Gender Based Violence in University Communities

Policy, Prevention and Educational Initiatives

Anitha, Sundari, Lewis, Ruth

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781447336600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Violenza nella società

Until recently, higher education in the UK has largely failed to recognise gender-based violence (GBV) on campus, but following the UK government task force set up in 2015, universities are becoming more aware of the issue. And recent cases in the media about the sexualised abuse of power in institutions such as universities, Parliament and Hollywood highlight the prevalence and damaging impact of GBV. In this book, academics and practitioners provide the first in-depth overview of research and practice in GBV in universities. They set out the international context of ideologies, politics and institutional structures that underlie responses to GBV in elsewhere in Europe, in the US, and in Australia, and consider the implications of implementing related policy and practice. Presenting examples of innovative British approaches to engagement with the issue, the book also considers UK, EU and UN legislation to give an international perspective, making it of direct use to discussions of 'what works' in preventing GBV.

Section III

Challenges and interventions in the UK

6

Student feminist activism to challenge gender based violence

Ruth Lewis and Susan Marine

Introduction

In the midst of growing attention to and concern about gender based violence (GBV) in universities, a key piece in the jigsaw of responses to GBV are student activists who resist GBV and supporting cultures. This activism has attracted criticism from some quarters which caricatures students as delicate, precious and easily offended, resorting to silencing those they deem to cause offence, thereby threatening freedom of speech. In this environment where voicing resistance, silencing, and freedom of speech are coexisting realities, this chapter explores how feminist communities help young feminists to find their voice to say the unsayable and to speak out about GBV.

Universities, gender based violence and feminist activism

As established elsewhere in this book, GBV in universities has emerged as a social, policy and scholarly concern in the UK significantly later than in some other parts of the world. The advantage of this delayed attention is that we can learn from developments elsewhere. For example, while Title IX in the US may seem to provide a legal framework of accountability that UK activists can only dream of, recent commentaries identify the limitations of this approach (Harris and Linder, 2017; Marine and Nicolazzo, 2017). These include the mechanistic way that Title IX has come to be used in the context of campus GBV, by universities driven more by the desire to protect their status and reputation than their students. These mechanistic approaches are symptomatic of an 'audit culture' or 'compliance culture' which prioritises procedures and processes (have staff completed their allotted tasks?) rather than outcomes (are students safe?), and is characteristic of the galloping neoliberal encroachment of universities. Although universities are protected from some aspects of wider economic forces (for example, in the UK universities have not been as devastated by 'austerity measures' as have most other public sector bodies), they are by no means immune to neoliberalism's tentacles (McRobbie, 2009; Martínez-Alemán, 2014; Phipps and Young, 2015; Gill and Donaghue, 2016). The marketisation of universities and commodification of degrees come together with the deadening hand of audit cultures to interpret legislation such as Title IX in ways that arguably subvert its progressive potential. Moreover, the commodification of higher education generates an instrumental approach among students; there is a risk, familiar to many of us working in universities, that students do not engage with wider activities which seem not to directly improve grades and 'employability'. This risk may be sharper in the non-elite universities where the resources available to students are more limited and the financial pressures on students are greater. Witnessing such developments in the US must surely make us in the UK consider whether legalistic, administrative procedures can help us achieve our goal – freedom from GBV. In this chapter we argue that, in addition to developing effective systems of accountability, progressive responses also lie in student activism to resist GBV and create cultures which support freedom, resistance, and respect.

It is reassuring to see that, despite the challenges posed by mounting neoliberalism in universities, student activism is surviving and flourishing as part of a wider resurgence in feminism in and beyond the UK (Dean and Aune, 2015). A key focus of this activism is the drive to witness, name and challenge GBV, particularly as it is embodied in student communities. This manifests as what is often termed 'lad culture' (Phipps and Young, 2015), or 'rape culture' (Lazarus and Wunderlick, 1975). Students are coming together to form communities – typically called feminist societies – which are at the centre of principled resistance to sexist norms. Strengthened and informed by feminist communities, students resist and challenge the attitudes, behaviours and institutional practices that support GBV, develop their pragmatic and theoretical approaches to GBV, and hold universities and perpetrators to account. However, to date, more scholarly and media attention has been paid to the problem itself, rather than to resistance to it. To address this lacuna, this chapter explores how students come together in feminism to resist and challenge GBV, and the ways that community building and connection foster their work.

These resistive initiatives continue a long history of the university as a site for radical politics including feminism (Rhoads, 1998; Joseph, 2003; Naples and Bojar, 2013; Arthur, 2016). While universities are far from representative of class-diverse communities and so have been rightly criticised for generating an elitist form of politics, their position as sites of intellectual endeavour where political positions can be tried and tested in relative safety makes them an important source of social change, where new understanding, behaviours, identities and cultures can be imagined, developed and practised. However, Mohanty warns, in her critique of '"post" frameworks' (2013: 968) which privatise social divisions and individualise experience, that

neoliberal intellectual culture may well constitute a threshold of disappearance for feminist, antiracist thought anchored in the radical social movements of the twentieth century. Radical theory can in fact become a commodity to be consumed; no longer seen as a product of activist scholarship or connected to emancipatory knowledge, it can circulate as a sign of prestige in an elitist, neoliberal landscape. (2013: 971)

Mohanty's call to arms to locate scholarship about activism in sites of activism guides our discussion of student activism against GBV.

Despite some media attention to contemporary feminist activism in universities (for example Pearce, 2014) and to the problems of GBV in universities (for example Younis, 2014) there has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to student activism against GBV, but we contend that it is important to document, understand and analyse this activism. The temporality of student activism makes it rather slippery to pin down; the student body regenerates every three or four years and students typically engage in extra-curricular activities such as feminist activism for only a fraction of their time at university, so the legacy of each generation is easily lost. Documenting each generation's work, in terms of community building and support for individuals to develop their politics, policy work, activities and campaigns, is essential to enable development from one generation to another. Without this sense of a legacy, of ongoing development and growth of the student activism between different cohorts, students can be easily 'bought off' by university administration who might provide superficial responses to student demands without committing to the longer-term, organisational and cultural change required to prevent GBV.

Moreover, documenting this activism is an important part of 'claiming' emerging discourses. Student activism against GBV is part of the discourse that is generated about and around GBV, although activists are themselves rarely in control of how they and their activism are recorded; the currency in stereotypes about feminists and feminist activism is testament to this (see, for example, Tomlinson, 2010). Gill (2016: 615) notes 'how different feminisms materialise in media culture' (emphasis in original), augmenting the presence of (neoliberal) 'feminism' in mainstream media, but argues that, with the exception of SlutWalk, contemporary feminist activism 'has generated relatively limited coverage' (p 616). She argues that the 'new feminist visibilities' appropriate concepts (such as 'empowerment' and 'choice') and symbols (such as the feminist 'fist') which resonate with feminism while promoting a distinctly anti-feminist ideology and, indeed, 'foment[ing] generational discord about feminism' (p 619). Similarly, we should be wary of discourses about GBV which are not embedded in student experiences of both GBV and of activism against it; instead, we contend that we should strive to put activists at the centre of our analysis of activism. However, some recent commentary has only added to these partial, problematic depictions of the feminist student, as we discuss in the following section.

The 'precious', 'protected' feminist student

Student feminist activity has been swept up in contemporary discussion about how we communicate in universities. Recent calls for trigger warnings and advocacy for safe spaces have been criticised as imposing limitations on intellectual freedom, including freedom of speech (McMurtrie, 2016). In some coverage of this debate (which rages particularly strongly in US media and scholarship; see for example, the collection of papers in First Amendment Studies, 30 (1)), contemporary students who call for teaching about trauma – such as sexual violence and racism – to be more sensitive to the effects on students have been depicted as 'coddled' (Lukianoff and Haidt, 2015), unable to deal with the harsh realities of life. Others express concern about the consequences of this development; although '[a]t first glance, these requests seem reasonable because at the core they are asking for a respectful atmosphere in which insults are not tolerated and student vulnerabilities respected', trigger warnings may keep students 'embedded in a culture of victimization' (Robbins, 2016).

In the UK, debates about freedom of speech in universities have highlighted the restrictive practice of 'no platforming' controversial speakers in university environments. Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer are infamous recent casualties of this practice which reflects how 'feelings have become a new political commodity … in debates in which hurt feelings are used as currency' (Phipps, 2014: 15). Indeed, what some call causing offence is seen by others to be committing a microaggression (Sue, 2010), to which no platforming is a legitimate response. 'Traditionally about rejecting the rhetoric of violence; especially by far-right organisations, no-platforming is now used to avoid "offence"' (Ditum, 2014). Others have compellingly argued that 'no platforming' and other resistance strategies reveal the privileging of free speech at university as the domain of white men (Fenton, 2016).

These debates about trigger warnings and safe spaces, freedom of speech, and no platforming are complex, heated and polarised; there are no simple resolutions and a fuller discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. We simply note that feminism has a long and proud history of saying the unsayable about 'offensive' things such as men's violence against women and girls, menstruation and childbirth, women's anger and their sexual desires – things that have been deemed 'shameful' and for which women have traditionally carried the burden of shame. Indeed, it is feminist work that has created a new vocabulary to name 'unsayable' offences against women, bringing them out from under the shroud of euphemisms such as 'domestic dispute', 'interfered with', 'seduction', to name them as 'intimate partner violence', 'child sexual abuse' and 'sexual assault'. While 'no platforming' and advocacy for safe spaces and trigger warnings can be valid and valuable in fighting oppression, we should also exercise caution in accepting simplistic narratives about 'taking offence', given that progressive social change has been achieved partly through 'offensive' speaking out by feminists.

It may be more fruitful to explore what purpose is served by these polarised public debates. Analysing 'the trope of the angry feminist', Tomlinson (2010: 33) argues that 'arguments about inappropriate affect are discursive technologies of power deployed strategically to suppress claims for social justice'. This analysis could equally apply to debates which emphasise the 'preciousness' of contemporary students, rather than their active engagement with and resistance to behaviours and cultures that inflict real harm. The attention to a particular range of activism (calls for no platforming, safe spaces and trigger warnings) focuses attention away from other forms of student activism against GBV (such as awareness-raising campaigns, demands for support services, fundraising for services) and simultaneously trivialises students' demands. Just as Gill (2016: 618) illuminates the media attention paid to 'celebrity and style feminism' at the expense of the myriad diverse topics addressed by contemporary feminist activism, and as Tomlinson (2010: 1) demonstrates that the trope of the angry feminist serves to 'foreclose feminist futures', the attention to trigger warnings and safe spaces in university environments serves to undermine the legitimacy of student activism against harms.

Contemporary student activism against GBV, then, occurs in a wider context of efforts to reconfigure the university environment. These efforts are subject to considerable critique, critique which sometimes has a patronising, dismissive tone, depicting young feminist sensibilities as 'precious'. While we share unease with some aspects of attempts to remove 'offence' from public debate, we also recognise that calls for greater sensitivity in how we communicate about traumatic experiences, such as sexual and domestic violence, reflect attempts to imagine cultures devoid of GBV and other forms of oppression.

Feminism in community

Activism happens in communities. Social movements thrive in and through communities of activists joined in struggle. Relationships, coalitions and connections have held a particular significance for feminist social movements. In universities, feminists are building communities of like-minded peers, coming together to develop their own and each other's understandings, identities, politics (we explore this in more detail in Marine and Lewis, 2017). Communities can help generate activist networks and collective identities (Taylor, Whittier and Morris, 1992; Hercus, 1999). They can be a source of emotional sustainability for activists and social movements (Brown and Pickerill, 2009). They can also 'reproduce sameness' as Rowe (2008) shows in her study of women academics whose differential investments in institutional power led white women to conceive of alliances with black women as 'difficult' and 'challenging'. Rowe's call for meaningful, authentic engagement with difference echoes Mohanty's (2013) warnings that a postmodern focus on difference distracts from radical critiques of power.

It is from feminist communities that much activism against GBV emerges, as individuals support each other to learn about GBV and about feminism, to change the normative narrative of blaming victims and exonerating perpetrators, to imagine worlds without GBV, and to experiment with small and large scale interventions to achieve those worlds on campus. In the midst of debates about the changing university environment, freedom of speech and the emergence of GBV as a matter of political, public and scholarly concern, this chapter explores how women students come together in feminist communities to challenge GBV in universities. The following section briefly outlines the research project from which findings are presented, and then analyses students' accounts of their feminist communities and of their activism.

Methods

The data discussed here are derived from a study about students' accounts of feminist identity, activism and community in UK and US universities. The participants in this study, 34 in total, represented a wide range of identities, including social class, racial/ethnic, sexual orientation, fields of study, years in school, and dis/ability statuses. Guiding questions shaping our inquiry included: how did you come to understand yourself as a feminist? What influences shaped your feminist identity? How do you live out feminism in your everyday life? Our sample was drawn from university students and recent graduates who self-identified as feminists, primarily through networks in feminist societies (in the UK) and women's centres (in the US). During the initial coding process of the in-depth interview data, 14 broad themes were identified and refined to make meaning of the students' perspectives. Key themes, explored in the following sections, were the importance of feminist space for exploring and refining one's ideas with like-minded others. For the purposes of this book's exploration of the current UK context with respect to GBV, we focus our discussion solely on the data yielded by the UK participants.

Findings

Students' resistance to GBV

In our research GBV was a common concern among participants, regardless of their own experiences. Some had experienced aspects of GBV before or at university, some were shocked to find 'laddish' cultures on campus, having expected university cultures to be more enlightened. As Laura, a white, straight-identified student bemoaned, "I thought it would be better here and I got to [university name] and it's really laddish". Similarly, Olivia, who identified as white and gay, found "this university is totally diabolical in terms of the rife sexism that is everywhere". Their experiences of the spectrum of GBV included: having drinks 'spiked' (presumably with the intention to commit sexual violence); sexual harassment by university staff and students; rapes and victim-blaming responses amon...