Anna Bull
‘From an outsider[‘s perspective], I was saying ‘yes’ to doing certain things with him, which, for all intents and purposes, would have counted as consent, but what you don’t see is the internal conflict and the invisible power structure where he could make me say ‘yes’.[…] He knew the right thing to ask and how to ask it in the right way in which it was pretty much impossible … I felt it was impossible for me to say ‘no’.’
These words are from a Master’s student who I interviewed about her experience of sexual harassment from an academic member of staff who was teaching her. ‘Andrea’ participated in a study of students’ experiences of sexual harassment and violence from higher education staff/faculty, published in the report ‘Silencing Students’ in 2018.
The situation that Andrea describes here – which she experienced as a form of ‘grooming’ – was one that has become familiar to me over seven years working on research and activism on the issue of staff/faculty sexual misconduct in higher education. In 2016, along with Tiffany Page, Chryssa Sdrolia and Heidi Hasbrouck, I co-founded The 1752 Group, a campaigning and research organisation aiming to address sexual misconduct in higher education. We understand ‘sexual misconduct’ broadly, to include both rape, sexual assault, intimate partner abuse, and sexual harassment, but also ‘grooming’ behaviours as well as consensual relationships between staff and students that later cause harm to students involved in them.
Our origin story
The 1752 Group was formed after my co-founders Tiffany, Chryssa and Heidi, had been involved in fighting our institution (Goldsmiths, University of London) to address a longstanding culture of sexual harassment of students by staff. Our name refers to the amount of money (£1752) that Goldsmiths was willing to put into addressing this issue at the time.
A few months after this, Professor Sara Ahmed – who had supported Tiffany, Chryssa and Heidi with their complaint – resigned in protest of Goldsmiths’ failure to address this issue, and this resignation gained international media attention. Our name is therefore a reminder that small sums of money and sticking plaster solutions are not sufficient to address a complex and widespread issue.
Making the issue visible
In the first two or three years, we were mainly trying to make this issue visible. One of the ways we did this was by partnering with the National Union of Students to carry out a national survey of staff-student sexual misconduct, Power in the Academy. We also asked respondents about how comfortable they felt about various types of interactions with staff/faculty, and found that around 80% were uncomfortable with staff having sexual or romantic relationships with students – a finding that I have replicated in a later study carried out within one UK institution.
Both Power in the Academy, and the qualitative study I led on that followed this, confirmed the experiences from our activism that reporting process for staff-student sexual misconduct was traumatising, exhausting and ineffective for students. As a result, we partnered with equalities lawyer Georgina Calvert-Lee to produce guidance to help universities improve their complaints and disciplinary processes in this area (with input from two of our co-directors at the time, Emma Chapman and Antonia Bevan).
As Sara Ahmed describes it, we had to become ‘institutional mechanics’ to try and excavate the processes through which complaints processes in this area were failing to be effective. This was also the aim of my ESRC-funded research project, Higher Education After MeToo (2021-2), which I worked on alongside postdoctoral researcher Erin Shannon. We explored complaints and disciplinary processes for tackling gender-based violence in UK higher education more widely, across student-student, staff-staff, and staff-student reporting – an area in which there is a surprising dearth of academic research.
‘Slow activism’
When we founded The 1752 Group – which is now directed by myself, Tiffany Page and Adrija Dey – we would have been horrified to think that seven years later, we were still fighting the same battles. Unfortunately, as our inbox testifies, as well as media reporting, and indeed my ongoing research, despite some progress on tackling student-student sexual violence, sexual misconduct from staff/faculty is still not being adequately address in many UK higher education institutions. Internationally, as our 2019 conference in the US demonstrated, this issue is also a huge challenge elsewhere in the world.
In line with our hands-on approach to try and support higher education institutions to improve their responses in this area, we have developed training for HR staff and others handling such cases in higher education institutions, as well as workshops on professional boundaries and awareness of sexual harassment for postgraduate researchers and supervisors (which we are currently working to evaluate).
But we have realised that the framing of ‘slow activism’ —coined by my 1752 Group co-director Tiffany Page— which we used to describe our work in the early days, is even more apt than we realised at the time. I’ve realised that one of the ways we have made a difference is simply by existing and naming the problem. For those who are struggling to label their experiences and to figure out how to raise their concerns safely and effectively within their institutions, we hope that our work serves to validate their experience and give them tools to help them try to attain justice and safety.
Author bio
Dr Anna Bull is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of York, and co-director of The 1752 Group, a research and campaigning organisation working to address staff sexual misconduct in higher education. As well as multiple academic and public-facing publications on sexual misconduct in HE, Anna was an academic advisor to the National Union of Students for their report Power in the Academy: staff sexual misconduct in UK higher education. She sits on advisory boards to address gender-based violence in education in the UK and Ireland. She co-authored The 1752 Group and McAllister Olivarius’ Sector Guidance to address staff sexual misconduct in UK higher education. She has also carried out research into inequalities in classical music education, and industry and sexual harassment in the film and television industry.
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