Hundreds of students have protested at the University of Warwick over the way it dealt with men involved in an online group chat threatening rape. Protestors are angry that the university reduced 10-year bans for two men who appealed to a year.
The content of the conversations
One member said how a girl he personally knows “deserves hair straighteners on her flaps” and that a girl who claims to have been sexually assaulted is “simply not attractive enough for all those things to occur to her”. The group chat was swiftly named “Fuck women disrespect them all”.
The boys were temporarily suspended and three of the students who sent the rape jokes also made racist and anti-Semitic comments. Three formal complaints were made to the university and 98 screenshots of the group chat were submitted as evidence.
Of the 11 of the suspended students, many of them hold senior and exec positions in academic and sporting societies at Warwick. One of the boys, Ryan Allison, is the outgoing Treasurer for Warwick History Society. He said a female student he knows should “be fingered vigorously by her own dad to teach her a lesson”, before referring to the same girl as an “absolute cum bucket”. Tom Dignum was also part of the chat, and is a member of the History Society Committee.
Warwick Students Union have since released a statement about the incident:
“Warwick SU is aware of the ongoing University investigation into a group Facebook chat involving a number of Warwick students. The SU condemns the content of these messages – together with all forms of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, ableism, and threats of violence – in the strongest possible terms.
The SU has been supporting the victims and will continue to do so. We are also proactively cooperating with the University’s ongoing investigation, and hope to see a conclusion as swiftly as possible.
If you have been affected by any of these issues, you can contact the Warwick SU Advice Centre or Wellbeing Support Services.”
However of the eight boys punished for the chat, six are now back at university. Warwick’s student union president called for the institution’s vice-chancellor Stuart Croft to resign unless he could explain why two of the perpetrators had their 10-year bans lifted, as hundreds marched on Warwick’s campus on Wednesday demanding urgent action into how the university “fail[ed] the victims” of the group chat in its investigation.
India-Mae, a finalist student studying History at Warwick, remarked “I have never felt more threatened by the possibility of sexual assault or rape before now.”
This is most definitely a nationwide problem at universities. In the weeks following the discovery of the group chat, evidence of a second group chat in Warwick surfaced.
Only this month it was uncovered that similarly repugnant behaviour was festering in group chats at the University of Sheffield. A medical school student is under investigation by the university after posting messages describing women in derogatory sexual terms in a social media chat group containing more than 240 fellow trainee doctors.
Students say the post is only the “tip of the iceberg” of an endemic “lad culture” within group chats of students at British universities.
To say that the language used to describe female students is disgusting is a vast understatement. A call to action is vitally necessary in order to protect university students amidst threats such as these.