Harassment on campus needs to be seen in this broader context. In March 2017, the Guardian chose to headline assault across UK campuses as an ‘epidemic’.69 As early as 2004 in the US, The Encyclopedia of Rape had described rape as arising ‘most often where there is social hierarchy: men in prison, men in marriage, soldiers in war, those who have enslaved another group, adults who control children, those preying upon people with mental and physical disabilities.’70 ‘It is absolutely true – and absolutely absurd,’ Grigoriadis comments, ‘that we could add the modern campus college to that list.’71
In British universities, those accused of harassment in whatever form tend not to be named, on the grounds of confidentiality. Cases rarely proceed to court as universities do all they can to avoid adverse publicity (this can also include rape cases, as the advice given to my friend not to go to the police after she had been raped makes clear). In June 2016, Sara Ahmed resigned from her post as director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London over the university’s treatment of harassment: ‘I have resigned from a college’, she wrote on Twitter, ‘that uses my labour to deny what I show #sexual harassment’.72 The work she was doing to expose the issue was being taken as evidence that the issue did not exist: ‘We don’t have a problem of sexual harassment because there are people in our college who show there is a problem of sexual harassment.’ 73
Expressing its solidarity with Ahmed, a student blog reproduced sixteen repeated images of the title pages of books by a Goldsmiths faculty member, each one scrawled with accusations naming the author as a serial harasser who they stated had been suspended but allowed to resign before a full disciplinary hearing could be held.74 The outcome they describe – hushing up, discreet departure, financial settlements or non-disclosure agreements with students – is not uncommon, both here in the UK and, despite Title IX, in the US. When nine women at Dartmouth University brought charges of abuse – including one allegation of rape – against three prominent professors in 2018, the college encouraged them to continue working with the professors for several more months. In the case of Todd Heatherton, one of the accused, instead of ‘responding appropriately’, it promoted him. The women brought a lawsuit against the college which eventually came to a $14 million settlement.75
If the accused is not formally charged, this means amongst other things that he can more or less seamlessly move on to another institution, safeguarding, indeed advancing, his career. When Carole Mundell spoke out in 2017 against her boss at Liverpool John Moores’ Astrophysics Research Institute for writing a glowing reference for a serial harasser, she was branded a whistleblower and had a libel claim made against her by the college (it was thrown out by the High Court).76 The harasser had been able to leave the university without charge and take up a prestigious academic position in South Africa. By contrast – and this is one of the least noted aspects of campus sexual harassment – women graduate students who have been on the receiving end, as often as not, fall by the professional wayside. ‘I am leaving academia because of what happened,’ one woman stated to the Guardian in response to their call-out. ‘I’m going to do my PhD, and then that’s it.’77 Another example would be the woman who gave up an MA place at Warwick when students who had discussed her as one of a group of potential sexual targets returned to the campus.78 Already in 2004, an independent report on the philosophy department at the University of Colorado Boulder described how, as a result of the atmosphere of sanctioned and/or ignored sexual harassment, young women philosophy graduates were leaving academia in disproportionate numbers.79 ‘Get used to it or get out of it,’ Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life. ‘No wonder if these are the choices, many get out of it.’80
Goldsmiths subsequently revised its policies on sexual harassment and created a management post to improve its practices. An earlier statement issued in response to Ahmed’s resignation by Jane Powell, then Deputy Warden, opened: ‘We take sexual harassment very seriously and take action against those found to be acting in ways incompatible with our very strong values…’ (no problem, then). ‘Non-performativity given new meaning!’ Ahmed tweeted. ‘One of the most embarrassing institutional speech acts ever!’81 The new plan includes a single policy on sexual harassment, violence and misconduct; a partnership with Rape Crisis in South London; more robust co-ordination of records; training/induction for all staff. Critics responded that insufficient attention had been paid to the overall culture that allowed things to go so wrong in the past. Goldsmiths’ aim is to make its policies ‘exemplary’ – an acknowledgement of the fact that there is no co-ordinated policy on harassment across the UK. When I spoke to Lisa Blackman, co-head of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, about what had happened and what the college was doing in response in 2017, she commented that as a sector, ‘we don’t have the measure of the problem.’ (She was not speaking in any official capacity, and is herself centrally involved in sexual harassment policy initiatives across the sector in the UK.)82
According to a survey published by the Guardian in December 2017, almost two thirds of universities had no harassment advisers or sexual violence liaison officers; nearly a quarter no designated point of contact for anyone wanting to bring a complaint; over a third were not training staff on any form of misconduct and/or gender violence, this despite a 2016 recommendation from Universities UK, the representative body for higher education, that a centralised reporting system for all such cases should be established. A ‘shocking and depressing complacency,’ commented Rachel Krys, co-director of the End Violence Against Women coalition.83 Since then, progress has, to say the least, been slow. In June 2019, a new report commissioned by the higher education regulator for England urged universities to hire specialist staff to investigate hate crimes and sexual harassment committed against their students. Outside a relatively small number of pilot schemes, reports of incidents were being neither collected nor analysed. In particular, black and ethnic minority students lacked confidence in existing complaints procedures, to which they were unlikely to appeal.84 A month later, Warwick University was accused of negligence and discrimination, and of not being a safe place for women and minority students, when no action was taken against a group of men who had been exchanging violent sexual comments about them (the university subsequently apologised).85 In November of the same year, it emerged that the University of Birmingham was refusing to investigate any alleged rape that took place off campus premises, even in privately rented student accommodation, or any assault ‘unrelated to university activity’,86 the same criterion now included under Title IX. (Presumably it would have done so if the act had taken place in a lecture hall?)
Perfectly consistent with the behaviour expected of women on the receiving end of harassment, most UK universities have been turning a blind eye. ‘Not addressing the problem of sexual harassment’, Ahmed blogged shortly after her resignation, ‘is reproducing the problem of sexual harassment.’ Her response is to make a virtue of ‘snapping’: ‘By snapping, you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne.’87 All of which might serve as a caution to anyone wanting to put the clock back on Title IX (not to speak of the problem of landing on the same side as Betsy DeVos and the North American Interfraternity Conference). Laura Kipnis, asked whether she wanted Title IX rescinded – a fair conclusion for anyone reading Unwanted Advances – suggested that this on its own would not be enough to turn the tide. The solution, she believes, will only come from the civil courts when those like Ludlow, who have fallen foul of Title IX, sue institutions for lost reputations and livelihood.88 As I cast my eyes from the UK to the US and back again, it strikes me that in relation to harassment, there is no legal or procedural middle ground. Sexuality collides with the law. The only available options, at least to date, seem to be too much legal intervention or not enough.
For Kipnis, the atmosphere around Title IX meant that the critical, enquiring spirit of women students was being suppressed. For t
he Goldsmiths students, on the other hand, it was the crushing of curiosity about sexual harassment, the quiet disappearance of the accused and the lack of transparency that threatened bodies and minds alike. As far as they were concerned, they were just reaffirming the impulse that brought them to university in the first place: ‘We are at university because we are curious and we want to learn … Clearly something is being covered up, which makes our desire to learn even stronger.’89 Despite the vast distance between the way campus harassment is treated in the UK and in the US, this is what unites the student activists across the board: ‘fierce, ruthless, determined, they have cast off the language of victimhood.’
Like the million and more voices in the #MeToo campaign, these women are fired up with rage. They are not passive, nor are they ‘damsels’ laid out on the railway tracks – to cite just one of the images used by Kipnis to describe the way women students are being portrayed under Title IX. Perhaps, compared with the sisters turned on by feminist teaching in the 1970s and 1980s, today’s feminist students are excited by different things. Why – in an era where misogyny and assault against women show no signs of diminishing – would they not be a little more cautious about sex? Grigoriadis’s book is littered with stories of women students who look back on their willing participation in hook-up culture with regret, not least because of the dire sex. Or because it took them time to realise fully what had happened. ‘It took me a while’, one woman comments to the Guardian in response to their call-out on harassment, ‘to realise that he shouldn’t have done that.’ She is not denying responsibility: ‘I thought … that’s OK, I put myself in that situation. I took a while to realise what he did was wrong.’ None of this, it should be said, says anything about a woman’s pleasure and agency during a freely engaged sexual act. Nor indeed about so-called passivity, a term that could itself do with some undoing. As Freud once observed, striking a blow against the active/passive distinction as one of the most misleading and sexually discriminating binaries of them all, it can take ‘a large amount of activity … to achieve a passive aim’.90 Kipnis reads this as passivity’s bad faith; I take it as a sign of its latent energy.
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Evidence is always key, especially in a disputed case. But evidence is not neutral. ‘The evidence we have of racism and sexism’, writes Ahmed in her essay-length blogpost on the topic, ‘is deemed insufficient because of racism and sexism.’91 Evidence has to be interpreted. When a student in a long-term consensual relationship with a tutor messages him to apologise for hurting his feelings and tells him that she loves him, someone has to decide that her subsequent claim that he had raped her the day before was a lie. Someone has to decide that the delay, possibly a long delay, between an event and feeling upset means that your claim to have been disturbed by the event is false (this again would be news for psychoanalysis, which takes delayed effectivity, the mind’s reluctance to register what is happening at the time it is happening, to be one of the hallmarks of trauma). Someone has to decide that a student who messages a hook-up inviting him to have anal sex must have really wanted it, or that if she had wanted it at that time, she could not have changed her mind, and could not, therefore, have been anally raped. Someone has to decide that a woman student whose messages establish that she wanted sex with a male student who was rejecting her advances, that she even mused on the pleasures of violence – ‘It is always nice to be sexually assaulted without breaking the law’ – could not have been raped.92 They asked for it, no? I take these examples from the cases of Ludlow (the first two), Sulkowicz and Allan respectively. Each one opens a door into the murky world of sexuality where all bets are off, where desire and a change of heart can persist in one and the same breath. These moments may indeed give us pause. But it is the elation with which they are seized, the unseemly haste with which they are used to bludgeon the complainant’s case, that I find so chilling. A woman starts down, even initiates, a sexual path, which for whatever reason she no longer wants to continue. She tries to bring it to a halt. If the man does not stop – and please don’t tell me that he might fail to understand the message, or that once he gets going no man can control himself – then it is rape.
To which we must surely add that a woman can be driven to co-operate in a violent sexual act, or seem to be co-operating, out of fear. This is common in cases of rape. ‘Judges and juries are more convinced if they can see torn knickers and proof that the victim was beaten,’ human rights QC Helena Kennedy has said about the ‘ideal’ victim in rape trials in the UK, but:
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even the signs of resistance have to be more than the odd bruise, which defendants explain away as the result of vigorous sex-play and playful pinching. The paradox is that the requirement to show that they put up a fight flies in the face of everything we are told about self-protection. As one victim said when interviewed about her experience, ‘Everything I did right to save my life is exactly wrong in terms of proving I was telling the truth.’93
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In which case, the ‘evidence’ will be fake.
And what of the strange idea that loving or caring for an abuser, even the next morning, rules out a claim of abuse? Jennifer Marsh is vice president of the US national support service for abuse victims, RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), founded in 1994 with Tori Amos as its first spokesperson. They take on average 266 calls a day. ‘One of the first things that our users say is “I don’t know what happened to me.” … It’s not uncommon for them to say things like, “I woke up the next morning and cooked him breakfast.”’94 ‘As in all things shitty,’ Hartley messaged Ludlow the morning after the alleged rape, ‘this too shall pass. I love you.’95 Women’s refuges across the UK are packed with women who have entered, willingly and lovingly, into intimate relationships that turn violent. The enduring nature of the attachment is one of the reasons it can be such a struggle to stop them from returning home.
This did not prevent the Conservative government in the UK in 2017, at the exact moment when sexual harassment and assault had hit the news like never before, from ending guaranteed funding for refuges, a move that was predicted to leave stranded around four thousand women and children in flight from domestic abuse. The government also slashed legal aid, which disproportionately affects abused women who are left with no choice but to represent themselves in court, often face to face with their abusers.96 In October 2018, twenty men were found guilty of belonging to a gang that had raped and abused girls as young as eleven in the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield over several years. Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s former lead on child abuse and violence against women and girls, accused government-driven austerity of undermining local attempts to protect victims. In 2013 the government had introduced a fee of £1,200 to go to tribunal; since then there has been a seventy-one per cent drop in the number of discrimination cases brought on grounds of sex.
All this has been brought to a head by the surge in domestic violence which was unleashed during the pandemic (similar surges have been reported across the world, for example in China and in Spain).97 At the height of the lockdown, calls to refuge centres rose dramatically as women found themselves trapped in their homes with abusive partners. Between 23 March and 12 April 2020, the project Counting Dead Women identified sixteen domestic abuse killings; the average for the same period over the previous year had been five.98 Offers from hotels to house women in flight from domestic violence were refused by the UK government on the grounds that the women would be too easily traced. The Mayor of London stepped in with a £1.5 million emergency fund to rehouse such women. In May, the government pledged £76 million to provide services for the most vulnerable, including victims of domestic violence, a move that was welcomed, although it was the prior slashing of funds by Conservative governments which had made the need so pressing; resources for the longer term were not guaranteed.
In October 2017, when the #MeToo movement spread to th
e corridors of Westminster, Prime Minister Theresa May made a commitment to create ‘robust’ policies which would protect staff from sexual harassment. By November, the Speaker of the House was demanding that the proposals for handling allegations should be made public, while members of the cross-party working group were complaining that the plan was simply being transferred from the procedure for dealing with employment grievances, and would not offer sufficient protection since it would remain within the hands of MPs: like foxes ‘talking about how to make the hen-house safer’.99 A year later, a proposed new government code for employers on sexual harassment in the workplace was met with criticism for not going far enough: ‘Failing to introduce a new duty on employment to prevent harassment’, Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, commented, ‘is a missed opportunity and leaves women dealing with the problem alone.’100
And in perhaps one of the most unbelievable (or almost unbelievable) cases of them all, MP and former minister Andrew Griffiths, who had bombarded two young women with over two thousand lewd text messages, was cleared of wrongdoing by the parliamentary standards watchdog in September 2019, on the grounds that he had not sent the messages when he should have been engaged in parliamentary activity, which presumably carried on regardless. Allegations that he had breached the House of Commons Code of Conduct had not been upheld. ‘However damaging these events have been for Mr Griffiths personally,’ the watchdog’s resolution letter stated, ‘I am not persuaded that the texts he exchanged with the two women have caused significant damage to the reputation of the House of Commons as a whole, or of its members generally.’101 Personal damage to the MP, reputational damage to the House of Commons and/or its members. Am I missing something? Not even a hint that the most significant damage might have been inflicted on the two young women themselves.
On Violence and On Violence Against Women Page 7