As on-campus sexual misconduct cases escalate, there are increasing calls to talk openly with young people about sex, pleasure and consent
Among the stalls encouraging students to sign up for rock climbing, parkour, the law society, and inevitably the pub crawl group, university freshers’ fairs have for many years now given out free rape alarms to young women. This conjures up the image of an attack by a stranger, perhaps on the way home from a night out.
But this gesture perhaps distracts from an urgent and rapidly escalating problem taking place much closer to home – that of increasingly violent sexual assault on campus. In most cases the male student accused of wrongdoing is in the same friendship group as the young woman reporting him, often studying on the same course. They may live just down the corridor in halls or even in the same flat.
