Are universities safe for female students?

These are things I have heard from real-life female university students. “If it happens at university and we were both drunk, is it still rape?” And “if it’s a minor thing like just groping in a club, its barely worth doing anything about it.” And “nearly all of my female friends have told me they’ve experienced some sort of sexual assault or rape.”

The prevalence of sexual harassment and assault at British universities is well-established. My story on Sky News is based on figures from hexjam which showed 1/3 of female students experience harassment or discrimination. Open-ended descriptions of what happened to the teeny 7% of those who reported the incident, included “not taken seriously enough; he is still at uni and hasn’t been punished. I have been too scared to go in for about 6 months,” and “it was dropped by the police after pressure from the university to drop the case”.

In 2011 the NUS found that 68% of women in further or higher education had been a victim of one more kinds of sexual harassment, with 1 in 7 experiencing a serious physical or sexual assault during their time as a student, and documented fresher slogans including “Keep calm and f*ck a fresher”, and “shag more student sluts”.

But there’s something even more worrying happening now — it’s total normalisation. It’s as if female students at university have been so brutalised, they’re not even sure if it’s wrong.

What are universities doing about this? In the high court earlier this year it emerged that some are still relying on guidelines written by law professor and former vice chancellor Graham Zellick in 1994, in which he advised universities not to undertake their own investigations into “serious criminal offences” — incidents he recommended could better be handled by the police.

Whatever the merits of that approach, and I spoke to professor Zellick and he still maintains it’s the right one — universities need to be transparent about it. And if they refuse to investigate allegations of sexual assault, they’ll have to work out other ways of supporting female students and taking their experiences seriously, keeping them safe on campus and clamping down on a culture that has already taken root.

The NUS says some universities are dealing with rape claims by students against students by trying to put victims and perpetrators in the same room and trying to get them to “work it out”.

Elizabeth Ramey, who brought the high court case after she reported being raped and was staggered by her university’s refusal to investigate, told me that she found that sense of betrayal as traumatic as the assault itself.

“[Universities] only care about the perpetrator — God forbid we affect some man’s promising life — with no thought for how that affects the victims, who are by and large women,” she said.

“It felt very unfair to me that he finished his exams on time. I didn’t. I started my next programme late, my performance really suffered. I never got the sense that the university gets any of that, or how much of the emotional work I've done with trained mental health therapists…has been about what the university did. not just the rape itself.”

There are a lot of competing theories about the root causes of sexual violence at universities — lad culture, which the NUS describes as “a trinity of drinking, football and fucking”, the commoditisation of the student experience, increasingly sources of profit for people who have nothing to do with university life themselves, and society’s general tendency to objectify women — especially when it comes to men celebrating sport- are all culprits.

But people who’ve experienced sexual assault and harassment see it more as a free-for-all, because other people are doing it and there seem to be no consequences.

None of the universities I approached wanted to comment. Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that this is happening on their campuses, and put off potential female students. But if they continue sticking their heads in the sand, that’s exactly what might happen.