Photographed in their beds, shamed on social media – and, for some female students, that’s just the beginning. So what are British universities doing about sexual harassment and assaults?

Rosie Wilcox, 20, grew up with three brothers in Portsmouth, Hampshire. When she was 13, she went to a girls’ boarding school, where she hung out with the popular girls. “We played pranks on each other,” Wilcox says. “And my brothers, who were at boarding school, played similar pranks.”

The pranks continued in her first term at Oxford University, where she read economics, but it was no longer such a laugh. “I used to feel pressured to go out all the time,” says Wilcox, now in her second year. “If I didn’t go out, because I had an essay to write, these boys would come by my room and say, ‘Why aren’t you going out? It’s pathetic.’ The next thing they’d do was come into your room in the middle of the night and take your duvet off.” (She didn’t lock her door because she was afraid of sleeping through a fire alarm.) This was similar to the practical jokes she played at school, but at university it felt darker, because she was photographed.

“I found photos of me in pyjamas in my bed on their WhatsApp group. ‘Hah! Look what we did to her last night!’ They did the same to one of my friends and she wasn’t wearing anything. She was sleeping and they went in at three in the morning and took a photo of her. They thought it was really funny, but she was devastated.”

There were other revelations, such as the college football song – “Derogatory, objectifying women and saying they should be in the kitchen, that sort of thing,” Wilcox says. There was also the initiation to get into the men’s college football team, which involved heavy drinking games, including one in which participants had to pick a girl out in the college bar “and say what they’d do to her on a night out, which obviously led to some really over the top and violent scenarios”.

When Wilcox started university, she was confident, outgoing, sure of her place in the world. “I was quite anti the whole feminist idea. I just thought it was a bit unnecessary.” She very quickly changed her mind: “I can see why women are making a point about things. There is definitely something here that I don’t like.”

There is certainly something not to like going on in many British universities. In May, three students from the Royal Agricultural University in Cirencester were arrested in connection with an investigation into alleged sexual assaults. They have been suspended while the case is investigated. In the same month, Benjamin Sullivan, the former president of the Oxford Union debating society, was arrested on suspicion of rape, but the case was later dropped. He admitted in an interview that the prevalence of rowdy, male-dominated drinking groups affected the way undergraduates “view women, view sex”.

The extent of sexual assaults on British campuses emerged four years ago when the NUS published Hidden Marks: A Study Of Women Students’ Experiences Of Harassment, Stalking, Violence And Sexual Assault. One in seven respondents had experienced some form of serious physical or sexual assault, the report stated, and more than two-thirds had experienced some kind of verbal or nonverbal harassment in or around university. (The latest NUS survey revealed that 37% of women and 12% of men who responded said they had faced unwelcome sexual advances.) Being groped, having someone put their hand up your skirt at a club and sexual comments were so ubiquitous, the NUS concluded, they were almost a fact of life.

A report last year, by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics, stated that female students in full-time education are at higher risk of sexual violence than the general female population. A particularly hazardous time, experts believe, is freshers’ week, when newcomers are invited to a raft of social events. “They are extremely vulnerable,” says Dr Alison Phipps, director of gender studies at Sussex University and coauthor of That’s What She Said, a 2013 report on women students’ experience in higher education. “Some of them are away from home for the first time, are trying to make friends and don’t know the campus, don’t know the city.”

“I recall one police officer describing freshers’ week as ‘killing fields’ for sexual violence,” says Dianne Whitfield, chief officer at Coventry rape and sexual abuse centre, which gets referrals from the counselling services at Warwick and Coventry.

Figures for sexual assaults on campus aren’t collected nationally, and this is a category of crime prone to underreporting. Earlier this month, Maria Marcello (not her real name), a student at Oxford University, wrote a blog in which she described how she had been sexually assaulted while passed-out drunk. She’d invited some friends over to teach her poker, one of whom brought two companions. Poker turned into a drinking game, and Marcello was so inebriated she lost consciousness.

“I was put to bed, but I don’t remember anything. Then a guy I didn’t know had sex with me,” she wrote on Medium, a site where people share ideas and stories. She had no memory of the crime, but she did have DNA evidence (clothes, bedsheets and a used condom). Nevertheless, she was advised by the police to drop the charges, because it would be “one person’s word against another’s”. Whatever had unfolded while she was unconscious was her responsibility, in other words. This is a stand echoed by Mary Jane Mowat, a former judge who in August declared that “rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk”. “Mowat is right that rape conviction statistics are lower than they should be,” Marcello argues. “However, the criminal justice system is to blame, not drunk women.”

Women (and men) can at least find a voice online with such websites as It Happens Here, where students at Oxford University who have been sexually assaulted air their stories. Take this post from 2 July: “I have told my attacker that what he did to me wasn’t rape. I told him that it was, of course, totally consensual – I was just a bit drunk. Why? Because the truth was and remains uncomfortable – and terrifying when you speak it aloud… I remember how I tried to get away from him. And how he held me down, drunk. And how I have kept silent about it since the confrontation, apart from to reassure him that, no, no, of course it wasn’t rape and to please not be angry at me. I still have to see him frequently and I wouldn’t think of being brave enough to confront him or go to the police, unlike others. Does this make what happened to me truly consensual?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I recall one police officer describing freshers’ week as killing fields for sexual violence.’ Posed by a model. Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/Guardian

Such posts lift the lid not only on rape, but also on the culture that exists in universities. Far from going away, sexism is imaginatively rearming. Take, for instance, Chloe Hill, outgoing president of St Andrews University Students’ Association, and only the fifth woman to hold the position in 50 years. The Albany Parker (now the Sinner), the university’s satirical publication, edited at the time by a student, marked the event by calling Hill “The Bitch” for three months until the university complained. She’s now referred to as “Kim Jong Hill”.

She avoids the union bar on a Wednesday, and did so even when she was president. “Sports clubs meet then,” she explains. “I’m short and they’d think it was really funny to surround you at the bar. Then – and you can never tell if they mean it or not – they would graze your bum. ‘Do you mind?’ I’d say. And they’d be like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’”

Vikki Patis, 22, studied criminology and criminal justice at Plymouth. The university has the ninth largest student population in Britain and the campus is in the town, which is packed with bars and clubs, with student nights at four of the biggest clubs during the week. There is a free bus service for students to Oceana, one of the bigger clubs, every 10-15 minutes on a Monday night.

In her first year, Patis went to the clubs, but says she never felt safe. “You felt like something might happen to you, whether it’s just a comment or something worse,” she says. “The atmosphere was horrible. Once, I was with a friend and one guy pulled her off the dancefloor and started to kiss her. You feel packs of guys, circling the dancefloor, eyeing you up and trying to find the best prize.”

There are new ways to disconcert women and put them down. “An environment has flourished among students that is highly sexualised and highly sexist,” says Holly Dustin, director of End Violence Against Women, “and that does seem to be worse than maybe a decade or so ago.”

Then, male university students were divided into camps. Among them, crudely put, there were sensitive, arty types, who liked indie music and baggy cardigans, and “rugger buggers”, who were loud, aggressively masculine and devoted to sport. Now, though, we have a new type: “the Lad”, who is hyper-macho and makes jokes about rape. He is, according to journalist Clive Martin, known for his Big Night Out… series for Vice magazine, “the anti-scholar, the beer-swilling, banter-puking cuckoo in the scholarly nest… The Lad is far less cuddly than his predecessor. He’s not selling a bit of hash on the side to finance the buying of yet more Che Guevara and Pulp Fiction posters. The modern male yooni-going dunderhead buys his drugs and his degree online, so most of his free time is spent charging drunkenly around whatever provincial British city he’s been assigned to, as if it were his own personal adventure playground.”

Laddism is not new. It had a particular resonance in the 1990s, when there was a lot of talk about political correctness and people feeling pressured into avoiding causing offence. It found a voice through magazines such as Loaded, and later Nuts and Zoo. “The lads in the 90s are the lads of the printed press,” says Isabel Young, research associate at the Centre for Gender Studies, Sussex University, and coauthor of That’s What She Said. “They basically co-opted working-class Jack-the-lad and made it a middle-class form of ironic enjoyment.

“But what makes the lad of today fascinating is the internet,” Young continues. “It’s more far-reaching, but also more performative, so what they are doing is taking the attributes associated with masculinity and taking [them] to the very boundary of what’s acceptable and beyond.”

Young means websites such as UniLad, founded in 2010 by Alex Partridge, then a student at Oxford Brookes University, “as the number one university student lads’ magazine and guide to getting laid”. In 2012, UniLad was censored for an article on “sexual mathematics” in which the author stated: “If the girl you’ve taken for a drink… won’t ‘spread for your head’, think about this mathematical statistic: 85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Following a public outcry, the site closed briefly to review its editorial policies. These days, it’s cheerful and irreverent, but also vulgar. It has a vast following – 1.6m likes on Facebook – and a narrow view of women. Take, for example, a recent photograph of a policewoman, captioned: “Holy shit. This policewoman is HOTTTTTT. And yes, she’s actually real…”

Laddish behaviour has taken hold in parts of campuses across the country. “Student union events, themed events, websites, pub crawls, sporting activities, drinking societies,” Phipps says. “It’s the most popular, most privileged men on campus who are engaging in this.”

But surely much of this sort of behaviour happens on the sidelines, I say to an informal focus group from Cambridge University (three undergraduates, three postgraduates; four female, two male). Can’t you just ignore it? “No, actually it feels we are on the sidelines,” replies Lauren Steele, women’s officer of the students’ union. “In the first year, I went to the swaps [where men- and women-only drinking societies get together] and bops [social events organised by each college]. I went to Caesarian Sunday [a drinking event] and Suicide Sunday [held on the Sunday immediately after the end of the summer term]. I’ve been to the two clubs in town. It’s not like I’m some militant rad feminist. I’ve been to them all and know exactly what happens. And it’s not fun, and there aren’t other things to do. Instead of going to the pub, we have dinner and throw our food around and get wasted on three bottles of wine. Good Pants, Bad Pants is a game where you have to get up and show everyone your pants, to see who is wearing the sexiest pair. You arrive at university and think, right, so this is the way I make friends.”

So what has changed? For one thing, socialising has become big business, with companies such as Carnage UK running student events with themes such as Pimps and Hoes since 2004, and boasting endorsements from Loaded, Nuts (which closed in April this year) and Zoo. Tequila UK used to run a club night at the Mezz in Leeds. Last October, they organised a night for new students called Freshers Violation. To promote it, they uploaded a video on YouTube. Here is some dialogue:

Interviewer outside the club: “How are you going to violate a fresher tonight?”

Interviewee: “She’s paying for the cabs, she’s paying for the drinks.”

Interviewer: “Strong.”

Interviewee: “She’s going to get raped.”

Mezz closed in December, after protests by Leeds University’s feminist society. “A lot of the time this kind of promotional material goes unchallenged,” says Freya Potter, former coordinator of the feminist society at Leeds University, now at the Manchester students’ union. “People laugh it off.” Tequila and the club night is back with a new venue in Leeds, Baracoa, and a new name, Qualite (an anagram of Tequila).

To be a member of a sports club or team increasingly involves passing an initiation ritual. Phipps says: “We all thought, oh, that type of thing happens only in America, but it happens here informally.” The ritual invariably involves heavy drinking, eating something deeply unpleasant (cat food, goldfish, vomit) and humiliation (lining men up naked to see who has the smallest penis).

When Hannah Wiltshire, 20, a medical student, wanted to join her university rowing team, she had to pass an initiation test that lasted three days. Phase one was having vodka, beer, cat food and gravy granules poured through a funnel into her mouth while on the bus to the initiation venue. Phase two was drinking games. Phase three, the initiation, involved drinking six pints and then memorising and performing a routine that included tapping the table, chanting and spinning around. She threw up on the bus, threw up in the pre-initiation and threw up during the initiation. One girl was so drunk, “she was absolutely hysterical and ended up hyperventilating for an hour at least”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Older medical students would come around at four in the morning with their funnels, get us out of bed and down on our knees, and get us to drink vodka and whisky, and say, ‘Drink the willy, drink the willy.’” Photograph: Lydia Goldblatt/Guardian

But what most oppressed Wiltshire wasn’t the sexism, but the hierarchies. “Lots of older medical students forcing us young medical students to do stuff. They would come around at four in the morning with their funnels, get us out of bed and down on our knees, and get us to drink vodka and whisky, and say, ‘Drink the willy, drink the willy.’”

Amanda Watson, a physics graduate and former social secretary of a university rowing club, also believes the rituals are about power. “It’s a popularity competition, impressing each other and being top lad.” Girls, too, she says, liked to join in. “If you were a girl who could drink a lot, then that made you quite cool. You would be on their friendship level.” She thinks girls are motivated by approval. “Maybe it’s an alpha male thing.”

“University is not a very friendly or safe environment for a lot of students,” Phipps concludes. What we’ve lost, she believes, is “a sense of a learning community, an intellectual community. The idea that we are not just educating young people about facts and figures, we are trying to turn them into citizens and help them decide what kind of person they want to be.” Instead, university has become commercial and “hyper-competitive”.

“The privatisation of bits of higher education is a long-running trend that has gathered pace with student fees,” Phipps adds, “so the idea of student as customer has become the norm, and what that does is put students in competitive relationships with each other, especially because they know the employment market is very difficult.” She goes on: “It’s all about individual self-interest and we lose values such as community, solidarity, compassion, even.”

And the internet, of course, gives students licence to be their worst. Spotted is a Facebook page now common at most universities, which allows students anonymously to post photographs and comment on other students. Comments can be anything from flirtatious compliments to more personal observations. The upshot of having Spotted: Plymouth University was that Vikki Patis couldn’t even go to the library without being conscious of how she looked. “I didn’t linger, I’d just go and do what I needed to do. You’d think, oh God, what if I end up on Spotted wearing an ill-fitting T-shirt? A friend was ‘Spotted’ in a onesie ‘looking rough’ – that was the caption. She was embarrassed, but took it on the chin, whereas I would have been horrified.”

Some comments are harmless: “To the girl named sophie, who I met in the ridiculously long su queue last night, you are beautiful” (11 January).

Some are invasive: “To the girl that told me she was so excited she didn’t have time to wipe… you have wee on your leg. Go and wipe. I’ll still bang you” (17 May).

Plymouth is at the forefront of initiatives against lad culture, but there have been complaints. “There was a student playing pool in the student union and she had quite a short skirt on, and a photograph was taken of her and you could see she had a sanitary towel, and her photograph was put on Facebook,” says Steph Driscoll, outgoing vice-president of education at Plymouth University Students’ Union. “It got to the point where she didn’t want to come on campus.” Driscoll had the photograph removed and replaced with an apology. But another administrator, an ex-student, “still to this day regrets getting rid of it”, Driscoll says. It was, in his words, “just a bit of fun and banter”.

Some universities have taken a stand. Exeter University’s Spotted page was forced to close last January, after senior university management claimed it harassed students and damaged their career prospects. They were also concerned that it had a “tendency to stereotype women as sexually available”.

However, similar sites at Exeter still exist. Spotted In The Forum has more than 7,700 likes on Facebook and included the following post, republished in the Tab, an online student newspaper, this March, under the headline, The Best Of Spotted In The Forum: “Spotted in the Ram: fittie with longish hair and 3 bottles of wine. You’re cute and you like alcohol. I like that.” The Tab added a comment: “This guy has basically summarised everyone’s ideal girl. She has hair and is drunk.”

The Tab was cofounded by Jack Rivlin, then a student at Cambridge University, in 2009, and is now a growing business, with teams at 41 universities, covering, he says, “stuff students actually want to read”. (That’s stories such as “Stop Slutshaming The ‘Magaluf Girl’: this girl sucked off 24 guys to win a free holiday… but wouldn’t you have done the same?” Tab Bristol, 7 July.)

The Tab and Spotted have a financial relationship, Rivlin admits. “We sometimes pay Spotted to plug stories – can you stick a few links out for us? I honestly don’t know how much. I presume that is why people set up these pages, to earn money.”

Rivlin believes the impact of laddism is overblown. “There probably is a problem with sexism at university, but I don’t think it has that much to do with guys who play rugby and get drunk a lot. These people are at best very tragic and at worst really quite unpleasant, but I think fairly harmless. A lot of blokes who talk about women or sex in that way are probably completely different when around women.”

Others see it more as a snobbery issue. “While every university parrots on about inclusivity, there is this big revulsion at the influx of this slightly more boisterous element,” says Tom Slater, assistant editor of Spiked, the online news and current affairs magazine. “It’s good old-fashioned disdain for crass, ostensibly working-class culture.” He goes on: “By painting lad culture as something that is directly correlated to genuine sexual violence and harassment, you create an atmosphere in which people are going to be much more fearful.”

This autumn term, new students at Cambridge University will be expected to attend compulsory sexual consent workshops. Each workshop will involve up to 30 students, last about 30 minutes and explain how silence and a lack of resistance do not signify consent. Oxford University is also putting on compulsory sexual consent sessions in 20 of its colleges, and the NUS is launching a pilot scheme offering consent programmes for 20 further and higher education institutions. In addition, some student unions have introduced “zero tolerance to sexual harassment” policies. “If sexual harassment is witnessed in a club or pub, then people should be removed by staff such as bouncers,” says Toni Pearce, the NUS’s national president.

The Good Lad Workshop, in Oxford, founded 18 months ago by a group of eight male postgraduate students from sporting backgrounds, is teaching male students to question their assumptions about gender roles. It runs free, hour-long workshops for college and university teams and drinking societies. Most volunteer; a few are referred following bad behaviour. “We try to address the way men get social capital among one another,” says founder Nikolas Kirby. The students are challenged not to fall back on misogynistic jokes as a way of getting laughs.

And, on a national level, End Violence Against Women is campaigning for universities to do more to investigate sexual assaults on campus. “Universities themselves have obligations that we think they’re not meeting,” Dustin says. Most universities, she believes, are still following the guiding principles established in the mid-90s, following a high-profile rape at King’s College London. Professor GJ Zellick, then principal of Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, chaired a taskforce recommending that universities should not take disciplinary action against students until the police and courts have followed due process. “We would say this is wholly inadequate, not least because so few survivors report to the police anyway,” Dustin says.

Meanwhile, at Rosie Wilcox’s college in Oxford, there has been a campaign to vote more women on to the Junior Common Room committee, the undergraduate governing body. “When the results came in, I was with a group of guys who lost to some girls, and they went on a two-hour-long rant about how they only got it because they’re women, swearing and saying, ‘It’s a shit college, full of feminists.’ One of them was having a birthday party that night, and they said, ‘Why would we want to be going out with the bitches? Let’s have a lads’ night.’

“I don’t know,” she reflects. “Maybe the women won because they were the better candidates?”



• Some names have been changed.

• This article was amended on 13 October 2014. An earlier version said that Benjamin Sullivan was cleared of rape charges. He was arrested on suspicion of rape but the case was dropped and Sullivan was not charged.