Providing End-To-End Support with the Sexual Violence Liaison Officer Model: LimeCulture
- Camille Schloeffel
- Mar 20
- 5 min read
Interview with Harriet Smailes, who at the time of interviewing was the Universities Lead at LimeCulture, a leading sexual violence training and consultancy organisation in the UK. Harriet is also completing her PhD on the impacts of post-sexual-violence support and resolution interventions in universities.
Location: Zoom (Leicester, England, UK and Canberra, Australia!).
LimeCulture is a national training and development organisation that works to improve responses to sexual violence and safeguarding. It works with universities and higher education institutions to support whole-of-institution approaches to prevention of and response to sexual misconduct. I first learned about LimeCulture when attending a Westminster Forum online in June 2022 where Kim Doyle, co-founder and Chair of LimeCulture, spoke about their work. I was particularly interested in LimeCulture's work embedding Sexual Violence Liaison Officers (SVLOs) within universities to support end-to-end support for victim-survivors, leading training across the university sector, and focusing on a whole-of-community approach to address sexual misconduct of staff and students.
LimeCulture designed the SVLO role and model to embed support within universities for people in cases of sexual misconduct. LimeCulture has delivered training and consultancy services to more than 80 universities in the UK and has trained over 500 SVLOs to date. These SVLOs are staff members, some of whom volunteer in this role, who are trained to support students who have experienced sexual violence.
The SVLO model creates a dedicated, specialist provision within the university, providing end-to-end support and a single point of contact for victim-survivors to navigate the support and reporting systems. Noting that although the SVLO model was originally designed for victim-survivors and this remains the primary focus of its introduction and implementation, it has now evolved to support ‘reported’ students (i.e. those that have been reported for sexual misconduct). This assists universities to provide equitable access to support for everyone and to meet their ‘duty of care’ and duty of contract to their students. In some institutions the SVLO model has been expanded to include staff. Staff are provided training to upskill SVLOs, who then act as the conduit to take students through internal and into external specialist services. The idea is that people in universities have access to those internal and external services with dedicated people who can help them get there. Developed in 2015 at two universities, the SVLO model is now active in more than 80 UK universities.
When Harriet finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Leicester in 2016, at the same time the Universities UK Changing the Culture report came out, she started working at the university in a Wellbeing Case Manager role. The role was created following a bid for government funding - Harriet was actually in the Students’ Union at the time and played a large part in developing the funding application. However, this funding was short-term and it was therefore difficult to make a long-term impact on culture to reduce sexual violence on campus. She was also an SVLO herself during the time she was employed at the university.
“Activism means listening to people's voices and for them to be able to do that in a way that is rejuvenating and sustainable - not something that is sucking everything out of them.”
The university continued funding for the Wellbeing Case Manager position and started expanding the team after government funding ran out - in part, supported by student activism starting in 2019. Following this, Harriet joined LimeCulture in early 2021.
LimeCulture fills a gap in service provision by providing specific guidance and tools to implement high-level statements in government reports, like the ones produced by Universities UK, and walks alongside universities to support them to implement these policies and guidance material. For example, a common recommendation that comes out of reports for the university sector is to conduct trauma-informed sexual misconduct discipline proceedings. However these reports don't always show universities how to do this in practice. LimeCulture fills that gap to support universities to do this through training, expert consultancy services and other support services.
When LimeCulture are booked in to deliver training at a university, they also do preparatory work with the university and this varies with each university. The LimeCulture team set the expectation that this training has to be part of a larger effort by the university to address sexual violence on campus, and on many occasions training may be preceded by strategic events to support universities to develop their whole-institution approaches. They particularly focus on educating university staff about how to create services that are genuinely trauma-informed and adopt the five guiding principles of trauma-informed practice; safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness and empowerment.
We discussed some of the challenges of embedding the SVLO model at universities. The main one is that it can be difficult to ensure that universities are embedding clear support pathways in trauma-informed and survivor-centred ways after they have received the SVLO training. There is rarely close monitoring of this implementation by LimeCulture, and it is not necessarily their role to do so, so each university is different in how they implement the model in practice. One of the benefits of this is that each university can tailor the model to their own student/staff needs and particular contexts.
Another broader issue we discussed (which is true across both the UK and Australia) is how universities don't always tend to draw on the expertise of researchers on site to help them address gender-based violence on campus.
“There is not always clear communication between academic and professional services, and some university structures mean that they’re quite separated in how they function.”
Harriet and I have both only seen this connection in our own contexts when there is a pre-existing relationship between a researcher and professional at the same university.
Across all of LimeCulture's work, there have been consistent calls for more education and support on how to work with people who cause harm. For example, Harriet spoke of instances where SVLOs have been approached by male students wanting to talk about the harmful behaviours they had exhibited in the past and wanting to help change behaviours of others now they realise what they did was wrong. SVLOs are not generally trained to deal with this, so it is something that Harriet believes could be explored further to support people to have these conversations.
“We want to create spaces where people who have caused harm can also seek support to change their behaviour. Why would you not upskill somebody to have a greater effect when the conversations are already happening?”
This sort of sentiment is similar in the Australian context where designated support people (in my experience, Senior Residents in Residential Halls) are sought out by people who have caused harm to talk about it and seek to move forward. This is why The STOP Campaign developed a Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Violence: Alleged Perpetrators model as part of our College Program. This in-person workshop provides student leaders with the confidence and skills to navigate these conversations which can be very confronting for many.
“Sexual violence activism needs to come from a feminist perspective.”
Activism on sexual violence for Harriet must be from a feminist lens and rooted in principles of equity, because it is not a level playing field for everyone. Harriet continues to be an active community member providing support to victim-survivors and guidance to professionals on how to advocate for change that is underpinned by feminism and trauma-informed principles.
In solidarity,
Camille Schloeffel
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