Seeking campus justice: challenging the ‘criminal justice drift’ in United Kingdom university responses to student sexual violence and misconduct (original) (raw)
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Tackling sexual harassment and violence in universities seven lessons from the UK
2021
This is the text of an online keynote I gave, hosted by the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and the Freie Universität Berlin, on February 5th 2020. It distils what I have learned over the past fifteen years of scholarship and activism around sexual harassment and violence in UK universities, for fellow scholars, activists and organisers in other contexts and countries.
International Journal of Law in Context, 2018
The last year has seen a revolt against the recommendations of the Zellick Report (1994) in England and Wales, and pressure on universities worldwide to bring serious criminal conduct within their own disciplinary structures. This paper examines the reasons why the Zellick Report advised against this, and why higher-education institutions have now turned their back on a number of its recommendations. Factors including student pressure and concerns about low conviction rates for sexual offences in the criminal courts have been cited, but this paper argues that universities will struggle to create a disciplinary system that is fair to both those who are accused of such offences and those who have been victims of them. A recent Universities UK report has reversed the Zellick guidance that conduct amounting to a serious criminal offence should never be pursued under university disciplinary structures. Drawing on both authors' experiences as practitioners, and using the first author's experience of university disciplinary matters as a case-study, this paper reviews the practical problems of bringing such serious conduct under university disciplinary structures, focusing particularly on the intersection of criminal and internal disciplinary proceedings. It concludes by suggesting possible ways of ameliorating these.
The University of Queensland Law Journal
This article examines the case of Y v University of Queensland and the issue of university disciplinary action in cases of student-on-student sexual assault. In addition to the question of whether universities have legal jurisdiction to decide these matters, there is the more fundamental question of whether they should. Using Martha Fineman’s theory of vulnerability as a theoretical lens, this article seeks to evaluate whether accusations of sexual assault should be treated exclusively as police matters or whether universities have a moral obligation to take independent action.
Policy Paper, 2022
In Australia, one in twenty university students have experienced sexual assault, including one in six experiencing sexual harassment since starting university (Heywood et al. 2022:1-2). Despite numerous reports, campaigns and recommendations, sexual based violence is still happening at Australian Universities. This paper contributes two key recommendations to improve transparency and response to sexual based violence at the University of Newcastle, with possible applicable contributions to the wider university sector in Australia. Global Voices is a not-for-profit that identifies and develops the next generation of Australian leaders, by providing practical experience in foreign policy, diplomacy and international relations. This paper was published as a policy fellow and Australian youth delegate for the United Nations Commission on the Status for Women 2021 through engagement with the iLEAD program at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Unsafe Education": Misconduct and Abuse in the Risk University
Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 2019
The paper deals with the increasing phenomenon of sexual harassment in the academic environment, according to the figures of The Guardian investigation concerning sexual misconduct in UK Universities. In particular, Cambridge University recorded the highest number of incidents, after introducing a new reporting system. Thanks to its communicative impact, The Guardian investigation allows a further analysis into the reasons why universities failed to tackle sexual misconduct and did not succeed in enacting reforms to support and protect victims. This could be one of the most significant aspects of post-modern universities, partly enhanced by the perception of danger, both psychological and physical. Thanks to The Guardian’s investigation, and media emphasis on those figures, it is possible to interpret universities as places of risk in an era marked both by connected knowledge and relationships and by mass slaughters and the collective risks sometimes stemming from the involvement in research activities in unsafe countries. Sexual harassment in universities – perpetrated especially by students, as The Guardian inquiry emphasizes – sheds a light on the silent but painfully awkward situation of victims, usually unable to denounce the misconduct perpetrated by both students and staff.
Communicating About Sexual Violence on Campus: A University Case Study
African Safety Promotion, 2019
South African universities are in the midst of highly visible struggles around decolonisation. Over the past two years, these struggles have foregrounded racialised, classed, gendered and other forms of exclusion. These are being challenged both by black academic staff as well as by black students. Most visibly and deeply connected, have been the challenges to the ways in which universities, as particular types of institutions, have dealt with sexual violence and harassment of its womxn 1 students. In this context we ask how the University of Cape Town, as one particular case study formally communicates about sexual violence on its campus. In an archival analysis of the university's public communications on sexual violence during 2015 and 2016, we ask what kinds of messages it conveys about violence, victims and perpetrators. We are interested in the ways in which the university positions itself in relation to the issue of sexual violence. The paper finds that the university's institutional discourse on sexual violence produces and reproduces some of the same discourses on sexual violence in both the public and media more broadly.