Hear no misogyny, speak no sexism, see no harassment. Gender-Based Violence and UK University Campus Culture: Time for Change?

Gender-based violence (GBV) on UK University campuses has begun to gain the attention of scholars, government, the media and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) albeit decades later than other Anglophone countries such as New Zealand and the USA.

The recently established UK Universities Taskforce’s remit is to ensure that HEI’s in the UK address GBV, harassment and hate crime affecting students. This marks a significant shift in the regulatory framework governing HEIs’ response to GBV in the UK.

These changes however have occurred amidst a wider revival of resistance to GBV in all, of its many forms. In universities, the resistance has focused particularly on sexual harassment, sexual violence, and sexual objectification, ‘lad culture’ amongst students, and the enduring vestige of such abuse by academic staff against other staff and students.

The role of both student and academic activists in bringing attention to GBV in universities and in holding universities to account for GBV amongst their staff and students has largely been the catalyst for the current changes. This paper examines how GBV in UK Universities is currently framed before exploring the inter-relationship between HEIs’ responses to GBV, civic values and social justice.

In particular, how universities are responding to increased expectations that they improve preventative measures and responses to GBV and how prevention interventions might shift campus cultures is explored in the paper with an emphasis on the Mandala Project at De Montfort University.