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Female students are at greater risk of sexual violence than ever before

From an article in the Times http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article4431028.ece

I admit to have objectified girls and wanted to conqueor them but I never got as far as even kissing a girl. When i was at uni a few years ago there wasnt much of the uni lad culture. in my Computer Science course no-one lost their viginity at uni.

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Reply 1

username1044970

I don't have a subscription, so I can't read the article.

Reply 2

username521617

I don't have access to the article.

But as far as I am aware, rates of sexual violence against university-aged women have been falling quite consistently since the 1990s, so this article sounds a bit like a sensationalist scare piece. It would be interesting to see the data they're actually backing it up with. From what I can read, it seems to be using the rise of 'lad' culture (or 'bro' culture) as its basis for alarm -- but is this actually substantive?

Reply 3

MatthewParis

I call bull****. What is occurring more than ever before is that the internet is increasing the frequency and speed with which these issues are being bounced around and discussed. This can affect someone's perceptions of the actual likelihood of such things occurring (just as hysterical reporting of crime by broadcasters causes people to perceive that crime is rising even when it is massively falling)

Male students are also at greater risk than ever before of being falsely accused by extremists with an agenda that says that any person with a Y-chromosome is guilty of rape in one way or another

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-what-went-wrong-20150405
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_%28Carry_That_Weight%29

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 4

HigherMinion

> pay ten shekels for the full article

Stop shilling for the Times.

Also calling bs on this. Sexual intimacy=/=rape and its something women don't seem to be taught anymore- personal responsibility is important in situations like these. You can prevent being in uncomfortable situations and accept them when you get in to them. It is your fault and your problem.

The point is, these women complaining about sexual activity at uni need to understand that womens lib made this happen. Git gud and understand the effects of your own ideology.

Reply 5

redferry

Original post by MatthewParis

Yeah let's just ignore the fact males are at a much higher risk of rape now shall we, because clearly being accused of rape is a much worse tragedy to fall upon you!

Reply 6

democracyforum

I think pornography, video games, and zombie tv shows,

are turning people into social retards who can barely understand english

Reply 7

Feels

Original post by GodAtum

I admit to have objectified girls and wanted to conqueor them but I never got as far as even kissing a girl. When i was at uni a few years ago there wasnt much of the uni lad culture. in my Computer Science course no-one lost their viginity at uni.

Radical

Reply 8

Smash Bandicoot

Original post by redferry

Yeah let's just ignore the fact males are at a much higher risk of rape now shall we, because clearly being accused of rape is a much worse tragedy to fall upon you!

I'm not sure the article was bull****, but why is it that every time something like male rape is mentioned, someone has to say 'women have it worse, this case is invalid'? Men know they don't have it 'worse', but the moment you speak up, you're told to shut up :s-smilie:

Reply 9

MatthewParis

Original post by redferry

Yeah let's just ignore the fact males are at a much higher risk of rape now shall we because clearly being accused of rape is a much worse tragedy to fall upon you!

I don't understand; the issues are not mutually exclusive. I was merely pointing out why people may perceive that the risk is higher when I understand it is not

Reply 10

Feels

Original post by redferry

Yeah let's just ignore the fact males are at a much higher risk of rape now shall we, because clearly being accused of rape is a much worse tragedy to fall upon you!

It is, rape is over after a few minutes, a false accusation is something that can put someone innocent in jail for many years and forever ruin their reputation.

Reply 11

Asolare

Post the full article + the sources please.

Reply 12

HandmadeTurnip

Original post by Feels

It is, rape is over after a few minutes, a false accusation is something that can put someone innocent in jail for many years and forever ruin their reputation.

The effects of rape last a lot longer than a few minutes.

Reply 13

Feels

Original post by HandmadeTurnip

The effects of rape last a lot longer than a few minutes.

No it doesn't, it rarely leaves any permanent damage.

Reply 14

username1331498

Original post by Dima-Blackburn

I don't have a subscription, so I can't read the article.

Original post by Dandaman1

Original post by Inexorably

Post the full article + the sources please.

Here's the article below:

Female students are at greater risk of sexual violence than ever before. So what exactly is going wrong at Britain’s universities? Ben Machell talks to the young women who are harassed on campus – and young men who don’t understand the meaning of no
It’s a freezing cold Sunday night and I’m in Leeds, surrounded by students, queuing up to get into a nightclub. We’re on a big bar crawl that’s been winding slowly through the city centre; everyone is drunk and everyone is happy. The crawl – organised by the popular Carnage UK brand of student nights – has a Baywatch theme, so there are dozens of boys and girls in endearingly crap fancy dress. Many of them have squeezed into tight orange swimming trunks. One guy wears a Pamela Anderson wig and has a jumper stuffed down his top. Everywhere you look, the Carnage T-shirts that we are all required to wear have been torn and modified to allow for the flaunting of abs, cleavage and torsos.
It’s almost 9.30pm when the bouncers eventually nod us in, by which point people are just about ready to risk dancing. Groups of baby-faced lads jig in loose circles, grinning at each other excitedly. One of them attempts to limbo under a laser beam and promptly hits the deck. Girls take to the floor in twos and threes and begin to dance, holding hands and pulling each other close. The boys look over and grin even more. The DJ plays an up-tempo dance track with a wistful, looped refrain: “I wish that you were mine, I wish that you were mine, I wish that you were mine.” The disparate groups begin to converge and, behind a pillar, a boy in Ray-Bans snogs a girl who is wearing a pair of water wings, an act that draws cheers from his friends. Beside me, another girl fishes a hip flask from her bra. I get the feeling it’s going to be a long night.
I shouldn’t be here. I’m too old. It’s more than a decade since I was at university. The only reason I’ve even been able to attend a Carnage student night is that three teenage undergraduates – Jessica, Joanna and Lauren – have agreed to let me tag along with them. I’m not here because I want to relive my student days. I’m here because there is something going badly wrong at the heart of British university life. And there’s no gentle way of couching it. Male students are assaulting, harassing and demeaning their female counterparts every single day on every single campus up and down the country. Not all male students, of course, but a significant number. Enough so that a particular strain of sexually aggressive masculinity is now an unavoidable feature of university life.
To some critics, the problem is “lad culture”. The National Union of Students (NUS) is setting up a national strategy team to tackle the issue. For others, though, the terminology required is more brutal: given that one in seven women at university, according to a 2010 NUS survey, has suffered serious physical or sexual violence, in the eyes of many, British universities have a problem with “rape culture”.
“When you hear the rape statistics, they’re shocking,” says Matt, 20, a student at Leeds. “You think, ‘That would never be me.’ But everyone gets so battered, they don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes you wake up with a load of texts saying, ‘You were f***ing banter last night,’ because you were really rude to some girl when she rejected you, or you put your hand down a girl’s top or tried to drag a woman into a taxi home with you,” he says. “But you laugh it off. It’s seen as funny. Sometimes you wake up with a girl in your bed and you don’t know how she got there.”
Mike, 20, is at another Russell Group university. He describes a night when he was out with the university rowing club and one of them “got into an argument and hit a girl”. He adds, “The club let it go pretty quickly, because he was a good rower.” For a while, the rowers had a tradition of sharing “the weirdest porn we could find”, as well as publicly rating the attractiveness of someone’s sister on Facebook. “All of us found it funny,” he says. “It was harmless.”
Sports teams are a hotbed of such behaviour. George, 19, attends Cardiff University. “Last year, the football lads had a social and someone got up and did a presentation on how to pull girls. His advice was go to for the insecure ones, because they’re the easiest.”
Female students, he continues, “are not seen as individuals” when it comes to sexual conquest. Vindictiveness is almost celebrated. “The worse you are, the better a reputation you get among the lads. If you pull a really fat girl, your mates will post a picture of Free Willy on Facebook. We make loads of sexist comments. ‘Any hole’s a goal’ or ‘Girls aren’t people’. It starts as a façade,” he says. “But you get swept up in it until you start believing it.”
Just how widespread is all this? A report from the Ministry of Justice and Office for National Statistics shows that female students in full-time education are at a higher risk of sexual violence than the general population. At the start of this year, the NUS published figures that showed 37 per cent of female students had faced unwelcome sexual advances, defined in this instance as “inappropriate touching and groping”. And if this number strikes you as high, you should know that it’s regarded as almost laughably low by the students I talk to. The consensus is that, in reality, it’s closer to 90 per cent.
“I don’t know a single female student who hasn’t experienced it and experienced it regularly,” says Ella Gibbons, an accomplished high jumper who volunteers as the women’s officer at Loughborough University. “The most common thing is the grabbing of a girl’s crotch. Not just a pat, but full-on forcing their hands underneath skirts. I’ve had girls come to me and say they’ve had male students push them against the wall and grind against them. There’s a lot of abusive language. Being called ‘whore’ or ‘c***’ when you try to walk away. I’ve had it myself,” she says. “I turned a guy down and I remember he said, ‘If you don’t say yes, I’ll just take you home and rape you.’ ”
This is not unique to Leeds or Loughborough. At St Catherine’s College, Oxford, one student welfare officer describes this kind of behaviour as simply reflecting “an underlying culture” that has become not just increasingly visible, but increasingly dangerous. “In my position, I’ve had to deal with people who have had really serious sexual consent issues,” says Jack Hampton, a member of the university hockey team and PPE student who helps provide pastoral care within his college. “I think there has always been a real problem surrounding consent and sexual violence at university.
And I think it’s a problem that is growing.” Cherwell, the Oxford student newspaper, has this term launched a campaign called “Not Guilty”, which is conceived in part to combat the culture of “victim blaming” faced by many who speak out about their experience of sexual assault. It’s a campaign precipitated by the experience of Ione Wells, an Oxford student who made national news when she published an open letter to the man who attacked her near her London home last month.
I spoke to one student at Cambridge, Victoria, who described how, after sharing a kiss with a boy she was friends with, he sexually assaulted her. “We arrived home and went up to my room. I said I didn’t want anything to happen. He kissed me again and pushed me onto the bed,” she says. “I told him again that I didn’t want anything to happen. He asked me why. But not in a nice way; in the kind of way that made me feel stupid because I didn’t have a reason beyond just not wanting to.”
Following the assault, she describes how she began to cry and tried to make him leave. “He looked at me and then kissed me again. The message felt clear: you can try to say, ‘No,’ but it does not matter to me.”
As a result of the attack, she is too anxious to do anything that would risk her running into her attacker. “He does my subject and is in my year at college.” She worries about going to her lectures, the college bar or the library. She stays in her room to avoid him. “The last time I saw him,” she says, “I threw up.”
Back at the nightclub, I loiter at the bar with Jessica, Joanna and Lauren. Joanna and Lauren study geography, Jessica does English. Things aren’t too bad tonight, they explain, but some of the student nights they go to get pretty ugly. “Some guys are so persistent when girls turn them down,” says Lauren. “They will not let it go. They’ll grab the girl and carry on grabbing her, even when she’s walking away. They’ll grab her skirt. Then they’ll try to get their hands under her skirt. In the more extreme forms of lad culture, the idea of consent just disappears,” she says. “It’s forgotten about. Especially if they’re drunk.”
“There have been times when I’ve been scared,” says Jessica. “Because I’ve had four guys surround me when I’ve lost my friends on a night out and they’re saying, ‘Come with us! We’ll help you find your friends!’ But then they start leading you towards the door and you’re thinking, ‘My friends definitely aren’t that way.’ Which is obviously creepy and rapey,” she says. “Saying you’re not interested isn’t good enough any more.”
So, the obvious question: who are these guys? In some ways, the answer couldn’t be more straightforward. As far as Jessica, Joanna and Lauren are concerned, they are “uni lads”, a subset of male students who have managed to inject many of the typical values of laddism into the undergraduate experience. They can be seen, if you like, as analogous to the American “frat boy”. To be a uni lad is to buy into a pack mentality, while at the same time remaining in a state of almost constant competition with your mates. You probably play sport, and will not be squeamish about misogyny. You consider yourself an alpha male and habitually engage in “banter” – sexist or derogatory repartee – which, if challenged, can always be defended as “a joke” or ironic.
Banter is particularly pernicious because it draws female students in, forcing them either to go along with it or to make a stand every time a boy makes a sexist comment. “If you can’t take a bit of banter, boys think you’re uptight,” says Jessica. “You don’t want to be that girl who can’t laugh at anything.”
It’s hard to pinpoint when this specific mode of laddish behaviour started to become so widespread. I tell Jessica, Joanna and Lauren that I’m pretty sure things weren’t this bad when I started university in Birmingham in 2001. I compare notes with more than a dozen female friends, all now in their thirties, and the consensus is that regardless of where they studied, whatever sexism they experienced was sporadic rather than systematic. Yes, male students could behave deplorably, they all said, but not in such a way that pointed to a coherent, identifiable culture. Ten or fifteen years ago, none of us were talking about “uni lads”.
So when did things change? The fact that a website called unilad.com was founded in 2010 may offer a clue. The site, which was set up by a pair of male students “for when you’re bored in the library”, gained both popularity and notoriety for a series of articles that joked about sexual assault. In 2012, a piece entitled “Sexual Mathematics” included this line: “Think about this mathematical statistic: 85 per cent of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.” The article carried with it the disclaimer, “Uni Lad does not condone rape without saying ‘surprise’.”
It was, we were told, just banter. The Uni Lad site was shut down after a backlash, but soon relaunched as unilad.co.uk and now has 5.4 million Facebook likes. And much like its popular online rival, the LAD Bible, the content, although now free of rape jokes, still has an occasionally vicious tone. Not only is it taken as read that you, as a male student, watch a lot of porn, but there is an emphasis on stories in which women – often in academic roles – are publicly shamed for having had sex. Headlines include, “Teacher Gets Sacked for Being a Porn Star” and “Two Girls Wanted for Stripping and Having Webcam Sex in Public Library”.
At times, the content seems as confused about sex and women as, you suspect, the “lads” who read it. And this, I think, is a massive part of the problem. The challenge is not, by and large, the existence of a distinct group of rotten-apple “uni lads” – creeps who live for up-skirt groping. The challenge is that a lot of normal guys – guys like George and Matt – in their late teens and early twenties are occasionally moved to act unforgivably towards their female counterparts.
But why? Dr Michael Kimmel is a sociologist and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities in New York, and this is a question central to much of his work.
He begins our interview by wondering, rhetorically, why the problem of male students’ behaviour is only being discussed now. “How did we miss it before?” he asks. “We missed it before because it looked like life. It was normal. You read books about British public schools or Oxbridge, a world that was full of cruelty, laddism and a boisterous sort of homoeroticism. And everybody thought that’s what boys did. And that’s because there was nobody else there. Nobody else but boys.”

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 15

democracyforum

see things from the other person's point of view

then you will know
what to say,
not to say
what they like,
and don't like,
how you are viewed,
how you are not viewed

simple life trick

Reply 16

HandmadeTurnip

Original post by Feels

No it doesn't, it rarely leaves any permanent damage.

I didn't say permanent, I said longer than a few minutes. Though in some cases it can be near-permanent.

The psychological effects of rape are well documented, are you suggesting it's all false?

Reply 17

Feels

Original post by HandmadeTurnip

I didn't say permanent, I said longer than a few minutes. Though in some cases it can be near-permanent.

The psychological effects of rape are well documented, are you suggesting it's all false?

Psychological effects isn't a real tangible thing, every action effects someone psychologically and not everybody reacts in the same way.
Simply making fun of someone can have worse psychological effects than raping them.

Rape is a form of assault and has to be looked at as a physical action from a legal viewpoint. A lot of people make too big a deal of what it really is, getting beaten up is far more damging generally.

Reply 18

username521617

Original post by EatAndRevise

Here's the article below:

...

Thank you.

So the author doesn't actually appear to be backing up their assertions with hard evidence - just anecdotes and stories from a few interviewees. No proof students are at an increased risk of sexual violence (and, as I mentioned earlier, currently available data would suggest the opposite), therefore the assertions would appear to be unsubstantiated, scaremongering conjecture.

Summing up the article in my own words: "Look! There are mean things said about women on the internet! You're all going to get raped!"

Now, I don't want to demean the horrible experiences of the women telling their stories in this piece, but these accounts are apparently being misused to create an unrepresentative assessment.

Reply 19

Duncan2012

As Dandaman says, it's an anecdotal story which isn't backed up by any data and which uses a misleading headline to get readers' interest. Whatever happened to critical analysis and good journalism? This isn't it.