Students at the University of Edinburgh have founded ‘Sex? On Campus!’, a campaign aimed at tackling rape culture on university campuses. It was founded and is run by Kirsten Hay, Kate Wilson, Ash Scholz, Hope Conway-Gebbie, and Sommer Lugert. The Student sat down with Kirsten and Hope to find out more about their work.
Congrats on launching your campaign! Why did you decide to do it?
K: I have wanted to get involved in activism to do with sexual violence for a few years now. It has been something that I have been really very passionate about for a long time. Coming to the university and being around people that had experience in that area, gave me the opportunity to start the campaign off. I messaged Kate, and then they went on to message Ash and Hope and we got the team together and we started it up.
H: When Kate approached me to get involved, I said yes because it is something quite close to my heart and I saw an opportunity to push for change.
You made headlines last week in the BBC. In the article, the University said they have a support system and measures to thoroughly investigate reports of sexual misconduct in place. What do you think of the way the university is currently handling those situations?
H: The University’s support systems for survivors of sexual violence are entirely insufficient. Under the current system, a student accused of plagiarism is going through the same investigatory and disciplinary process as a student accused of rape, which is just absurd. Those are crimes of completely different magnitudes. And when proposed changes to the code of conduct were introduced, they were completely insufficient and not going far enough. Another thing I noticed when I was Women’s Officer was mandatory consent training. The University does have a consent training module online, but it is not publicised very well, and it is also not mandatory. One of the things that I really wanted to implement as Women’s Officer, was making that consent training a mandatory part of matriculation. They just keep on pushing it back. I think that is emblematic of the university’s progress on change when it comes to sexual violence.
K: I think a big thing for the uni is just something that we see with a lot of problems at the university. They claim that they are doing so much, that they are working so hard. But they very often have little to show for it if anything at all.
What exactly do you want to achieve through your campaign?
K: We have three main goals that we want to achieve through ‘Sex? On Campus!’. The first is to improve consent education. The second point is that we want to badger the university to do better, because we believe that the uni could and should be doing better. They just simply are not. And the third, and final aim that we have for our campaign, is to build a strong network of survivors of sexual violence and allies to these survivors.
H: Sexual violence is a really isolating experience, and we don’t want anyone to go through that alone. Coming to the University for the first time is a really vulnerable moment for young people in which you are more likely to be taken advantage of and not have a support system around you. And what we are trying to do is provide that support system.
What would that survivors’ network look like?
H: That’s where our socials come in. You can come along and have a good time with other people who you don’t need to speak to about what you have been through, but you know that they understand. And just knowing that they understand is a lot.
K: It is just a really nice community situation where everyone has that understanding that most people in the room will have been through something very similar to what they’ve been through. But we don’t want to have it as a heated trauma bonding session, so we are trying to keep it light. It is a very nice, supportive, and welcoming community that we have managed to grow.
How do you plan to establish a better consent culture?
H: A lot of people come to university and their understanding of consent comes from a video about tea. We want to move past that. We want people to have a much more thorough understanding of sex, relationships, and consent, than many people are leaving high school with. We are working to achieve this through running a number of consent workshops in collaboration with student societies throughout the year.
K: We had two workshops in Fresher’s week. One with FemSoc on navigating consent within a clubbing environment and one with GirlUp on general topics of consent. We are also having one next Monday, with Gender Liberation on consent withing queer sex. We are just hoping to roll some more of those and more educational posts out. I think just trying to reach as many people as we can with our content, and hope that that works.
Apart from those workshops, what other actions or events does ‘Sex? On Campus!’ have coming up?
H: There are some longer-term projects that we are starting to work on. One of them is ‘Survivor Docs’, alongside EUTV. I know Kate is keen on doing a podcast and I would quite like to do blog.
K: We are also hoping to host some community socials like a big winter event in January. And we have a concert gig coming up that is in collaboration with Sexpression Edinburgh.
H: It’s going to be at ‘The Three Sisters’, on 16 November. We have got three fantastic local bands and 15 per cent of the proceeds are going to go towards Edinburgh rape crisis centre. But the very big thing is that we are bringing back the #metoo protest for a third year in a row, against rape culture at the University of Edinburgh. I think they maybe hoped things would die down but that’s part of why we are bringing it back. We want them to know that this is not going anywhere. It is staying right here on their doorstep until they actually tackle the problem. Of course, we would love to see as big a turn out as possible at that.
How can people join or contribute?
K: We would love for more people to get involved. Just come to our events. You can send us a message. Either give the main @s3xoncampus account a message or if you feel more comfortable talking to one of us, our DMs are also open. We would much rather that you reached out and we were able to make you more comfortable in coming and support you through that than that you didn’t feel comfortable coming at all. So do reach out to us if you are interested!
H: If you follow along on our Instagram, that’s where we will promote all of those [events]. We especially would like people to come to the protest in February. We also have a GoFundMe to organise our events and to produce our resources. If you can donate to us that would of course be wonderful, but we understand that most people who want to get involved are students, so no pressure!
Is there anything else you want to say?
H: I would urge people reading this to interrogate their understanding of consent. Think about the consent education they have received, where the gaps are in that, and just learning more from there. I’d also ask them to reflect on what they can do to better support the survivors in their life.
K: You are not alone. There is a massive community of people ready to support you whenever you’re ready to be open to that.
Image via Hope Conway-Gebbie.