![]() Havey says: “While men do attend the consent workshops I’ve delivered at universities, they make up 25% to 30% of the audience.” This is something many female students have campaigned for, and which the Office for Students is consulting on. While men do attend the consent workshops I’ve delivered at universities, they make up 25% to 30% of the audience Allison Havey, Rap ProjectĪllison Havey, co-founder of the Rap (raising awareness and prevention) Project, which runs consent workshops for students, firmly believes they should be mandatory when young people arrive at university. Yet far fewer insist that all students attend. In an attempt to address this earlier, the majority of universities now offer training on sexual consent as part of the packed freshers’ programme of activities and parties. “These are particularly challenging cases, and it is difficult for the university to get to the bottom of whether someone should have known if their partner was still consenting,” she says. However, sometimes it is in a longer-term relationship where it has been a shared practice between two students, but some months in, one “reaches the conclusion that it is not OK for them”. Jamdar explains that in some of these S&M cases the woman who has reported the assault has been clear that she does not want this. They have seen stuff online about sex which many fully grown adults would struggle to process.”Īs a result she says: “Allegations of some form of sado-masochism, including choking, are not uncommon.” She says: “Students now are navigating so much more complexity. Smita Jamdar, partner and head of education at law firm Shakespeare Martineau, gets called in to sexual assault investigations when universities feel particularly out of their depth, often because the parents of the accused have hired a lawyer. “That can be an uncomfortable thing for institutions to accept they have to talk to freshers about.” “We need to have grownup conversations with teenagers about this – and that means also discussing sexual pleasure,” she adds. ![]() “Not talking to teenagers in universities and schools about choking without consent seems ridiculous to me,” she says. ‘We need to have grownup conversations with teenagers about choking and also sexual pleasure’: Rose Stephenson of the Higher Education Policy Institute. Rose Stephenson, director of policy and advocacy at the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, says universities need to be “brave” and look this squarely in the face. “The last thing we want is to drive silence, and have young women feeling they can’t go through the trauma of an investigation,” he says.Įxperts say issues around consent at university are becoming more complicated, with strangling – referred to by many students as choking – often a feature of sexual assault complaints, echoing its prevalence in the violent porn which many students will have been encountering for years while still at school. He worries that this will put students off coming forward when they have been assaulted. “Usually you’ve got the accused student being represented legally and the victim not. “This is happening more often – and my personal view is that hiring a lawyer is completely unfair and unmanageable,” West says. West is frustrated that the Office for Students has stressed that universities are not like courts of law and should take evidence from students supported by friends or family, but then goes on to advise that accused students facing possible suspension or expulsion can have legal representation. Not talking to teenagers in universities and schools about choking without consent seems ridiculous Rose Stephenson, Higher Education Policy Institute While a criminal rape investigation often takes years, a university will aim to investigate in a few months.īoth students will have a different team in the university offering them support, though West says in serious cases they often suspend the accused student pending investigation “to give some distance”. He explains that once a student has made a complaint, and it has been determined that they do not want to go to the police, the university’s own internal investigation will “gather pace quite quickly”. Prof Steve West, vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England, heads one of the many universities now trying to work out how to tackle this issue. Many victims are unwilling to go to the police because they know the justice system is slow, traumatic and rarely results in conviction for rape, and more and more are turning to their university instead. Universities are gearing up this term for what is becoming an increasingly frequent and difficult problem, with staff left to investigate these complex cases.
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