Students and the strategy to halve violence against women and girls
Jim is an Associate Editor (SUs) at Wonkhe
Tags
She also said that much of the criticism for previous strategies under previous governments was that they didn’t get other government departments to actually engage with it – and that she had that issue very much in her head as she was seeking to write the strategy.
That sounded promising, given that “a national strategy or piece of legislation has ignored students” is pretty much a genre on this site these days.
The strategy itself notes the growing evidence that misogyny and sexual harms are a “significant concern” in higher education, referencing the Office for Students’ survey data on the scale of the problem from September.
That told us that 24.5 per cent of final-year undergraduates who responded to the survey had experienced sexual harassment since starting their studies, and that round one in seven had experienced sexual assault/violence. But only 13.2 per cent of respondents who experienced sexual harassment in the preceding year made a formal report to their university or college. And of those who did make a report, 46.7 per cent said their experience of reporting was good and 39.3 per cent said it was poor.
The strategy also notes that in ONS crime survey analysis, a significantly higher proportion of full-time students experience domestic abuse (14.1 per cent) compared with people in managerial and professional (6.8 per cent), intermediate (7.1 per cent) and routine and manual occupations (8.2 per cent).
The March 2025 iteration of the survey shows that a higher proportion of full-time students were victims of sexual assault in the last year than those in any other occupation type.
When Phillips was the shadow minister, the commons’ Women and Equalities Committee held a dedicated inquiry on attitudes towards women and girls in educational settings as part of their work on VAGW. OfS CEO Susan Lapworth used her appearance before the committee to talk about a new Condition of Registration and a prevalence survey:
If we can collect prevalence data that gives us a picture across the sector as a whole and an understanding of which kinds of students in which context are affected by this, and if we can then see that for individual universities, that lets us target our interventions. A university with high prevalence and low reporting would perhaps raise concerns and we would want to then understand in detail what was going on there and that would allow us to focus our effort.
The evidence review accompanying the strategy identifies universities as effective settings for prevention interventions, with the strongest evidence base around bystander programmes aimed at preventing sexual violence.
The evidence shows strong positive effects on student knowledge, attitudes, bystander efficacy and intervention behaviours – one meta-analysis found students performed about 5 more intervention acts in the 4 months following a programme. Separately, rape myth acceptance training delivered to undergraduate students showed “relatively strong evidence” for decreasing harmful beliefs and increasing victim empathy.
The resultant strategy and action plan is full of work in schools and colleges. But despite the overwhelming evidence, you may be surprised to learn that the sole action that relates to HE is:
In higher education, the Office for Students introduced a new registration condition in August 2025 requiring universities to publish clear, accessible policies and procedures for reporting, investigating and responding to harassment and sexual misconduct.
In other words, to the extent to which any actions will be taken in HE, they’ll be undertaken by universities themselves with student fee income.
When OfS published the NSS-add on prevalence survey results in September, it said that a more detailed analysis, including results for different combinations of characteristics and findings by academic subject, would be published “at a date to be confirmed”. We’ve heard nothing since. It’s also not repeating the exercise during NSS 2026, and has not said a word about any plans to do so in the future.
The OfS strategy consultation said it would “continue to collect and publish data that shows the prevalence of sexual misconduct” to ensure “continued focus” on the issue and to measure the impact of its regulation and the steps institutions are taking. The final version’s “roadmap” merely says that it will “regulate” to prevent harassment and sexual misconduct and to ensure that institutions respond effectively when incidents occur.
And on that domestic violence and abuse issue, when OfS ran its consultation on E6, some respondents explicitly said that it is not properly captured by the definition of harassment, while some pushed for the framework to hook into wider law and safeguarding expectations, including calls to reference the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. OfS rejected those calls.
Over in the ROI, a national framework on sexual violence and harassment was published by the government in 2019, the Higher Education Authority published an implementation plan in 2021, and a Speak Out National Data Report has been aggregating anonymised data for a few years now to identify national trends, patterns, and areas needing intervention.
12 universities are developing a campaign to address the issues, and an expert group has now identified five priority areas for advancing the framework that include improving safety measures and risk assessments through expert-informed national guidelines and training, the establishment of safer staff recruitment practices, tools to measure the effectiveness of ESVH initiatives and developing specialist staff training. There are no national frameworks, action plan, funding or coordinated initiatives in England.
Every single lever and power of the state.
Good grief.
Thanks for this analysis. It is shocking that HE is so absent in the strategy’s action plan.
It’s worth noting that in Ireland, not only have they got a national framework with centrally funded priority action areas but also they carried out a national staff and student survey in 2021 and are planning to run it again in 2026. So as well as the Speak Out data (which is quite limited for various reasons) there is very fine-grained, high quality, academically rigorous data from a large national dataset.
The OFS data is significant and important but very limited compared to Ireland’s.
In the UK we can only watch and weep.
“Every single lever and power of the state?” If that is the Government’s claim, it invites an obvious question: why does higher education still sit outside a statutory duty of care? This matters because a duty of care is not symbolic or issue-specific; it is one of the clearest legal mechanisms through which the state allocates responsibility for preventing foreseeable harm.
In 2023, the Rishi Sunak government explicitly rejected a statutory duty of care for higher education providers. Ministers argued against it in principle, claiming existing regulation and common law were sufficient and that legislation risked unintended consequences.
That refusal now sits uneasily alongside the language used by the Keir Starmer government, which says it will deploy every lever and power of the state to address violence against women and girls.
The strategy itself accepts that students — particularly women — face elevated risks; that universities are central environments for both harm and prevention; and that reporting systems often fail survivors. Yet the policy response for higher education remains cautious and indirect. Universities are steered towards guidance and regulatory conditions overseen by the Office for Students. These mechanisms matter, but they are process-based. They do not impose a clear legal responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm.
A statutory duty of care would not guarantee safety or criminalise institutions for every incident. It would clarify responsibility by establishing, in law, that universities must anticipate risk and act reasonably in light of what they know — a standard familiar in other safety-critical sectors.
Crucially, a duty of care is harm-based. It establishes a single legal baseline for how institutions should anticipate and respond to foreseeable harm across different contexts. Seen this way, the VAWG strategy does not create a new case for a statutory duty of care; it exposes the consequences of not having one.
What has also changed since 2023 is the evidential landscape. The British Medical Association has now added its voice to the call for a statutory duty of care after examining the experiences of medical students, particularly the role of power imbalances and fear of repercussions in suppressing reporting.
If the Government genuinely intends to use every lever and power of the state, it must explain why a foundational, harm-based duty of care for universities remains excluded. That is not a matter of tone or advocacy; it is a question of policy coherence.