Introduction

In the midst of growing attention to and concern about gender based violence (GBV) in universities, a key piece in the jigsaw of responses to GBV are student activists who resist GBV and supporting cultures. This activism has attracted criticism from some quarters which caricatures students as delicate, precious and easily offended, resorting to silencing those they deem to cause offence, thereby threatening freedom of speech. In this environment where voicing resistance, silencing, and freedom of speech are coexisting realities, this chapter explores how feminist communities help young feminists to find their voice to say the unsayable and to speak out about GBV.

Universities, gender based violence and feminist activism

As established elsewhere in this book, GBV in universities has emerged as a social, policy and scholarly concern in the UK significantly later than in some other parts of the world. The advantage of this delayed attention is that we can learn from developments elsewhere. For example, while Title IX in the US may seem to provide a legal framework of accountability that UK activists can only dream of, recent commentaries identify the limitations of this approach (Harris and Linder, 2017; Marine and Nicolazzo, 2017). These include the mechanistic way that Title IX has come to be used in the context of campus GBV, by universities driven more by the desire to protect their status and reputation than their students. These mechanistic approaches are symptomatic of an ‘audit culture’ or ‘compliance culture’ which prioritises procedures and processes (have staff completed their allotted tasks?) rather than outcomes (are students safe?), and is characteristic of the galloping neoliberal encroachment of universities. Although universities are protected from some aspects of wider economic forces (for example, in the UK universities have not been as devastated by ‘austerity measures’ as have most other public sector bodies), they are by no means immune to neoliberalism's tentacles (McRobbie, 2009; Martínez-Alemán, 2014; Phipps and Young, 2015; Gill and Donaghue, 2016). The marketisation of universities and commodification of degrees come together with the deadening hand of audit cultures to interpret legislation such as Title IX in ways that arguably subvert its progressive potential.