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Many undergraduate students in the UK fall into age groups particularly at risk from interpersonal violence. Recent evidence suggests that a range of interpersonal violence is part of the university experience for a significant number of students. In this article, we report on the findings of an online survey of male and female students administered at a university in the north of England in 2016 exploring experiences of interpersonal violence during their time as a student. Focusing on the qualitative responses, 75 respondents, mostly women, wrote about their experiences of sexual violence. In presenting women’s accounts, we challenge the construction of the ‘ideal victim’ who is viewed as weak, passive and without agency or culpability (). Women adopt a range of strategies to actively resist men’s sexual violence. In doing so, they challenge and problematise perpetrators’ behaviours particularly tropes that communicate and forefront the heterosexual dating model of courtship. These findings raise implications for women’s strategies of resistance to be viewed as examples of social change where victim-blaming is challenged, perpetrator-blaming is promoted and femininity/victims are reconstructed as agentic. Universities must educate students about sexual violence, dating and intimacy, as well as provide support for victims of sexual violence.
This chapter reports on the findings from an online survey of female students administered at a university in the north of England exploring perceptions of safety and experiences of interpersonal violence, predominantly in public spaces. The chapter considers how landscapes of (un)safety feature in female students’ experiences of, and strategies to avoid, predominantly sexual harassment, abuse and violence. While certain places and spaces within the urban landscape are regarded as ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’, their status as such is contingent. Material characteristics of urban landscapes are brought together with social, emotional and affective aspects, to form ‘atmospheres’. The chapter explores how female students recognize, experience and negotiate these hostile yet ‘ambivalent’ and potentially shifting emotional and material environments and atmospheres of university life. The chapter further argues that these atmospheres are shaped by broader processes of neoliberal urbanism.
