Sally Weale, education correspondent 

New Cambridge students to attend compulsory sexual consent workshops

Oxford will also put on similar sessions designed to debunk myths surrounding consent at 20 of its colleges
  
  

Cambridge University students on graduation day, Cambridge, Britain - 29 Jun 2012
Cambridge University students will be expected to attend the half-hour sexual consent classes. Photograph: REX Photograph: Geoffrey Robinson/REX

As freshers arrive at Cambridge University next month, on their packed timetable of welcome meetings, matriculation photographs, punting trips and city tours there will be one extra date for their diaries.

For the first time in the university's 800-year history, new undergraduates at half of the colleges will be expected to attend compulsory sexual consent workshops.

Each workshop will involve up to 30 students and will last about 30 minutes, the aim being to get freshers talking about the issue of consent, as well as unpicking some of the myths that surround it. Finally, the following description will be read out: "Consent is active and willing participation in sexual activity. It means that both parties had the freedom and capacity to make choice."

Cambridge is not alone in seeing the need to introduce workshops. Oxford is also putting on compulsory sexual consent sessions in 20 of its colleges.

The National Union of Students, which this week published a survey claiming more than a third of female students had been groped or inappropriately touched, is also launching a pilot scheme, offering "I ❤ consent" programmes for 20 further and higher education institutions.

The issue of sexual violence on university campuses has been gaining attention, not least because of the case of the former Oxford union president Ben Sullivan, who was the subject of a rape inquiry, which police subsequently dropped.

Earlier this month an Oxford student using the pseudonym Maria Marcello wrote a blog in which she described how she had been raped, and claimed that her university largely ignored her requests for help and that police had told her she did not have a chance of getting a conviction.

In the US, Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz is carrying her mattress from class to class until the man she says raped her leaves campus.

The scale of the problem was laid bare by a survey of 2,100 students in Cambridge this year, which found almost half had been "groped, pinched or grabbed" during their time at university, and that more than 100 had experienced "attempted serious sexual assault".

That there is a problem around the issue of sexual harassment, sexual violence and consent, there is a consensus. What to do about it is less obvious.

Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge, questioned whether workshops were the right approach. "Consciousness raising about sexual consent has to be a good idea," she said. "Whether consciousness is most effectively raised by a compulsory workshop remains to be seen."

Amelia Horgan, Cambridge University student union women's officer, and one of those organising the workshops, is more confident: "We are sending out a very clear message with these workshops that sexual violence is not welcome within the university community."

Where colleges have agreed to take part, the workshops will be marked as compulsory on freshers' introductory material, although no one can be forced to attend, and will carry the same weight as fire, health and safety briefings. Cambridge said it had "well-established reporting procedures for both staff and students".

Pilot workshops have been held for front-line staff in colleges to build their confidence in responding effectively to reports of any type of abuse and to develop the skills required to respond appropriately.Organisers suggest there is a need now because of the lack of effective sex education in schools. "A lot of people come to university with a very, very basic sex education which stems from sheer biology," said Caitlin Tickell from Oxford University's women's campaign. "It doesn't teach people about rape myths."

The second contributing factor, they say, is the enduring impact of so-called "lad culture", which began in the 1990s and never went away.

As the NUS survey this week suggested, lad culture, sexual harassment and assault affect women right across the higher education sector, but a key challenge for Oxford and Cambridge in tackling these issues is the problem of trying to get multiple colleges to agree on a course of action.

In addition, the small communities in which students live and study make the issue of reporting and anonymity even more difficult than it would otherwise be.

At Oxford, campaigners are working to draw up and implement a university-wide harassment policy, with up-to-date complaints procedures; the university authority is expected to approve it this autumn, but individual colleges that have their own policies will still then have to be persuaded to implement it.

A spokesperson said the university had recently reviewed its harassment policy to make "more explicit its inclusion of all aspects of harassment, including sexual violence, assault and stalking".

Anna Bradshaw, Oxford University Student Union vice president (women) said: "This is the big problem we are facing, the epidemic of sexual violence within the higher education sector. It's not easy to report these things at the best of times, but being faced with multiple policies that are unclear makes it so hard for survivors. No matter the progress we are making there's still this massive cultural problem. Rape myths are believed and a victim blaming culture persists."

The other problem that some female students at Oxford and Cambridge cite is the drinking societies, where they say lad culture persists.

The Wyverns, a notorious drinking society at Magdalene College, Cambridge, for example, cancelled its annual "jelly wrestling" contest for female students following a petition of complaint; it subsequently hired a bucking bronco in the shape of a penis.

Then there's the "finger a fresher" challenge, and the annual mass drinking bash known as "Caesarean Sunday".

"The environment in some of these drinking societies is at best sexually aggressive, at worst openly misogynistic," said Horgan.

"It takes on a specific form because of the makeup of the student body and the college system. There's a small group of public school boys who have a sense of entitlement and a sense of impunity, which students at other universities might not have."

 

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