When Oxford University student Emma* saw the classmate who had sexually assaulted her three months before punching his girlfriend in front of a crowd of strangers, she knew she was going to have to speak up. ‘I spent months pretending that it hadn’t happened, but when I saw him attack his girlfriend, I realised that this guy wasn’t only a danger to me but a danger to everyone else,’ she tells The Debrief.
‘The idea of having to relive that night felt terrifying, but I knew I had to go and speak to my college.’
Emma had been at Oxford for only six weeks when the assault happened after a party. ‘We’d both been drinking,’ Emma remembers. ‘It was after a college party. We went back to his house and he pressurised me into having sex with him when I clearly didn’t want to. Halfway through, I told him to stop. He didn’t, and it was horrific.’
Emma wasn’t sure what she expected to happen when she made her report to a welfare officer at her college, but it certainly wasn’t the reception she received. ‘There was a basic lack of sympathy,’ she says. ‘But they assured me that the college was going to deal with my case and take it seriously. The next day, I got an email asking me if I wanted to have coffee because I’d “looked very upset” – and that was the last I heard from them.’
So Emma tried a different route when she came back from her Christmas holidays the following year. ‘I went to the dean and tried to make an official report under the college’s sexual harassment policy,’ she explains. ‘I was treated horrendously throughout the entire process – if you can call it that. I was told, “I hope you know that is a very serious allegation, this could have a massive affect on someone’s life.”
‘And I was asked if we were both too drunk to consent – as if I had sexually assaulted him. Then I was told he had a problem with alcohol, as if that should explain his violence away. It was clear, in the end, that they felt like I was “unstable” and a problem that they wanted to go away. At the end of the term, I went over to my friend’s house and she lent me some pyjamas and I cried because it was the nicest anyone had been to me in two months.’
What happened to Emma isn’t an isolated incident, according to a new campaign started by Oxford University students. It Happens Here looks to raise awareness of sexual violence at the uni, claiming that the authories there have been ‘betraying’ alleged victims of sexual violence by hushing up claims of sex attacks and rapes.
The group is working with students and various colleges to change attitudes around sexual assault through outreach campaigns, training sessions and advocacy campaigns. They have also produced a pamphlet which was published by the Oxford University Student Union, in which more than a dozen university students described a ‘culture of silence’ preventing them from reporting claims of sex attacks and rapes.
One in four undergraduates at Oxford have experienced some kind of sexual violence
The university has been swift to respond. ‘Oxford has always taken complaints of harassment very seriously. It has a policy and procedures in place to help students make complaints in all such cases, including sexual harassment and assault,’ the authorities said in a statement, adding that college staff ‘will always support students who report sexual violence and would encourage them to report those allegations, which are a criminal matter, to the police’.
But are they doing enough? Not according to It Happens Here, who claim that one in four undergraduates at Oxford have experienced some kind of sexual violence.
And according to the NUS, the problem isn’t just isolated to Oxford – sexual assaults are on the increase at universities all over the country. Its most recent study into sexual assault Hidden Marks reveals that 68 per cent of respondents have been the victim of one or more kinds of sexual harassment on campus during their time as a student.
And they believe the growth of sexaul assaults on campus are very much related to a pervasive culture of ‘laddish behaviour’.
That’s something fourth-year Oxford University student Amy*, who was raped by a friend of a friend during her first year at the university, agrees with. ‘I met the guy at a formal, then we ran into each other again at a club night,’ she told The Debrief. ‘We’d both been drinking heavily and I ended up going back to his room. Yes, I was drunk, and yes, I went back to his room, but that does not equal consent. When we were there, he raped me.’
Unlike Emma, Amy didn’t report her assault to her college – because she simply didn’t believe they’d do anything. ‘I was never tempted to report my rape to my college because I just felt like nothing would have been done. I see him around now and then, and it makes me so angry that he’s able to get on with his life while I have to live with what he did to me. He even added me on Facebook after he raped me. It made me feel so isolated and violated – like I had no one to turn to.’
‘He even added me on Facebook after he raped me. It made me feel so isolated and violated’
Since her attack, Amy has been stunned by the basic lack of understanding around the issue of consent at the university. ‘It seemed to me that people don’t understand that if a man has sex with a woman who is drunk beyond the capacity to consent, then it is rape. People seem to jump to victim blame. Within the university sexual harassment policy, there is a whole paragraph dedicated to how strictly the university will treat any “frivolous or malicious” sexual assault complaints. It doesn’t make for an environment where victims of sexual violence feel like they will be taken seriously.’
Both Amy and Emma believe that when people do report incidences of sexual violence to their colleges, very little is actually done. ‘The problem is separate colleges at the uni are legally autonomous and have their own sexual harassment policies, so it’s difficult to know what the official procedure is. From what I can tell, the current university procedure is to report alleged crime to police and suspend the accused student while the investigation is pending,’ Amy explains.
‘The thing is, the suspension isn’t that rigorously enforced and I know lots of girls who have reported sexual assaults to their colleges and the guy is still allowed to attend university. They had to see him every day knowing that the guy knows she reported him. Colleges are small – around 400-600 people in each – so you end up having to share a library, a dining room or a social event with the guy who attacked you. It’s terrifying.’
‘Colleges are small – around 400-600 people in each – so you end up having to share a library, a dining room or a social event with the guy who attacked you’
In fact, in a particularly nightmarish scenario, Emma almost found herself living with the guy who assaulted her. ‘One of the few things I was promised was that I would never have to live with the guy who assaulted me,’ Emma remembers. ‘But a few weeks before I came back for a new term, a friend told me he was going to be living on my housing complex. When I complained, the college told me they “didn’t control the housing process” – so why had they made that promise to me to begin with? It felt like they didn’t care enough to follow it through.’
But the problem runs deeper than the bureaucracy of the colleges – both girls feel the culture at Oxford is just as toxic. ‘I feel like people intellectualise misogyny at every level,’ says Amy. ‘It sounds trivial, but the sports clubs run things “lady’s half hour” where they’re encouraged to go out and “catch” random women on the street and bring them back to a bar to buy them a drink.
‘It treats women as non-autonomous and trivialises their presence – but because they’re obviously intelligent men they’re able to argue it all away as ironic. It just shows that the culture is still quite backward. People always seem to be able to quote a philosopher or other great thinker to justify their viewpoint, no matter how backward – and there are a lot of middle class white men at Oxford who have never had their misogyny questioned. Put it this way – you don’t feel encouraged to tell friends and bystanders what happened to you at Oxford. I still haven’t told many friends because I’m not sure they’d believe me.’
‘I feel like people intellectualise misogyny at every level’
So, for now, these women have been left to deal with their assaults on their own. ‘I felt betrayed and completely invisible, it was like the science fiction stories when you wake up one day and no one remembers that you ever existed,’ says Emma. ‘No one wanted to talk to me about it. Like I was seeking help for a problem that didn’t exist. I feel more let down by my college at Oxford than I do by my sexual assailant. Oxford will never be a place where I feel safe and it will never be a place where I feel happy.’
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Names have been changed
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.