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Education, Children and Young People Committee 26 January 2022

26 Jan 2022 · S6 · Education, Children and Young People Committee

Item of business

Drink and Needle Spiking

Jill Stevenson (Association of Managers of Student Services In Higher Education) Watch on SPTV

I hope that I can pick up on some of those points. Notwithstanding the valid points that have been made about the issue being not just for students but for wider society, I want to reassure the committee about how seriously universities take it. Other than prevention, which we can talk about more, our primary focus is on encouraging any student who has been a victim of any type of gender-based violence, including spiking, to come forward and report, and on ensuring that we support them effectively. Almost all universities have been increasing their efforts in introducing centralised reporting systems to encourage people to come forward with reports, either named or anonymous, which will be dealt with centrally. Almost all of us—if not all of us—have trained up staff who can take those reports and who are trained in disclosures. Some of the institutions have what are called SVLOs—sexual violence liaison officers—who are trained to take those reports. Their role is then to work with the people who have come forward with disclosures, basically to ascertain what support they need. People may want to report formally to the university or to the police, or they may just want counselling or emotional support. That is what we have been investing in to help us to respond to those reports, as well as investing in the reporting systems that I mentioned. There has also been a lot of training of first responders. Although our SVLOs have more training in dealing with disclosures, we understand that a spiking could be reported to anybody in the university—for example, to a personal tutor or to somebody in the person’s accommodation, such as a cleaner. We are therefore investing in training to help staff to understand where to direct students who have disclosed something like that, so that they can get support. 09:45 Communication and awareness raising have been really important for us because of the transient populations that we have and all the valid points that have been made about concerns about reporting. A lot of work has been put into encouraging students to feel comfortable about coming forward—the point has already been made about not using victim-blaming sentiments but providing encouragement and support. There are examples of those campaigns being run in pre-entry, welcome and induction programmes in universities to get that awareness into people’s minds early in their student journey and throughout it. Hilary Sloan is right about communicating to the perpetrators that it is their fault and their responsibility and that it will not be tolerated in universities and wider society. However, there is an important message for victims as well—that they will be believed and supported, so they should please come forward. There are some good examples of messages that have gone out to students, and not just about spiking. During the pandemic, there were messages that said that, even if they had been socialising when they should not have been, they should not let that be a barrier to coming forward. They would not be judged for that and they would be supported. The same sort of messaging is now going out for spiking. I know that we need to get on and that we might touch on some of this later, but I have one final point to make. Universities are part of a partnership approach to the problem, and partnership is vital. We are an important cog in the wheel, but the partnership approach across cities is important. I can talk more about examples of really good partnerships that are in place between us, the police and the night-time economy, which clearly has a role here.

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Education, Children and Young People Committee 26 January 2022

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