A n exceptionally abundant glut of sexual harassment news may have overshadowed a significant victory for students at Warwick University, which, thanks to its administration’s complacency over sexist abuse, has come to occupy a prominent place in the misogyny league tables.
As any female undergraduate can tell you, this is a highly competitive field, but only Warwick has excelled to the point of getting its concern for the perpetrators broadcast across social media, as #shameonyouWarwick. Student protests, then national headlines, provoked by the feeble official response to the discovery of rape “chat” by some male students, led to the university commissioning an independent review, by Dr Sharon Persaud, and now to an apology to the victims from Warwick’s vice-chancellor, Prof Stuart Croft. “We are genuinely sorry,” he said. Pity about the “genuinely” but, moving on, “I should have been quicker. I should have reached out.”
As faintly welcome as this may be, given the VC’s previous, vigorous rejection of the women’s complaints about process, it does little to explain why his university’s response should, as revealed in a BBC Three documentary, have been a failure to recognise the seriousness of violent sexist speech that was as misogynistic, in its way, as the original group chat.
To judge from his blog, the VC is able to register the seriousness of hateful behaviour on campus when it manifests as racism. But after some undergraduates were shown to have shared comments about raping known individuals, his university devised a process unlikely to have been considered had the remarks been religious or racist insults. Its head of press, Peter Dunn, was tasked with investigating an episode affecting the university’s reputation. His interrogation was described as “horrendous”. One woman told the BBC that Dunn – who is still in office – was “very accusatory”, asked about her sexual history, and reduced her to tears.
Possibly, given the scarcity (one in five) of women in senior positions at Warwick, there just weren’t enough of them to spare so that female undergraduates could be questioned by a woman about comments such as “Rape her in the street while everybody watches”, or “Rape the whole flat to teach them all a lesson”. After two of the men were banned from campus for a decade, Croft ruled, on appeal, that they should be allowed back after a year – alongside the subjects of their violent rape fantasies. One woman had to sit an exam next to one of the chatters.
Persaud’s report notes that among some groups of students this kind of hate speech has become normalised. She found a “widespread acknowledgement that the ‘chat could have happened anywhere’ – ie that a parallel and deeply disturbing online world is now a form of social norm”. But that does not, presumably, apply to the university officials who were content, by marginalising the victims’ complaints, to normalise it further. The Warwick slogan, on a website lavishly ornamented with images of laughing young women, is “Open to Wonder”. It’s one way of putting it.
Still, out of three reports that illustrate how power and indifference sustain misogyny, Persaud’s is probably my favourite of last week’s, for having extracted a semblance of responsibility. Now Croft has been introduced to the possibility of not tolerating harassment, his example might yet educate staff and students in universities where misogynistic behaviour remains commonplace.
The other reports, one by Naomi Ellenbogen QC on harassment in the House of Lords, one on ditto in the Commons, by Gemma White QC, expose not just institutionalised sexism but a deep resistance – given Westminster’s inaction following the 2018 recommendations from Dame Laura Cox – to tackling it.
With Boris Johnson, and his enthusiasm for “semi-naked women… glistening like wet otters”, as the incoming figurehead, there is little reason for optimism. Almost as memorable, in his history of objectifying and disrespecting women, was his suggestion that women attend university because they “have got to find men to marry”.
The environment in which a Johnson thrives remains one, Ellenbogen reports, where certain peers are notoriously lecherous or “handsy”, and harassment by MPs ranges from sexist and sexualised comments, innuendoes and jokes, to attempted kissing, groping, leering, and conduct that, White says, “can only be described as very serious sexual assault”. Pending more enlightened behaviour, a plainly despairing Ellenbogen goes as far as to suggest putting cameras in “hotspots” where the unsackable 75% male section of our legislature is particularly prone to bothering women; junior women, that is, whose feelings and complaints they can confidently disregard.
Since, unlike Johnson, most of those responsible have now learned to suppress overt racism and homophobia, there remains the possibility that were misogyny to be recognised as a hate crime, Westminster’s harassers would be forced, by the alternative of police involvement, to act decently.
That the Law Commission is, following campaigning by Stella Creasy, Women’s Aid, the Fawcett Society and others, now consulting on whether misogyny should require an addition to the protected characteristics list, means that this curb on molestation, on the streets as well as in the legislature, might be achievable.
But, as in Warwick and Westminster, the understanding of misogyny and of its harms is likely, in a profoundly misogynistic culture, to be contested. Or to provide misogynists with a pretext for yet more hatred: invented misandry.
One recalls, in this connection, that all five members of the UK Law Commission are men. Since they recently betrayed no awareness of this anomaly, as a public reforming body, in a long report on surrogacy (they long for more UK women to offer modestly priced incubation), women should maybe, once again, manage expectations of fairness. What explains this most misplaced – borderline hilarious – performance of unabashed privilege? Maybe all the women QCs are busy writing reports on institutionalised misogyny.