FOI_25-078 Female students reporting sexual misconduct
Date of response: 02 April 2025
We have now considered your request of 06 March 2025 for the following information:
Question 1. (a) For the combined total of the last three academic years (21/22) (22/23) and (23/24) how many cases have been reported to the university authorities of incidents when female students have claimed to have been the victim of a sexual assault or rape attack?
Question 1(b) How many of these were alleged to have been committed by a male student?
Question 2. Over the same time period please state what, if any, university disciplinary sanctions, were imposed on male students in connection with carrying out these alleged sexual assaults on female students?
Please state the exact number of each sanction on these offending students.
Please be specific in what these sanctions were – for example; banned from campus accommodation, expelled from the university, made to attend a consent course, write a letter of apology etc…
Question 3. How many of the offending students referenced in your answer to question 1(b) were allowed to continue with their studies at the university?
Question 4. For the combined total of the last three academic years (21/22) (22/23) and (23/24) how many cases have been reported to the university authorities of incidents when female students have claimed to have been the victim of any kind of sexual abuse or harassment from male students at the university?
If derogatory or abusive language was part of the complaint, either verbally or online, then for each case give the exact words that were alleged to have been used against the woman
Our response:
We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.
Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to ‘if derogatory or abusive language was part of the complaint (female students against male students), either verbally or online, then for each case give the exact words that were alleged to have been used against the woman’.
We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.
'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.
Information relating to student complaints of all sexual misconduct, including harassment, against fellow students, and if any abusive or derogatory language was used against the victim in each case, is held within several university departments, namely: Student Services (including Wellbeing, Talking Therapies, Mental Health and Counselling and reports made via our online reporting tool Report and Support), our Student Misconduct Investigation Team and our Access and Security department. There is no central record of where this information is held, and the information we do hold does not allow for easy extraction of whether any derogatory or abusive language formed part of the incident being reported.
For the period outlined in your request, we have identified 43 formal reports/complaints of a sexual misconduct, (where the victim/reporter was a female student and the alleged perpetrator was a male student), which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate all data held within the departments noted above. This would include reviewing notes made within Talking Therapies, Wellbeing, Mental Health/Counselling sessions, all data held by our Student Misconduct Investigation Team (where the alleged perpetrator was formally investigated for accusations of Sexual Misconduct - see our General Regulations for students – Regulation 10.1.18.1 and Regulation 10.18.1.2) and all reported information held by our Access and Security division, should the incident have been reported to Security personnel also.
We have calculated it would take a minimum of 2 hours per report of sexual misconduct, or 86 hours, to locate and manually interrogate all records held relating to each individual victim making a formal report/complaint of Sexual Misconduct against a male student to ascertain if any abusive or derogatory language formed part of the incident. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
To assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we would be able to provide all information relating to questions 1-4, and a response to the second half of question 4, relating to academic year 2023-24 only, for ‘If derogatory or abusive language was part of the complaint, either verbally or online, then for each case give the exact words that were alleged to have been used against the woman’.
We wish to state that in relation to reports of sexual assault and rape, our reporting structure does not easily allow for just rape and sexual assault reports to be extracted from our records. For the total number of reports of sexual assault and rape (question 1a) we would include all reports logged and recorded as Sexual Assault, Sexual Harassment, Sexual Misconduct, Allegation of Rape, and Indecent/Sexual Offence. For the number of reports concerning female student victims and male student perpetrators we would also include all categories as noted above.
With regards to question 2, please note that when a report of any of the above categories is made to the University, the victim in each case will be contacted (where their identity has been provided to allow us to do so) to seek their consent to refer the case to our Student Misconduct Investigation Team in order for a formal misconduct investigation to take place. Not all student victims wish to process a formal complaint or proceed with a formal disciplinary investigation, therefore not all perpetrators are investigated or sanctioned as a result of a formal investigation.
We also wish to note that in all cases the victim will be encouraged to report the incident to the Police, but again not all victims wish to do so.
Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.
We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.
We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.