High levels of public fear about paedophilia and ‘stranger danger’ notwithstanding, most people find it difficult to believe that sexual abuse is as widespread as the evidence suggests (the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse estimates its incidence in the UK at around 15 per cent for girls and 5 per cent for boys).
The impulse to doubt, diminish or deny isn’t limited to incorrigible misogynists or rape apologists. Talk about the prevalence of sexual violence provokes a degree of scepticism: it can’t be that common – or else ‘it’ is not the real thing (not ‘rape-rape’, in Whoopi Goldberg’s phrase). A 2017 investigation by the Guardian involving 120 universities found that fewer than two hundred formal complaints had been made by students against their teachers in a period of six years. Only a minority of those who experience abuse at universities make an official complaint. A survey conducted by the National Union of Students in 2010 found that 14 per cent of women students had suffered a serious physical or sexual assault and 68 per cent had experienced sexual harassment. This excluded the still more common experience of sexual harassment. A recent analysis in the Lancet, drawing on 104 studies from 16 countries, found that 17.4 per cent of women students in higher education – and 7.8 per cent of men – had experienced an ‘attempted or completed sexual act obtained by force, violence or coercion’. There is no question that sexual violence is common in universities, as it is outside them. ‘Oh, he’s being lynched by a feminist,’ I once heard a prominent philosopher remark of some acquaintance, in a tone that seemed to say: you know how it is these days.
#Design doll free android series#
(In the recent Netflix series The Chair, a troubled professor’s career is ended after students take exception to an ironic Nazi salute.) This perception is by no means alien to the academy. The contemporary university is a place of woke-gone-mad, inhospitable to freedom of expression and common sense, a place where complaints are a powerful weapon. According to this way of thinking, well-meaning efforts to address real but rare occurrences have gone too far (cf ‘political correctness’). But this tendency co-exists with another, which, when the status quo is threatened, dismisses anxieties about sexual violence as overblown, a product of heightened sensitivities or stretched definitions. The belief that sexual violence is simultaneously aberrant and rampant – lurking around every corner and yet concentrated in certain communities – has long been a pretext for authoritarian solutions: it fuels the tough-on-crime initiatives that promise to protect our daughters by locking up other people’s sons or stopping them at the border.
Abuse thrives wherever power relations are unequal – in the school, the workplace, the family, the church. But rates of sexual violence are not significantly higher in universities than anywhere else. Media reports of a ‘rape culture’ among students and ‘epidemic’ levels of sexual predation by staff have created the impression that universities are unusually sordid and perilous places. S exual violence at universities is shrouded in myth and misunderstanding.