One of the things we’ve been picking up from SUs on our calls is that complaints from students about students are on the up.
And they’re transforming what used to be awkward conversations in the kitchen or strategic avoidance in the library into formal investigations requiring witness statements, panel hearings, and sixty-page reports about who said what in the netball club WhatsApp group at 2am on a Tuesday.
Meanwhile for England and Wales, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) has launched a consultation on harassment and sexual misconduct procedures in universities, and while the document focuses on university processes, the implications for SUs are unavoidable.
That’s because a decent proportion of the complaints SUs are getting allege harassment, and many harassment complaints emerge from the spaces where students actually interact – clubs, societies, campaigns, student media – rather than the carefully managed environments of lectures and seminars where everyone stays muted on Teams.
We’re going run a project interrogating what’s going on in the new year – and we’d love you to get involved. See below.
The paradox of progress
The increase in complaints isn’t entirely bad news, because for decades students suffered harassment, discrimination and worse in silence – particularly women, LGBT+ students, disabled students, and students of colour – who were told explicitly or implicitly that complaining would mark them as troublemakers, that nothing would change anyway, that this was just part of university life.
The infrastructure that’s been built – anonymous reporting tools, online portals, trained liaison officers, believe-and-support protocols – represents real progress in surfacing experiences that institutions previously ignored, and when a student from a marginalised background finally feels able to report harassment they’ve endured for months, that’s the system working as intended.
The paradox is that these same systems that give voice to the vulnerable also may get dominated by students who think their housemate using their milk constitutes theft requiring formal investigation.
And you can’t restrict access without potentially silencing those who fought hardest to be heard – international students navigating cultural differences about what constitutes harassment, disabled students facing access barriers, working-class students without the social capital to frame experiences in institutional language.
The irony is that students most likely to need these systems may now be competing for resources with a tsunami of minor complaints, while staff spend days investigating committee disagreements, knowing that dismissing anything with “harassment” attached creates risk, but also knowing that every hour spent on trivial disputes is an hour not spent supporting genuine victims.
Why?
So what’s going on? One theory is that students who spent formative teenage years in lockdown, mediating friendships through screens where you can block, mute, or ghost rather than navigate disagreement, now struggle with the messy, real-time negotiation that face-to-face conflict requires, defaulting instead to formal mechanisms that transform personality clashes into potential disciplinary offences requiring sub-committees and external investigators.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue students genuinely believe emotional discomfort causes psychological damage requiring institutional intervention, and Campbell and Manning describe a shift from dignity culture where you handled your own problems to victimhood culture where demonstrating harm brings social status. Jean Twenge’s data shows in-person friend time halved over fifteen years suggests this is simply a skills deficit from missing thousands of hours of practice at working things out.
The pandemic created a specific developmental gap for students who were 13 to 18 during 2020-2022, missing the precise window when teenagers learn through low-stakes conflicts in drama rehearsals and friendship group splits how to navigate disagreement without adult intervention, creating a cohort effect we’re seeing arrive at universities without the basic equipment for communal living.
But the most common theory surrounds success. If you look at the five classic barriers to complaint raising – the opportunity costs of formal versus informal resolution, aversion to confrontation, the need for social capital to bridge differences, the understanding of rights, and a fear of retaliation – at least for harassment complaints, these have all been formally (and partially successfully) lowered in HE in recent years. The problem is the volume that generates, especially of complaints not necessarily serious enough to warrant senior staff time.
Five crises colliding at once
The volume crisis is everywhere – SUs tell us that complaint numbers are up while many complaints seem trivial, yet still require formal processing because once magic words like “harassment” or “discrimination” appear, risk management protocols activate regardless of context.
Jurisdictional complexity means when a sports club WhatsApp argument becomes a harassment allegation, often it’s not clear whether whether the SU managing the club investigates, the university holding disciplinary power intervenes, or everyone spends weeks in meetings with legal services mapping responsibilities while students grow increasingly angry about institutional inaction.
Service design tensions emerge when students who vocally support diversity and inclusion in principle struggle with the practical trade-offs of inclusive spaces – the society that can’t understand why scheduling clashes with prayer times matters, the drama group frustrated that accessible venues cost more, the campaign group imploding because someone’s access needs conflict with someone else’s triggers, all generating complaints that mix legitimate accessibility concerns with resistance to change.
The cultural shift problem means positive changes in reporting culture that surfaced previously hidden harassment simultaneously create what staff perceive as dependency cultures – where students expect authorities to referee minor disputes rather than learning to navigate disagreement, transforming SUs into magistrates adjudicating personality clashes.
A compliance and health and safety approach adopted across SUs and universities when briefing and training new students emphasises rules, policies, and procedures – “here’s what you can’t do and here’s how to report it” – rather than building students’ practical skills for navigating conflict, creating compliance frameworks without capability development, teaching students their rights without teaching resolution skills, building linking capital to authority without bridging capital across difference.
The neurodivergent dimension
We are also told that complaints on SU desks increasingly involve neurodivergent students either not recognising their behaviour is unwanted – continuing conversations when others want them to end, interpreting direct communication as aggression, misreading social cues – or neurotypical students interpreting neurodivergent traits as deliberate harassment, and policies written for an “average neurotypical student” who doesn’t exist can’t handle this complexity.
SUs describe alarm bells ringing when hearing complaints – the student upset about someone’s “aggressive” directness who doesn’t realise they’re describing autistic communication patterns, the ADHD student reported for “deliberately disrupting” meetings when they’re struggling with executive function, the complaint about “creepy” behaviour that sounds like someone missing social cues rather than predatory intent.
But without disclosure, how do you navigate these conversations while maintaining confidentiality and fairness?
The OIA consultation
The OIA’s draft framework on harassment complaints is mainly about universities, and is a positive step – but it maintains studied silence on plenty of operational questions that matter.
Should students should sit on harassment panels and if so should that be sabbs? When do (or should) SU codes defer to university procedures? Who funds the increasingly complex advice services demands that the document assumes exist? How can small SUs manage conflicts when the welfare officer who received the disclosure also sits on the panel?
The doesn’t discuss neurodivergent students navigating these processes, says little about distinguishing between social difference and genuine harassment, little about the training needed to recognise when complaints stem from misunderstanding rather than misconduct, and maintaining instead a framework designed for clear-cut cases that rarely exist in messy student communities.
What SUs need to say
The consultation window offers an opportunity to inject operational reality into regulatory design, and SUs in England and Wales should be explicit about the impossible balance between protecting genuine victims and managing capacity, between accessibility that catches serious issues and systems that don’t collapse under trivial ones.
We’ve got a guide to responding elsewhere on the site.
Jurisdictional clarity is surely a non-negotiable – precise thresholds distinguishing harassment from interpersonal conflict, documented handover protocols between SU and university processes, explicit statements about ownership when complaints span both territories, recognition that service design tensions generate legitimate complaints alongside resistance to inclusion.
Resource reality needs acknowledging – who funds advisors when every section directs students to SU support, what happens when supporting both parties creates conflicts, how three-person SUs manage complex investigations, what occurs in summer when officers disappear but complaints continue.
And alternative models already operating successfully go unmentioned – some universities exclude SU officers from panels, others use trained volunteer pools, some share resources across institutions, all issues that SUs will want to think about raising.
Our complaints project
To help with how SUs might respond internally, we’re again running a complaints in SUs project early in the new year.
We’ll run for six months with three distinct phases – diagnostic research from January to March where we’ll map the reality of complaint handling across participating SUs, intervention design from April to May where we’ll develop and test new approaches based on what we learn, and dissemination from June onwards where we’ll share tools, templates and guidance with the wider sector.
The diagnostic phase will involve three parallel investigations that participating SUs can engage with at different levels depending on capacity – we’ll conduct 60-90 minute semi-structured interviews with staff and sabbatical officers about what complaints reach them that shouldn’t, what stops local resolution, and what they need to handle things differently, run facilitated group sessions examining specific anonymised complaints to understand where they could have resolved earlier and what prevented that, and review procedures across the sector to identify what distinguishes SUs managing effectively from those drowning.
We’re particularly interested in understanding the five barriers that stop students resolving conflicts themselves – the opportunity costs of formal versus informal resolution, their aversion to confrontation, whether they have social capital to bridge differences, their understanding of when formal processes are actually needed, and their fear of retaliation if they try direct resolution – because interventions need to address these specific factors rather than just telling students to talk to each other.
The intervention design phase will develop practical tools based on what we learn, and the dissemination phase produces tangible outputs SUs can use.
Do just drop us a line with a named contact if you’d like to get involved.
Transformation is possible
When every disagreement becomes a formal complaint, students lose opportunities to develop skills they’ll need in workplaces where HR won’t adjudicate personality clashes, staff lose capacity for strategic work while investigating petty disputes, and SUs lose focus on empowering students rather than processing their inability to coexist with difference.
We’re hoping our project acknowledges, rather than ignores, the paradox of needing accessible systems that don’t collapse under their own success, the need to work with participating unions to map what’s actually happening on the ground, and to develop interventions that build capability while maintaining protection. Do get involved if you can.
