Ruth Lewis and Susan Marine have edited a special issue of the journal Violence Against Women on activism to address campus sexual violence. This is a timely and important issue and so we are very grateful to the editors for including us in the special issue. Tiffany Page, Emma Chapman and myself contributed an article discussing the modes of activism we are using to work on staff sexual misconduct within higher education. In our article, we argue that in order to activism to address staff sexual misconduct on campus, we first need to make the issue visible. We have attempted to do this through ‘slow activism’ by carrying out research; making complaints; telling survivor stories; and discipline- and sector-level activism for institutional change. Of course, as this work is fairly fast-moving, this article, for which the final version was submitted in September 2018, is a snapshot in time. Nevertheless, given the dearth of research and academic work on this topic in the UK it may be of interest to other activists and researchers in this area in thinking through some of the issues arising as well as thinking through how to make change in this area.
For those who don’t have institutional access, I’ve uploaded a pre-print version of our article. Please note there were a few final edits that are not in this version. The article was covered in Research Fortnight (in case you want the extra-short summary).
I would also strongly recommend taking a look at the other articles in the special issue.
Dr Anna Bull 