I attended the 2022 EmilyTest Gender-Based Violence Charter Conference. Over the course of the day, we listened to talks from:
Fiona Drouet, Chastyn Webster and Kara Stewert from EmilyTest.
Jamie Hepburn MSP, the Minister for Higher Education and Further Education, Youth Employment and Training in Scotland.
Clarissa J. DiSantis, Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Manager at Durham University.
Professor Graham J. Towl in Forensic Psychology at Durham University.
Professor Lesley McMillan, Chair of the University and College Union sexual violence task group.
Gemma McCall, Co-Founder and CEO of Culture Shift.
Dr Michael Murray, Clinical Lead at the Institute of Neurosurgery in Glasgow and Chair of Medics Against Violence.
Niamh Kerr, Training and Education Coordinator for Universities and Colleges from Rape Crisis Scotland.
Location: Glasgow, Scotland, UK
“We can’t address this work without top-down buy-in.”
- Chastyn Webster
Through this conference I learned so much about all of the work happening to address Gender-based Violence (GBV) in higher education across the UK, with a particular focus on Scotland. I was so grateful to Fiona Drouet and her team for the warm welcome to join in and learn from them in the hopes to bring new ideas to Australia.
EmilyTest
“Gender-based Violence in student populations is higher than the wider population.”
- Fiona Drouet
EmilyTest was set up in memory of Emily Drouet, an undergraduate law student, who was subjected to a campaign of GBV by a fellow student, and who took her own life in 2016. Fiona Drouet, Emily's mum, established EmilyTest with the mission to ensure no other student ended up in Emily's shoes. EmilyTest aims to achieve this through their GBV Charter, training programmes and resources that they share across institutions. Some of the resources EmilyTest creates include support cards that fold up into lanyards and wallets, as well as stickers and pens with their GBV Charter on it.
GBV Charter
“Emily’s death was preventable.”
- Chastyn Webster
The GBV Charter is an award that allows educational institutions to take the ‘Emily Test’, which involves meeting minimum standards which would have ensured Emily’s life could have been saved. It is made up of five principles with over 40 minimum standards in GBV prevention, intervention and support. All of them must be met in order for the institution to pass the Emily Test. To enable institutions to implement this framework, EmilyTest supports institutions through one-to-one coaching, providing dedicated staff support, resources and opportunities to share good practice with the sector. Institutions then ‘Take the Test’ by presenting evidence of their work to an independent panel of experts.
This GBV Charter is the first of its kind in the world. It was piloted across two colleges and two universities, and more than 10 institutions had signed up at the time of the conference. The key themes of the charter include that it is:
Principles-led
Testimony-based
Whole-of-institution wide
Collaborative
Intersectional
Victim-survivor and student centred.
The five principles of the charter are:
Open and learning
Educated and empowered
Comprehensive and connected
Equal and inclusive
Safe and effective.
GBV Risk Assessment
“By sharing resources and engaging in multiple programs, we will increase the pace of change, not reinvent the wheel.”
- Kara Stewart
EmilyTest also developed a GBV risk assessment tool for colleges and universities. The risk assessment, L.I.S.T.E.N, is a conversation guide for university and college staff to follow when supporting students who may have experienced GBV. As part of this, EmilyTest provides training on how this framework can be utilised in practice and talks through Emily's story as an example of how this sort of response would have saved her life. This is essential because Emily went to staff at her college for help, but they did not intervene to keep her safe and she subsequently died as a result of the abuse she was enduring from her peer. The intended learning outcomes from this training is for participants to be able to define GBV, respond to a disclosure and to apply the steps of L.I.S.T.E.N.
The steps of L.I.S.T.E.N are:
Listen - Show your support.
I Believe You - Have no judgement.
Scared - Ask if they are afraid.
Threatened - Assess threat level.
Ending Life - Ask about suicidal thoughts.
Next Steps - Ensure they are not alone.
“Students have to be involved in this process, from the beginning and throughout.”
- Chastyn Webster
EmilyTest hosts their conference yearly to bring together the GBV and university sectors - inclusive of decision-makers, frontline staff, university staff, student union representatives, student activists, and other groups to talk about how to address GBV on UK campuses.
The Conference
Jamie Hepburn MSP, the Minister for Higher Education and Further Education, Youth Employment and Training in Scotland at the time, opened the conference with a clear commitment from the Scottish Government on how seriously they take this issue of sexual violence in higher education. Specifically, Hepburn referenced Equally Safe: Scotland's strategy for preventing and eradicating violence against women and girls. The aim of Equally Safe is to work collaboratively with key partners across all sectors to prevent and eradicate all forms of violence against women and girls. To achieve this, the Scottish Government established the Delivering Equally Safe Fund to provide funding to projects supporting women and girls. In the 2021 funding round, the Scottish Government committed £38 million initially over two years to 121 projects focused on providing vital support to victim-survivors, and on essential work to tackle gender-based violence through preventative measures. EmilyTest was one of the organisations that received funding to work with universities and colleges to prevent gender-based violence in higher education. Hepburn spoke about how EmilyTest's GBV Charter is the only one of its kind in the UK and should be rolled out across all universities.
“GBV is not between two individuals. It is within our structures and organisations, and it benefits people in power.”
- Clarissa J. DiSantis
Clarissa J. DiSantis delivered a presentation on overcoming barriers to meaningful progress in addressing GBV on campus. She is a GBV prevention specialist and practitioner, trainer, social worker and author. She is the current Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Manager at Durham University and co-editor (alongside Professor Graham J. Towl) of two essential books on this issue:
In her presentation, she focused on how to deal with and push through resistance when addressing sexual violence in university settings. DiSantis spoke about how people stop change from happening because it benefits them to keep things the way they are - particularly for those in power and the elite within our society.
It is a shared experience by students, activists, student union representatives and sexual violence and wellbeing staff in having great levels of backlash and resistance from their university leaders to adequately address sexual violence on campus. DiSantis provided some ways that university staff working to address GBV on campus (such as in prevention, response and support roles) can push through this resistance:
Monitor, assess and report on progress and resistance. Name the resistance and specifically address it.
Create a business case for addressing GBV connected to the strategic vision of the university.
Dispel myths around GBV with senior leaders.
Build a staff/faculty network of champions and allies.
Create tailored communication plans based on the audience.
Create opportunities for discussion and debate in moderated spaces, such as in training sessions and workshops.
Add GBV prevention to all job descriptions to embed it as everyone's responsibility, such as how work health and safety generally is.
Support prioritisation of work-life balance and self-care for those working to address GBV.
Graham J. Towl is a Professor of Forensic Psychology at Durham University, and an experienced leader in higher education. He co-authored (with Tammi Walker) the book, Tackling Sexual Violence at Universities: An International Perspective, which draws on evidence from the UK, North America, Australia and Europe. His presentation was providing a case forward for data collection and publication of campus sexual violence.
So, why should universities collect data?
To check progress (or the lack of it).
To better understand reporting and responding party characteristics.
To be able to demonstrate when investigations have been undertaken and their outcomes.
To convey to the wider university community (and beyond) that sexual violence is taken seriously.
“We need to talk about the higher perpetrator rate amongst male students at university, and flip the ‘risk’ narrative from victim-focused to perpetrator-focused.”
- Graham J. Towl
Towl spoke about the importance of focusing on perpetrators of violence in data collection and publishing, as a way to better understand what is happening on campus and to bring focus to the root causes of violence. There is a tradition of secrecy at universities in all aspects, and Towl is passionate about changing that by ensuring that when data is collected it is also published.
The types of data that Towl said should be collected includes:
Number of disclosures and reports.
Types of reports to identify patterns.
Biographic information.
Geographic information.
Reporting and responding party characteristics, with particular focus on the features of perpetrators. For example, there was research at the University of Kent that found playing a team sport is a risk factor for higher chance of male perpetration.
“If [universities] don’t publish outcomes then how do we know what is actually happening? Saying ‘we take it seriously’ doesn’t show what [universities] are actually doing.”
- Graham J. Towl
Once this data is collected, it is essential that it is published publicly. Some key reasons Towl provides for this include:
When universities don't publish their data, they are colluding with and protecting perpetrators.
Publication of outcome data may give those thinking of reporting the confidence to do so.
When university leaders assert that they take sexual violence seriously outcome data publication provides evidence of this.
There is a need for parity of disclosure between the reporting (victim-survivor) and responding (perpetrator) parties. At the moment, universities often hide outcome information to victim-survivors. If this data was published then this would not be the case.
Towl concluded his talk on some work that points to future directions to address GBV on campus in the UK and beyond. The SUMS’ final report published from their evaluation of Office for Students’ statement of expectations provides a case for prevalence surveys to be conducted more regularly and for more rigorous regulation of the sector. As the more that reporting becomes the 'new norm', the more that the issue of GBV and how universities are addressing it will be in the public realm. There is also a shift in risk perception from governing bodies as there are no easy options following the wealth of evidence emerging about universities' bad practices. In turn, transparency may be a lower risk in the longer run.
“With prevalence data comes the opportunity for regulators to measure progress.”
- Graham J. Towl
Professor Lesley McMillan is the Chair of the University and College Union (UCU) sexual violence task group. This task group released the report, Eradicating Sexual Violence in Tertiary Education (2021), which details staff experiences of sexual violence from results of a survey. This survey found that one in 10 university and college staff have directly experienced workplace sexual violence in the past five years, whilst around a quarter of staff know a staff member who has experienced sexual violence at their college or university workplace.
McMillan is focused on ensuring universities also support GBV prevention, response and support for staff as well as students. This would see staff being included in conversations about what they need and where the gaps are when new initiatives are introduced.
“GBV prevention should be core business for teaching and learning.”
- Lesley McMillan
McMillan also spoke about how GBV shouldn't be something that universities are competitive about, as this generates a lack of sharing and connection across the sector. Universities need to share resources, policies, information across the sector for free so that the commitment is shared.
Gemma McCall is the Co-Founder and CEO of Culture Shift, a report and support platform for workplace and university misconduct incidents. I spoke to Culture Shift later in my research and will share a blog from that interview in a few weeks.
Culture Shift's reporting platform helps institutions meet a number of the EmilyTest GBV Charter principles. It provides university institutions a real-time reporting platform to identify and prevent bullying and harassment. The first university that used their platform was the University of Manchester, and now many universities in the UK have adopted it. Some of the goals of the platform are to:
Ensure the platform is accessible to students and signposted consistently and persistently throughout the year.
Provide an anonymous option for people making a report, and also collecting data as to why people report anonymously so the university can understand and fill needed gaps.
Create a case management system that does name matching (highlighting reports where the same name has been mentioned).
Provide a campaign library of resources for institutions to use to raise awareness of GBV and promote the reporting platform as an option for people.
Niamh Kerr from Rape Crisis Scotland (during her last week working there) spoke about the GBV First Responder Training she has been delivering across Scotland. I was able to speak with Kerr the next day to take a deeper dive into this important work and will post a blog about that discussion soon.
A video from the Alice Ruggles Trust was played about stalking and risks for young people. The Alice Ruggles Trust was established following the stalking and murder of Alice Ruggles in 2016 by Trimaan Dhillon. The mission of the Trust is to help prevent what happened to Alice happening to others. Their message is that we need to bring stalking to an end.
Dr Michael Murray spoke about his research on traumatic brain injuries as a result of GBV. As the Chair of Medics Against Violence, he is passionate about adopting a public health approach to prevent violence in the community, and subsequently traumatic brain injuries.
“Prevention is better than a cure.”
- Dr Michael Murray
Thank you to EmilyTest, and particularly Fiona Drouet, for making a difference in the lives of so many students. GBV and student deaths are preventable, and the work that EmilyTest is doing is not only saving lives, but is also creating a more connected workforce every year to talk about the essential work of EmilyTest and how to implement it.
In solidarity,
Camille Schloeffel
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