telling of #MeToo, and the UK digital project documenting ‘Everyday Sexism’.
The National Union of Students’ (NUS) Hidden Marks report in 2010 marked a turning point in exposing the problem and its prevalence. Reporting on a survey of women students’ experience, it reported that 1:7 of those responding to the survey had been victims of serious sexual assault or serious physical violence, and 68% reported being victims of one or more kinds of sexual harassment. Successive studies revealed toxic mix of ‘lad culture’, ‘rape culture’ and ‘everyday sexism’ thriving in Universities (Phipps and Young 2015) highlighting the need for institutional reform and cultural change.
The problem of addressing gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in university communities is fraught with difficulty, rooted not only in wider societal dynamics of unequal power but also in the complex combination of hierarchy and intimacy in University spaces. In addition, extant complaint and conduct procedures appear ill-equipped to deal with such matters, deliver adequate outcomes or even provide suitable care for complainants and accused alike. Indeed, until a change of guidance in 2016, the so-called Zellick principles (drawn up in 1994 by sector leadership) actively discouraged Universities from starting internal processes regarding sexual misconduct unless it had first been addressed through the criminal justice system.
Gradually individual institutions began to respond to the mounting demands for institutional reform and cultural change, including by the piloting of bystander and consent programmes in England and Scotland. But it was the Changing the Culturereport (2016) of the Universities UK Taskforce 2016 that marked the beginning of a sector-wide change programme with new guidelines to address poor and inconsistent responses to reporting, lack of specific politics and procedures for sexual misconduct and lack of specialist support. The 2018 Power of the Academy Report (NUS and 1752 Group) fixed attention on the ongoing problem of staff-student sexual misconduct, noting that 4:10 student respondents had experienced at least one instance of sexualised behaviour from staff. The routine use of secrecy clauses (NDAs) by institutions after the resolution of complaints has been challenged. Success in Scotland at securing commitments from University leaders to stop using NDAs in cases of sexual misconduct prompted the 2022 NUS Campaign Can’t Buy My Silence campaign in England.
Progress has been slow and faltering but there is a trend towards promotion of intersectional and whole-institution approaches, for example, the Scottish Equally Safe in Higher Education approach aligned to the Scottish government’s wider anti-GBV strategy, which cautions against taking an overly regulatory, criminal justice approach to the detriment of wider cultural change and duty of care considerations. Since 2021, the English Office for Students has set out a Statement of Expectations to University leaders for preventing and addressing harassment and misconduct in HE.
Commentators have noted a change in calculations for Universities and other HE institutions. In the past it may have been deemed too risky to institutional reputation for Universities to ‘lift the lid’ on sexual misconduct in their communities (staff-student, staff-staff, student-student), now – it is argued – there is greater reputational damage in being seen NOT to be doing anything (Anitha and Lewis 2018). Student activism has provided the catalyst for change and student activists continue to call institutions to account.
In India, conversations around sexual harassment coalesced in the 1990s. The gangrape of a woman employee during work, multiple protests by women’s groups across the country, a writ petition filed by an organisation in the Supreme Court and the subsequent judgement (Vishaka v State of Rajasthan) defined sexual harassment of women at the workplace for the first time in 1997. The court responded to demands made by women’s movements and addressed the empirical reality of women workers in organised workforce. Taking cue from this judgement, one of the earliest Gender Sensitisation and Committee for Prevention for Sexual Harassment was elected in JNU, New Delhi in 1999. The GSCASH Policy stated [t]he University is committed to the providing a place of work and study free of sexual harassment intimidation or exploitation. Sexual Harassment as defined in the judgement mentioned above included such unwelcome sexually determined behavior as physical contacts and advance, sexually coloured remarks, showing pornography and sexual demands, whether by words or actions. Much of the first decade of the 2000s did not see the mandatory presence of anti sexual harassment bodies in higher education institutions barring exceptions like JNU or the University of Delhi.
After the 2012, December 16 gangrape, the Government set up the Verma Committee to look into the ways in which criminal laws could be amended. The report had a section on sexual harassment and in that context it referred to well functioning anti-sexual harassment bodies in educational institutions, like that in JNU:
“Those universities, in which Internal Complaint Committees have functioned successfully to deal with sexual harassment, should share their internal guidelines on combating sexual harassment in their University with other Universities across India. As an example, the internal complaint committee of JNU is known as Gender Sensitisation Committee against Sexual Harassment, which is stated to have been extremely effective in its working partly due to the diverse nature of its constituent members. This model may be examined”. [page 140]
However, the passing of The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013made a formidable change in bodies like GSCASH, replacing it with Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) in 2016, rejecting the praises that the Verma Committee had for the former. In the meantime, August and September 2014 saw a new slogan from young college-going people – hok kolorob (let there be clamour) – which started from the streets of Kolkata, as a response to a problematic handling of a reported case of sexual harassment at Jadavpur University (JU), Kolkata (Chakravarti and Roy 2022) and against the subsequent police attack on peacefully agitating students. At nearly the same time as the protest in JU, another incident of sexual harassment against a woman student at Visva Bharati, Shantiniketan, was reported. Yet another incident of sexual harassment at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was reported on September 2014, which prompted protests by students. It brought out in the open that while women students are mostly silenced by the authorities, at times, they do decide to organise themselves to make noise, claiming their rights. While in 2013 the UGC initiated SAKSHAM report was published, which brought to light the uneven functioning of anti-sexual harassment bodies in most higher education institutions, expecting women’s development cells in colleges to deal with complaints against sexual harassment. The report recommended the need to introduce gender sensitisation workshops for all members of the higher educational institution and marked a distinction between securitisation and protectionism.
In 2017 post the release of #List (Raya Sarkar), the limitations of the functioning of the anti-sexual harassment bodies were brought to light and debates opened between feminists on power, privilege, (lack of) professional ethics in teacher-student relationship. This was the #MeToo moment in Indian academia and it complicated the conversation around sexual harassment, which was now not just about whether voices could be heard but also asking how to speak. While post 2013, all HEIs mandatorily have to create ICC, the question remains whether there has been a deeper bureaucratisation of this committee losing its touch with feminist politics and becoming a legal mandate that institutions need to display. On the other hand, the unfinished discussion on intersectional everyday forms of power that generate gendered behaviour in HEIs need to be sharpened, by bringing in discussions on consent, intimacy, transgression. Finally to raise questions around whether the sexual harassment question and ensuring a non-hostile work environment (which Vishaka mandated) need to be part of employee contract and not a separate committee/complaint matter.
In this year’s blogathon, we will explore all of these perspectives to better understand how sexual violence and sexual harassment can be overcome. We have curated our blogs to reflect the arc of a demand for justice as it makes its way through an institution. Our early posts complicate ideas about gender-based violence and its form, consent, and reception. We then move on to the social, cultural, and legal contexts of how claims are received and processed by institutions, reflecting on personal experiences not only of survivors but also of the impossibility of serving as a feminist on some of these committees. Finally, our concluding posts point to student activism and its articulation with forms of power.
Content note: Posts inevitably address distressing experiences and issues around sexual and gender-based violence. We hope they also provoke, energise and at times, serve to provide hope when it seems most bleak.
The 2023 curators:
University of Edinburgh: Dr Hemangini Gupta (Assoc Director and 2023 Blogathon Co-Lead), Prof. Fiona Mackay (GENDER.ED Governance Lead and 2023 Blogathon Co-Lead) and Rhea Gandhi (PhD web and editorial assistant) from GENDER.ED.
Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi: Prof. Rukmini Sen, Dr Rachna Mehra.
University of New South Wales: Prof. Jan Breckenridge (Co-Convenor), Mailin Suchting (Manager) and Georgia Lyons (Research Assistant) for the Gendered Violence Research Network.
Guest curators: Dr. Heike Pantelmann (Managing Director) and Dr. Sabina García Peter (Associate), Margherita von Brentano Center at Freie Universität Berlin, for the Una Europa Gender Equality Network (UGEN).
16 Days Blogathon 