Lad culture and sexual harassment in universities

Posted on 4 October 2018

Sexual harassment is widespread and affects the lives of women and girls, in particular, every day. In the face of calls to tackle sexual harassment and violence, the UK government committed to carry out a review to see if misogyny should be treated as a hate crime. This review is a welcome and important step, but studies we conducted at UK universities indicate that the law alone won’t be enough to tackle sexual harassment.

Vanita Sundaram (Professor of Education, University of York) and Carolyn Jackson (Professor of Gender and Education, University of Lancaster) have a new article about their research project speaking with university staff about ‘lad culture.’ They interviewed 72 staff members at all levels across six universities and found that staff often did not recognise lad culture--a type of behaviour associated with sexual harassment and violence--as an issue at their university, despite evidence of how normalised it is. Read the full article on 'Lad culture and sexual harassment in universities: it's about more than a 'few bad apples'' on The Conversion web pages.