Author: rgandhied

Wendy Stollberg

On the lookout for support

Who do you turn to for support at German universities as a victim-survivor of sexual harassment and violence? Often, it is hard to find any point of contact that both seems to have an official character and at the same time to be trustworthy. With some patience during your internet search, you might come across the e-mail address or phone number of the gender equality officer at your department. She (mostly they are women) states that she can be approached in cases of sexual harassment and violence. What support can you expect from her?

Gender equality officers

Before answering that, let’s have a brief look at their office. Gender equality officers operate at all public German universities. This is legally enshrined in state higher education acts. Their mandate is to support and to consult the university management and the department managements in creating and maintaining equal chances for women (!) in academia. In short, their aim is reaching gender equality at their institution. Gender equality officers are elected for a 2-to-6-year term by female members of the university. They have a suspensive veto right in management decisions and – very importantly – they act independently from the instructions by others. Each university has a chief gender equality officer. Big universities additionally have departmental gender equality officers – one of them that you might have turned to as a victim-survivor. 

Striving for gender equality includes fighting sexual harassment and violence. Consequently, it is understood that gender equality officers put this topic on their agenda. Now back to the question of what kind of support a gender equality officer can give a victim-survivor.

How gender equality officers support victim-survivors

Gender equality officers provide confidential counseling. They give you a safe space to share what happened to you. They actively listen to you and verbally empower you. If you wish, the gender equality officer suggests to you further steps for redress and for your safety and well-being. She refers to other points of contact and informs about complaint procedures (if there are any). The gender equality officer offers to accompany or represent you in calls with superiors, HR and the offender. 

What you will probably not be aware of: From consultations with victim-survivors, gender equality officers gain knowledge about harmful and discriminating behavior and structures. They use it to push, develop, and organize tailored initiatives against sexual harassment and violence like, e.g., workshops, information material and codes of conduct. 

Benefits and limits of their support

Let’s sketch the most important benefits: Most of the gender equality officers are highly motivated to help victim-survivors and to fight sexual harassment and violence. Many have a background in gender studies and political activism against inequalities. Combined with the work they do as gender equality officers, they are equipped with knowledge about power abuse, dependencies and discrimination much more than other members of the university. They understand that they must handle cases of sexual harassment and violence with special care for the victim-survivors. What is more, they initiate and support awareness and prevention activities.

What are the greatest limits? Clearly, they are of a structural nature. First of all, it is difficult for gender equality officers to point out second-level support to victim-survivors: Many universities do not obtain proper procedures for handling cases of sexual harassment and violence, nor for processing complaints, nor for issuing sanctions against offenders. Second, gender equality officers are no professional counsellors and have not received training in psychology, coaching or trauma work. Third, they operate without reflection and supervision and must cope themselves with their own emotions. Fourth, they are caught in often contradicting expectations (from the institution, from victim-survivors and from themselves). They strive for structural changes and at the same time “only” help single women. Fifth, they support only women. If you are a victim-survivor of another gender, you might receive no counselling support at all within the university. Sixth, due to short office terms, gender equality officers cannot build up much trust, awareness and experience. Seventh, many of them do not have a room to conduct confidential counselling, do not have enough time available for any activities against sexual harassment and violence and often lack support within their departments. 

Helpful support? 

If you are a victim-survivor, it is only you who can judge if the support you receive by a gender equality officer is helpful to you. The truth is that by now they offer the best support you can get at most German universities. The individual gender equality officers do what they can. It is the conditions concerning the office and counseling that are not favorable. The universities must come up with more responsible and viable solutions for victim-survivors’ support.

Author Bio

Wendy Stollberg chairs the Office of the Standing Working Group for the Prevention of Sexualized Harassment, Discrimination and Violence at Freie Universität Berlin. She is the main person of contact for victim-survivors, by-standers and persons with educational, supervisory, and management responsibilities seeking advice and support.

wendy.stollberg@fu-berlin.de

Featured image source: WordPress stock photos

Hemangini Gupta and Bill Flack

1. What is the kind of work that you’re doing around sexual harassment and sexual violence on college campuses?

I do this work in local, national, and international contexts. 

Locally, I’ve been conducting campus climate surveys focused on sexual violence victimization at my school (Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA) since the early 2000s. I do this work with teams of undergraduate students (and occasionally master’s students), and have found their involvement to be vital in making the research relevant to their social intimacy cultures. Recently I’ve also been involved in reconstituting a local coalition against campus sexual assault consisting of faculty, student support staff, and students, to share information and resources and to work collaboratively across the various boundaries in our campus community.  

Nationally, I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in the Administrator-Researcher Campus Climate Collaborative (ARC3; https://www.arc3survey.org), a group of campus sexual assault researchers, student life deans, and Title IX coordinators (these folks are responsible for on-campus adjudication of cases that are brought to the university’s attention) that came together in 2014 and 2015 to develop a research-based campus climate survey in response to the 2014 White House Task Force (https://www.justice.gov/archives/ovw/page/file/905942/download). The ARC3 survey is currently being revised, and the 2.0 version will (hopefully) be available some time next year. I was also recently invited to be on the Advisory Committee for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education (https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/action-collaborative-on-preventing-sexual-harassment-in-higher-education) at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Internationally, I’ve been very fortunate to have two Fulbright Scholarships focused on sexual violence in higher education, one at Ulster University in Northern Ireland (fall 2015) and the other at the University of Galway (fall 2019). One result of the Fulbrights has been the establishment of a research network that includes colleagues from throughout Ireland and the U.K. (including colleagues at the University of Edinburgh). I’m currently on the Fulbright Specialist Roster and available to help with short-term projects focused on assessing gender-based violence in higher education.

2. Was there a particular event that got you interested in this work?

Yes. Students in my first seminar on psychological trauma (I trained as a clinical psychologist, and did a post-doc at the Boston VA Medical Center) got interested in the discrepancy between prevalence rates of campus sexual assault reported in the research literature (there wasn’t as much of it at the time, back in the early 2000s, as there is now) and information on the numbers of cases reported to authorities in my university. Based on their own experiences and those of their peers, they thought that the rates on our campus were closer to those reported in the literature than those in annual campus safety reports, and so we decided to do a survey to find out. Turns out the students were right. 

3. How does this work relate to your research?

This work is my research, although I also do research on “trigger warnings,” that is the effect of telling students about potentially disturbing content in academic assignments before they’re exposed to it so that if need be they can prepare themselves for the possibility of experiencing distress. I also do some work on promoting equity and justice in college curricula. 

4. What are some of the challenges that you encounter with measuring and calibrating data related to sexual harassment and sexual violence?

Some of the major challenges in this work are trying to ask the right questions in the right ways, being as inclusive as possible with regard to those groups who are targets of harassment and violence and to the types and contexts of harassment and violence, and the lack of support for – and often backlash to – doing this work.

Regarding measurement, sexual harassment and sexual violence occur in social and intimacy cultures that are always changing, and so researchers are always catching up with those changes (this underscores the importance of involving members of the groups we’re interested in in designing the research!). My favorite example of this goes back to our first survey at Bucknell. The students insisted that we assess hooking up as a risk factor, and I had no idea what hooking up was (well, I knew a bit because I had watched ‘Sex and the City’ where they’d talked about “friends with benefits,” but that was the extent of my knowledge). Turned out that hooking up was more strongly related to sexual assault than alcohol consumption, and that it was (is) a fairly complex phenomenon (hookups vary in lots of different ways).

So we try to improve our measures as best we can. One current example is the new revision of the Sexual Experiences Survey (Koss et al., 2007), commonly considered the “gold standard” for survey-based assessment of sexual violence, due to be published very soon. It’s been changed and extended in some interesting and, hopefully, useful ways, for example replacing “consent”-based language with “permission”-based items that are designed to be closer to respondents’ experiences. 

Inclusivity is a huge challenge in this work, both in terms of how and what we ask about in survey questions and with respect to including sufficient numbers of those who’ve experienced sexual harassment and assault especially from members of groups that are typically minoritized, marginalized, and otherwise oppressed within our campus communities. Response rates vary in this kind of research, but it’s very difficult to get large percentages of the campus population to respond to research surveys about emotionally distressing experiences, and the smaller the subgroups the more challenging it is to obtain response rates sufficient to analyze statistically. 

Over-sampling of those subgroups is one way to deal with this problem. Another is to use a combination of surveys and interviews focused more on qualitative information, so called “mixed methods.” While ideal in combination, this kind of work is labor-intensive and requires substantial resources of time and funding. That’s not an excuse not to do it, of course, and there are excellent models such as the critical approach taken by Michelle Fine (https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/michelle-fine) and colleagues.   

Finding support to do this work is also difficult. Although the situation has improved somewhat over the last few decades, it remains difficult to find grant funding for this kind of work, especially in the international context. And sometimes it’s not just lack of support, but rather denial that sexual violence is a problem and aggressive criticism aimed at stopping the work of researchers, community workers, and activists. As Susan Faludi and others have taught us, when work against oppression has an impact we can expect backlash from those with a stake in maintaining the status quo.

About Bill Flack

Professor Bill Flack trained as a clinical psychologist and has focused increasingly on critical and community psychologies. His research is aimed at understanding and eliminating sexual assault and other forms of gender-based violence in the context of higher education. His teaching and research help students to understand the shortcomings of current psychological knowledge in order to improve it toward more socially just ends.

Featured image: via Amy Life

Amy Life & Sharessa Naidoo

As students, safety in university spaces is something we feel we should be able to take for granted. But how can students feel safe if their abusers are allowed to remain on campus? Sexual assault shouldn’t be part of the university experience. Seeing your abuser in the same spaces where you are trying to study should not be a common experience for students either. Yet, it remains the case that university establishments would rather let students off the hook for sexual assault than receive the negative press that’s attached to having known rapists on campus. Using redressal systems that are not fit for purpose, systems that were originally intended for cases of academic misconduct, is a surefire way of avoiding the issue at hand. 

#MeTooEdiUni was set up in the wake of a petition from Aarti Mukehedkar calling for the University to change the way they handle cases of sexual misconduct. Aarti’s experience of the university’s redressal system is similar to many other students with numerous reports of victim blaming, unfair hearings and lack of support following negative outcomes. Given the adverse effects on students’ mental health, the obvious miscarriage of justice and the overall disregard for student safety, we felt it was necessary to spark a movement for change. Our campaign was focused on the specific need to review the Student Code of Conduct (the document outlining the redressal process) and change a system designed for dealing with academic misconduct and make it fit for the gravity of sexual assault cases. 

Petitions, open letters and protests allowed us a seat at the table and yet, whilst we were part of the conversation, we did not feel listened to. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that being in the room guarantees you a voice and perhaps we fell into this trap too. Despite our carefully outlined amendments to the code, our ideas for improving fairness, for taking into account the diverse experiences of students, for keeping people safe, we were met with only faint smiles and empty promises. It is in the interests of institutions to focus on the small minutiae of important documents, to make changes but never the ones that will equate to a real difference in the systems set out by the document. Our improvements were eventually reduced down to simple clarifications, the odd change of word order or added explanation, but nothing that would amount to a better, fairer, and safer redressal system. It was, in want of a better expression, soul destroying. There are only so many times you can sit at a table of people with more power than you and ask for victims of sexual assault to be believed before you become exhausted and simply give up. The problem is that this is exactly what the University wants, it’s how these systems remain unchanged, and it’s how miscarriages of justice go uncorrected. 

Bureaucracy is the weapon that institutions wield against change-makers and it’s certainly effective. Eventually, after months of effort and no real changes, we were told that if we wished to continue raising the issue, we must voice our concerns via the Edinburgh University Students Association. This was an easy way to silence us – we could only speak through a system, not through our own voices. In order to make change then, we must ask others to speak for us, there is no longer a seat for us at the table and nothing has really changed. We still hear about students going through the process and being left out to dry while their assailant faces no consequences for their violent actions, and we are angry. They are angry. And we are all tired. 

It’s hard to see through this mist of gloom, to see the light of change at the end of a dark, labyrinthine tunnel. But as Sharessa Naidoo, a previous president of Girl*Up and one of MeTooEdiUni’s campaigners points out, the campaign marks a significant step forward. We have heard about the experiences of students, and the issue is out in the open. The awareness that the campaign created will hopefully mean the next students to fight for changes won’t have to start from scratch – something that both Sharessa and I feel incredibly proud of. More change is needed, of course, especially with regards to tailored support for BAME survivors.

“Concrete change is still needed as university survivors require tailored support. As a brown woman, I call on the university to hire more BAME sexual assault response staff, specifically trained to help BAME survivors. My experience growing up outside the UK as a racialized minority means my experiences and feelings related to sexual assault are vastly different. If I were to undergo an assault, there would be cultural shame. My self-perception would shatter, which has forever been based on my ability and my family’s ability to protect me. Being exotified is another experience only BAME individuals have, that affects our sexual encounters. Conclusively, there are many instances where racism and a sexual assault are inseparable.”

Sharessa Naidoo

It is vital when campaigning for overhauls of sexual assault redressal systems in higher education to account for the diverse experiences of diverse student bodies and it’s concerning that university’s failures to even look at the way their redressal system causes harm will perpetuate existing inequalities. 

When it comes to the issue of sexual violence in higher education, there is an important question that we must ask: is it that these institutions can’t improve justice, implement trauma-informed processes, account for experiences of BAME and other minority students, or is it that they won’t? And if they won’t why won’t they? When student safety is at risk, are we really going to be fooled into believing that a system designed for academic misconduct can cope with cases of sexual misconduct?

Author Bios

Amy Life is a fourth year French and Philosophy student and the Undergraduate Communications Intern for GENDER.ED. She has previously been the president of Edinburgh University’s Feminist Society and is one of the founders of #MeToo Edinburgh University. 

Sharessa Naidoo graduated with a MA in Maths and Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in 2023. She is a 4th generation South African of Indian-origin. Much of her experiences are shaped by her South African upbringing and time spent in her Johannesburg-based all girls’ high school as a South Asian. She served as Girl Up Edinburgh’s President at the university from 2021-23. Girl Up Edinburgh is a student club a part of the global Girl Up UN Foundation Movement aimed at empowering young girls and women to be community leaders. Her time at Girl Up gave her greater exposure to sexual assault on campus and the ability to talk to survivors. She is passionate about anti-racism and how structural injustices can be identified and solved most effectively.

Image credit: Angela Griffin

Angela Griffin

Universities are places of learning and, for most of us, they are places where we learn to be adults. While I was at university, I lived out of home for the first time, learned to cook for myself, learned to make friends, I explored volunteering opportunities, first jobs, and I discovered who I was. A lot of these important life firsts came with their own difficulties as it turns out finding yourself can be a painful process, but facing these difficulties are an important part of growing up. However, one difficulty no university student should have to face is sexual violence.

Unfortunately, sexual violence is a sad reality for a huge number of university students. The National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) conducted in 2021 found that one in twenty students had experienced sexual assault and one in six students had experienced sexual harassment since starting university. For students living on campus, these rates were even higher with 25.8% of sexual assaults recorded in the NSSS occurring in university residences. 

When I first came to study at UNSW, I was 19 years old and was social justice minded. I threw myself into feminist spaces getting involved in groups such as my university’s women’s collective, and Sydney’s Reclaim the Night rally. In the time that I was involved in these groups, I heard story after story from my women and queer friends who had experienced sexual violence, and activists who had been burned out by the monumental trek uphill toward societal change. At this same time, in 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) released the ‘Change the Course’ report (the AHRC report). This report investigated Australian university student experiences of sexual violence and made nine recommendations for universities to prevent and respond to sexual violence. 

In 2021 I completed an honours thesis for which I asked student activists like me how they felt their universities had implemented the recommendations included in the AHRC report. This thesis found that students involved in sexual violence activism in 2017/18 were more likely to express satisfaction with their universities implementation of the AHRC report recommendations than those involved more recently. Students involved in activism and advocacy in the years immediately following the release of the AHRC report expressed that their universities were shocked into action and that their universities explicitly prioritised including student representatives in decision-making processes. Therefore, many students involved in 2017/18 felt a level of ownership over the subsequent changes made. 

Students involved in 2020 and 2021 however were more likely to express disenfranchisement with, or a lack of knowledge about, their university’s approach. One student was a Women’s Officer in 2020 and stated that: 

“I personally had very little contact with the University regarding the implementation of the Change the Course report… The minimal contact I had with the University was related to providing feedback on other projects unrelated to the topic of sexual misconduct.”

Many students also felt their universities had quietly discontinued a prominent focus on sexual violence during the pandemic. This sentiment was supported in the recently released Senate Inquiry into current and proposed sexual consent laws in Australia conducted by the Legal & Constitutional Affairs References Committee. The Committee was tasked with reviewing current and proposed consent laws in Australia and it particularly highlighted high rates of sexual violence occurring at Australian universities. In the report, the Committee found that: “…despite these efforts [actions taken by universities in the aftermath of the AHRC report], the committee heard that the university sector’s commitment has, at best, waned and, at worst, stalled.” 

Universities, like many slow moving institutions, need external pushes to continue efforts toward sexual violence prevention and response. In 2017, this push was the release of the AHRC report and associated student activism. Today, the push is coming from the findings of the Senate Inquiry. When it came to making recommendations for change, recommendations 15-17 related to universities. These final three recommendations were that:

1. Universities Australia conduct a second NSSS with results made publicly available no later than 2025.
2. The Commonwealth Government implements an independent taskforce overseeing universities’ policies and practices to prevent and respond to sexual violence.
3. The Commonwealth Government commissions an independent review of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.

In recent years, I have noticed a drop in university engagement on the issue of sexual violence. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated economic concerns pushed the issue off the university agenda and it is in universities’ best interests to keep this up and to ignore the problem. I implore Universities Australia and the Commonwealth Government to implement the three university related recommendations in the Senate Committee report and I hope that this report can act as a fire to ignite the issue of sexual violence on university campuses once again. Students deserve better. It’s time to do better.

Author bio: 

Angela Griffin (she/her) is a Research Assistant at the Gendered Violence Research Network, UNSW Sydney, and has a background completing research and consultation with university students. In 2021 she completed her Bachelor of Social Research & Policy (Honours First Class). As part of this degree, she completed a thesis exploring student activist experiences of their universities implementation of the recommendations included in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2017 ‘Change the Course’ report.

Featured image: WordPress stock images

Jan Breckenridge

Gendered violence in universities 

Sexual assault and sexual harassment are prevalent in universities and carry a profound impact for students, faculty, and staff. Since 2016, there has been a significant number of policy and prevention initiatives to respond to sexual assault and sexual harassment in Australian universities. In February 2016, Universities Australia (the national peak body for universities) launched Respect. Now. Always., an initiative designed to prevent sexual assault and sexual harassment in universities and improve university response and support to those affected. 

In 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Change the Course report found that 1 in 5 university students experienced some form of sexual harassment in a university setting. The report recommended ways that university staff can support students affected by gendered violence, as students often disclose their experiences to a staff member. This included ensuring that relevant staff members receive training in responding to disclosures of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Similarly, the 2021 National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) identified ways in which university staff can support the wellbeing of students affected by sexual assault and sexual harassment, including preparing staff to appropriately respond to disclosures. 

What these reports did not do is focus on university staff experiences of sexual assault and sexual harassment and appropriate responses to staff. 

What is the role of university staff in supporting students affected by sexual violence and sexual harassment? 

There is a lack of any definitive empirical evidence of how university staff can be involved in changing the culture of universities. This should not be confused for a lack of importance. UNSW currently employs over 7,000 staff members, who may themselves experience gendered violence or may play a support role for students and/or colleagues. As demonstrated by the Change the Course findings and recommendations, university staff are positioned to play a key role in culture change and support for those affected. As such, the role of university staff in combating sexual misconduct and gendered violence on campus cannot be ignored.

It is vital that universities provide clear information about how staff can seek support and support those affected by gendered violence. Staff may impact a university’s culture by engaging in governance arrangements and participating in education and training designed to increase knowledge of gendered violence, as well as university-specific triage pathways. Most universities see staff as a key first responder to student disclosures of gendered violence and set up processes for staff to respond to disclosures competently and compassionately. 

What about responses to staff who are affected by sexual violence and sexual harassment? 

Unfortunately, university sexual violence including sexual harassment is often framed as a student only issue. This cannot be the case. In 2023, the Australian National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) conducted a survey of university staff experiences of sexual harassment, sexism and gender-based bias. The survey found that 1 in 3 university staff had experienced sexual harassment in their workplace. This highlights the need to respond to both staff and students affected by sexual violence and sexual harassment. 

The impact of Respect@Work on organisational responses, including universities 

Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report (2020) recommended the adoption of new framework to more effectively prevent, and respond to, workplace sexual harassment in Australia. The new framework recognises that a more holistic approach is necessary for organisations, which includes universities. The framework looks beyond policies, training and complaint-handling procedures to recognise that sexual harassment is primarily driven by gender inequality and power imbalance. It provides guidance about steps that can be taken within workplaces to better prevent and respond to sexual harassment.

UNSW Sydney leadership in responding to staff and students 

UNSW Sydney is leading through the development of a Gendered Violence Strategy and Action Plan that focuses on prevention and response to gendered violence for staff and students. Universities not only have the responsibility to make their campuses safe and welcoming places for all students, staff and visitors, but they must be catalysts for cultural change throughout society. With this Gendered Violence Strategy and Action Plan, UNSW is taking a whole-of-organisation approach to achieve their bold vision to Stop. Empower. Support. in our community. 

UNSW, Sydney has committed to: 

Stop gendered violence on our campuses through prevention and education. 

Empower our people to create a safe and respectful community by calling out inappropriate behaviour where it is safe to do so, and with the expectation that students and staff model respectful behaviour. 

Support our students and staff to raise their concerns, report incidents, and seek support when they need it.

The success of any responses to sexual violence and sexual harassment in universities requires leadership and appropriate resources being made available to support every person affected.  

Author bio:

Professor Jan Breckenridge is the Head of the School of Social Sciences and the co-convenor of the Gendered Violence Research Network (GVRN) at UNSW. In 2021, she was appointed to the National Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Working Group of the National Women’s Safety Alliance. In 2022, she was appointed to the Research Advisory Committee of the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse. In 2023 she was appointed to National Women’s Safety Alliance –Sexual Violence Working Group. She has always oriented her research towards maximum impact in innovative social policy development, best practice service provision and outcome measurement of effectiveness.