Some of the world’s most elite universities are failing to protect their students when it comes to sexual misconduct by staff or other students. Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has spent two years examining how British universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, and Warwick deal with complaints of sexual harassment, sexist, drunken behaviour, and coercive control. A series of podcasts and videos reveal why students say university complaints systems are stacked against them and how sexual misconduct by university staff and students has extensively affected the lives of women in academia. Multiple complaints against the same abuser are regularly not heard together so individual complaints are dismissed as he-said-she said. Complaints take months, even years to be heard.
Al Jazeera sent 164 freedom of information requests to every university across the UK, requesting data on the total sexual misconduct complaints made against both students and staff members between 2017 and 2020, how many of these complaints were fully investigated and how many led to an outcome for the complainant. The personal stories featured in the podcasts and videos, combined with the trove of documents obtained through the freedom of information requests, reveal a hard to navigate system that to many students is bewildering and traumatic.
Source: aljazeera.com
