Exploring Implementation of Gender-Based Violence Policies in English Higher Education

Introduction¹

Regulation to address gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) in higher education has been and is currently being implemented in national contexts globally. The US legislated for higher-education institutions’ (HEIs) legal responsibilities on sex discrimination early, with the federal guidance Title IX first introduced in 1972 and later updated in 2011 to reaffirm HEIs’ obligations to address sexual harassment and violence (Richards, Gillespie, and Claxton 2021). More recent regulation in this area has been adopted in some Canadian provinces (Bergeron, Goyer, Hébert, and Ricci 2019) and in Australia, where a federal Code of Practice for HEIs is being developed (Australian Government 2024).

The UK did not have any specific statutory requirements for HEIs to address GBVH at the time of the study that this article discusses. However, the UK context is of interest because, among European countries, its policy framework for tackling GBVH is more developed than that of other comparable countries. In England, statutory requirements in this area were announced in 2024 to come into force in August 2025 (Office for Students 2024). Prior to this, non-statutory policy guidance had been in place since 2016, following student activism on this issue (National Union of Students 2010). However, HEIs’ implementation of this was patchy, with some institutions adopting significant changes and others doing only very little (SUMS Consulting 2022, Universities UK 2019).These differences in policy implementation raise questions in regard to why some HEIs are more proactive in this area than others. Exploring the perspectives of staff who are involved in enacting work on GBVH in higher education can shed light on why and how some HEIs adopt non-statutory polices while others do not.Therefore, while the present article focuses on England only, it illuminates how this work might be taken up in other international contexts, particularly with a weak statutory regime.

This article focuses on one specific aspect of GBVH policy that has been a particular challenge: formal report handling, around which legal guidance was published in the UK in 2016. It draws on case examples of two institutions with contrasting responses in this área (one that had implemented policy changes to address this guidance and one that had not - to ask what catalysts and obstacles shape GBVH policy implementation in higher education.

Policy Implementation for GBVH in Higher Education

Even in places that have a political mandate and/or legal requirements for HEIs to address GBVH, these are filtered through a complex set of institutional and extra-institutional factors that can facilitate or hinder relevant work (Simonsson, Ovesen, Steinþórsdóttir, and Husu 2024). An analysis of 16 case studies of HEIs across 15 European countries that explored the effects and consequences of the design and implementation of institutional measures and responses to gender-based violence (Ranea-Triviño, Pajares, Bustelo, and Jaquetto 2022) found that such work was characterised by an “incident-driven approach” and an absence of strategy (Ranea-Triviño et al. 2022: 84-85) and that most institutions relied on informal procedures alongside or instead of formal procedures (Ranea-Triviño et al. 2022: 5). Facilitating factors for this work were found both externally to the institution (such as COVID-19, the broader gender-related political context, or government mandates or guidelines - as well as internally, such as in the form of political support from senior management, partnerships with specialist organisations, and in relation to individual actors, personal activism, and feminist beliefs and/or gender expertise.

Indeed, in the wider UK context, the simple fact of GBVH has been a highly influential factor in shaping policy implementation. In a survey of 68 HEIs in the UK, the most important factor for an organisation’s approach to preventing and responding to harassment and sexual misconduct was “incidents of harassment and sexual misconduct affecting students” (SUMS Consulting 2022: 20). The second and third most important factors were “input from victim-survivors of harassment and sexual misconduct” and only then the actions of the regulator (in this case, the Office for Students’ “statement of expectations”, which preceded and foreshadowed the regulatory requirements introduced in 2024) (SUMS Consulting 2022: 20). These findings - that actual incidents are the main driver of action - reflect the fact that nearly one in five students experiences sexual violence in any academic year (Steele, Mackenzie, Melendez- Torres, Degli, and Humphreys 2023) and many students are subjected to such violence and harassment from other students at the same HEI (Bull and Turner-McIntyre 2023). It appears, then, that students’ need for institutional support to continue their studies while or after experiencing GBVH is pushing HEIs to act.

Nevertheless, differences between HEIs in regard to the work they are doing need to be explained. Institution-specific analyses highlight varying catalysts for change. At Yale, a Title-IX investigation alongside “several serious incidents of sexual misconduct” led to institution- wide change (Bagley, Natarajan, Vazley, Wexler, and McCarthy 2012: 8). At Michigan State University, “a large-scale institutional crisis [i.e. the Larry Nassar case] served as a catalyst for institutional reckoning” (Campbell, Munford Moylan, PettyJohn, Schweda, Fedewa, Rosen, Fersguson, Beal, and Buchanan 2022: 3). In addition, student activism has often been a driver (Lewis and Marine 2019; Marine and Lewis 2020; McCall, Luu, Krogh, Phelan Dempesey, Acosta, Marshall, Svejkar, Pruscino, and Beres 2024: 1598). National policy and media attention on this issue - such as Australia’s 2017 “Change the Course” report - have also been identified as influential (McCall et al. 2024: 1598), as has the presence and commitment of academic and external experts on gender-based violence (Towl 2016). By contrast, hindrances to this kind of work include lack of awareness of the prevalence of harassment in university life and understanding it as “normal” (Lombardo and Bustelo 2022). In the UK context, Phipps (2018) has claimed that the neoliberalisation of higher education has inhibited HEIs’ work in this area, while others argue that despite problems created by marketisation, its impacts on addressing GBVH in higher education have not been straightforward (Bull and Dey 2022).

Existing studies of policy implementation in this area have focused on institutional responses as a whole (Bagley et al. 2012; Beres, Treharne, and Stojanov 2019; Campbell et al. 2022; McCall et al. 2024; Simonsson et al. 2024; Towl 2016). This literature - with the exceptions outlined below - has not explored institutional practices for handling formal reports. Indeed, even in an example where a “whole-of-institution” approach is relatively well-developed, “case management and policy” remains “under development” (Beres et al. 2019: 656).This lack of progress reveals how challenging this area is for HEIs. In the US, statutory requirements in the form of Title IX have been in place for some time, but “due process” has nevertheless become a political battleground (Brodsky 2021), and the implementation of Title IX has led to policies that are overwhelming and confusing for survivors (Bedera 2022) with poor outcomes that exacerbate gender inequalities (Bedera 2023) and with staff operating in a “fear-based environment” (Cruz 2021: 369). In the UK, with Erin Shannon (2024), I have outlined how “gender regimes” of HEIs affect formal reporting in ways that contribute to the failure of sexual-harassment complaints to be upheld. Sara Ahmed (2012) argues that the institutional climate that enables harassment and/or discrimination also shapes institutional responses. There is also a danger of “criminal-justice drift”, as a result of which formal HEI processes end up mirroring criminal-justice responses (Cowan and Munro 2021), giving more rights to responding than to reporting parties (Bull, Calvert-Lee, and Page 2021; Cowan et al. 2024). This contributes to poor outcomes for reporting parties (Bull and Page 2022), who experience “institutional listening while silencing” (Oman and Bull 2022) while institutional processes fail to address the main reason why they report: to protect others (Bull 2022). Existing studies of staff perspectives on GBVH-policy implementation in higher education are US-based, analysing statutory rather than non-statutory policy implementation within a very different socio-political and higher-education context (Bedera 2022, 2023, 2024; Cruz 2021). Other studies - both within and outside the US - draw on accounts of institutional change led by the respective authors them-selves and, as a result, may be limited by having to name the HEI(s) discussed (Bagley et al. 2012, Beres et al. 2019, Campbell et al. 2022, Lombardo and Bustelo 2022, McCall et al. 2024, Towl 2016). In studies that do anonymise HEIs, institutional case studies are amalgamated to ensure anonymity, which means that differences between specific HEIs cannot be explored (Simonsson et al. 2024). Furthermore, this literature focuses primarily on what changes or practices were implemented rather than exploring the motivations and drivers behind these changes. By contrast, the present article explores different approaches to the implementation of one specific policy in two English HEIs.

Policy Context and Framework

This article focuses on the implementation of non-statutory policy guidance within two English HEIs prior to the introduction of statutory regulation in 2024. In 2016, following years of activism by the National Union of Students as well as the violence-against-women sector (End Violence Against Women Coalition 2015, National Union of Students 2010), the lobby group for the higher-education sector Universities UK published non-statutory guidance for HEIs for addressing student-student sexual violence, harassment, and hate crime (Universities UK 2016), accompanied by legal guidance that they had commissioned from law firm Pinsent Masons (Pinsent Masons/Universities UK 2016).

Prior to 2016, the so-called Zellick guidance had been in place, which outlined that student disciplinary issues where the alleged misconduct may also constitute a criminal offence should be referred to the police rather than investigated by the university under its disciplinary codes.This was overturned by the 2016 guidance, which states that HEIs themselves should take action on breaches of their policies - such as sexual violence that contravenes staff or student codes of conduct - whether or not the reporting parties choose also to go to the police (Pinsent Masons/Universities UK 2016).

In practice, in instances where students or staff did not report to the police or where the police had taken no action on reports, this guidance provides a legal basis for HEIs to carry out risk assessments, implement safety (or “precautionary”) measures, and investigate breaches of their institutional policies that might also constitute criminal offences. The accompanying report Changing the Culture (Universities UK 2016) outlined a “whole institution” approach for tackling this issue, including a chapter on disciplinary processes that addressed the implementation of Pinsent Masons’ guidance. As such, this policy change required a significant amount of capacity building from HEIs in terms of systems, expertise, and resourcing. However, in a 2022 survey of 68 HEIs in the UK, only 63% of institutions stated that they had fully implemented the guidance, while 20% had not started with any such implementation (Jordan et al. 2023: 68, SUMS Consulting 2022: 48).This is one motivation behind this article’s exploration of obstacles and catalysts to this implementation.

In the analysis below, I adapt Isabelle Engeli and Amy Mazur’s (2018) approach of “Gender-Equality Policy in Practice” for my framing of the discussion. This approach outlines three stages of analysis of policy implementation: first, analysis of the types of implementation instruments used in this process; second, the process through which implementation takes place; and finally, the extent to which policies lead to gender transformation, i.e.“the extent to which gender policies have succeeded in eliminating gender and sexual hierarchies to create a more gender-just society” (Engeli and Mazur 2018: 120).

The first stage in the implementation of the Pinsent Masons guidance in UK higher education involved two types of implementation instruments. The first, incentive instruments, “provide encouragements for target groups to adopt or change a particular behaviour” (Engeli and Mazur 2018: 115). These included the legal guidance itself as well as grant-making by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to HEIs for implementing this agenda (AdvanceHE 2020). The second type, capacity and learning instruments, encouraged policy implementation through “tools that provide[d] resources, knowledge and skills to catalyse and coordinate the actions of individual policy actors” (AdvanceHE 2020).These included a report published by the lobby group for the higher-education sector Universities UK, which outlined how this guidance should be operationalised (Pinsent Masons/Universities UK 2016), as well as annual conferences and further resources.

The second stage of implementation, for the purposes of this policy, is situated within HEIs; it is this stage on which I focus in the following pages. An analysis of this stage includes asking which (networks of) actors are involved, on which resources they draw in order to be part of this process, and, as a result of this, whose claims are heard.

Finally, the third stage assesses to which extent policies lead to gender transformation. This can only be assessed 5-10 years after a given policy is put in place (Engeli and Mazur 2018: 120). As this timeframe had not elapsed at the point of data collection, this stage is not included in my analysis.

While Engeli and Mazur’s (2018) approach is designed to assess the implementation of government policies, here I use it to examine a non-statutory policy agenda. Therefore, in order to adapt the framework, I focus on what Engeli and Mazur call implementation battles during the second stage (2018: 117), which include obstacles and catalysts to implementing the agenda within HEIs, including building the capacity necessary for it. A further difference from the approach by Engeli and Mazur is that the policy analysed here is not explicitly one about gender equality and, indeed, has been criticised for taking a gender-blind approach to sexual violence and harassment (Jackson and Sundaram 2020). Nevertheless, in the absence of more specific tools for studying policy implementation in the context of GBVH, the chosen approach provides a suitable framework.

Methods

This article draws on data from a larger study that aimed to understand how higher-education institutions in the UK are handling staff and student GBVH complaints as part of a whole-institution approach, drawing on interviews carried out during 2021 with staff and students that had reported or attempted to report GBVH to their respective HEIs as well as staff across three HEIs that were involved in the handling of such reports (Bull and Shannon 2023, Shannon and Bull 2024). Following data collection in the first institution (not included here), it became clear that uneven policy implementation was an important factor in HEIs’ responses to reports. Therefore, for the subsequent two institutions, interviewees were asked about the ways in which change had been initiated or managed in their institution; it is this data on which the following analysis draws.

By contrast with the US, where there is often a specific member of staff or a specific office responsible for implementing GBVH policies (such as the Title IX coordinator), in the UK this work is dispersed across different roles. As a result, interviewees held a wide range of roles across the institutions, including academic staff in management roles, student services (specialist in sexual violence support or discipline staff), complaints, and counselling. Advice workers and sabbatical officers from students’ unions across both case-example institutions were also interviewed (see Table 1). This wide range of interviewees’ roles is indicative of differences between HEIs in GBVH policy implementation as well as the often-fragmented nature of this work at HEIs.

The institutions were chosen based on two factors: access and variation. Rather than attempting to generalise, the present article explores differences and similarities in policy implementation across two contrasting examples (Yin 2013). The point of variation is that one HEI had implemented the Pinsent Masons guidance at the point of data collection, while the other had not. For reasons of anonymity, contextual details of the case-example institutions are kept to a minimum.

Access was negotiated via a gatekeeper at each institution. Gate-keepers were current or previous staff at the institutions with whom the researcher had connected through her networks; this proved invaluable, and access was granted to staff who had been central to this work within each HEI. Due to these practical limitations on access, it was not possible to match people in the same roles across each HEI. There were also key actors within each HEI who were not accessible for interviews, either because they had left the institution or because they did not respond to requests for participation.

Conducting interviews was chosen as the method of study rather than policy analysis. This was because there already existed policy-based analyses (Jordan et al. 2023; SUMS Consulting 2022; Universities UK 2019) and because interviews can shed light on the reasons for differences in policy implementation. The interviews were carried out in autumn 2021 as semi-structured interviews and explored interviewees’ perspectives on the challenges of implementing formal reporting processes for GBVH in higher education - i.e. the main requirement of the Pinsent Masons/Universities UK (2016) guidance - across staff-student and student-student complaints.

Using a feminist epistemology (Wise and Stanley 1993), the wider project prioritised methods and data that would support social change in order to make HEIs safer and more equal. Such an epistemology assumes that knowledge is “situated, specific and local to the conditions of its production and thus to the social location and being of its producers” (Wise and Stanley 1993: 227). As such, interviewees’ accounts are not seen as the “objective truth” about their respective institutions but as a partial and situated perspective. Based on this perspective, the data were analysed with the assumption that interviewees presented views shaped by their particular roles, status, and lengths of tenure within the institutions.

The data analysis involved the creation of narrative summaries of all individual interviews, then grouping these by institution and summarising the catalysts and obstacles in implementing GBVH policy and practice that were identified in each. Next, a thematic analysis was carried out of the awareness of and the reasons for institutional responses as well as the explanations of how change had happened within the HEIs. The analysis provides a composite picture of each HEI’s response and shows where interviewees had differing perspectives on a particular issue. By contrast with other studies that have used data from interviews with staff working in this space (Bedera 2022, 2023; Cruz 2021), the present analysis is positioned primarily at the level of the institution rather than of the individual member of staff.

My own positionality as a researcher, critic, and activist in this space undoubtedly shaped the interview data as well as the analysis.² Most interviewees were already aware of my research and activism in this area as founder and director of the research and campaigning organisation The 1752 Group. This positionality seemed to be an advantage; interviewees sometimes spoke very frankly about the issues in implementing the policy agenda within their institutions as well as about the limitations and gaps in their institutional responses. As such, I managed to bypass accounts of “happy talk” as Ahmed (2012) describes in relation to diversity practitioners, where “to work for institutions, as practitioners do, can require that you develop a habit of talking in mission talk […] a way of telling a happy story of the institution that is at once a story of the institution as happy” (Ahmed 2012: 10).While interviewees - perhaps with the exception of students’ union officers and staff, who were independent of HEIs - may still have been presenting an overly positive version of their institutions, there was a clear overlap between the challenges named by complainants and by staff handling reports (Bull and Shannon 2023), which suggests that “happy talk” was not a major issue in relation to the validity of the data. In addition, my expert knowledge of policy and practice within this area enabled me to have detailed conversations with interviewees about the specificities of their institutional approaches and to critically assess their levels of compliance with existing policy guidance.

The ethical review was conducted by the ethics committee at the University of Portsmouth’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS). Anonymising institutions was crucial for data collection, and the process of anonymisation was discussed with interviewees. As a result, names of roles as well as other small details have been amended to ensure anonymity, and specific dates of key changes have been omitted. All interviewees were offered the opportunity to edit or withdraw their transcripts before data analysis, and one interviewee from Institution 2 reviewed a draft of the article.

Findings

The following provides an overview of obstacles and catalysts to policy implementation at each of the case-study institutions, from the perspectives of interviewees and across three areas that affected capacity building: negative/positive feedback loops; informal networks; and strategy, leadership, and resourcing.

Concluding Discussion

This article described how non-statutory guidance for UK HEIs published in 2016, which set out their legal duty to take action when receiving reports of sexual misconduct that may also be a criminal offence, had been implemented in Institution 2 but not in Institution 1. It outlined obstacles and catalysts for implementing relevant policy, including challenges with building the capacity to actually deliver it.

Institution 1’s approach was characterised by ad hoc structures and processes, negative feedback loops inhibiting capacity building, and informal networks rather than strategic leadership, which led to a lack of resources for this work. As a result, the non-implementation of this policy meant that, at the time of the interviews in 2021, there were no systems in place for precautionary measures to support students that reported sexual violence, no risk-assessments or case-management processes, and the disciplinary process for addressing sexual violence and harassment within the institution was not fit for purpose. Subsequently to data collection at Institution 1, the new guidance was eventually adopted. However, its slow uptake - more than five years after its publication - shows that compliance with legal guidance was not a priority.

Institution 2, by contrast, had implemented systems for handling student-student GBVH reports, in line with the 2016 guidance.These changes had not, according to interviewees, been driven by the national legal guidance. Instead, a “watershed case”, in which a reporting party had taken her own life, had led to “a real wake-up moment” for staff across the institution, similarly to accounts from Beatriz Ranea- Triviño et al. (2022: 88) and Rebecca Campbell et al. (2022). Build- ing on that moment, interviewees described how key staff had driven change with the support of senior management.The tragic “watershed case” not only led to significant changes across the institution, but also shaped the direction of these changes and the priorities in them. For example, Institution 2 was particularly concerned with precautionary measures and assessing risks in student-student cases. Therefore, the institutional response was shaped not only by the “watershed case”, but also by the particular challenges it had raised. In this way, positive feedback loops had compounded the changes introduced; the more reports of GBVH were received, the more the institution learned about handling such cases.

There were similarities between the two institutions. Both struggled with building capacity and with sustained support from senior leadership for this work. Another similarity was the mobilisation of informal networks to address GBVH. At Institution 1, these informal networks were for the most part unable to get traction to embed policy and practice changes. By contrast, at Institution 2, the informal networks did implement systems and process changes.This could be a result of the “watershed case” at Institution 2. Nevertheless, given the prevalence of GBVH in higher education, it is almost inevitable that Institution 1 would have also had very serious, high-risk cases, and it is possible that a culture of naivety around GBVH impeded such cases leading to change.

Feedback loops worked in opposite ways at each institution. At Institution 2, implementing systems for handling formal reports led to more cases being reported, which led to further institutional learning and progress. At Institution 1, the institutional culture as well as a lack of systems/processes, data, and expertise on GBVH meant that negative feedback loops reinforced the status quo; scarcely any reports were received, so the institution did not build capacity, expertise, or systems to handle them.

While the case-example institutions were not described in detail in order to enable anonymity, institutional context is important, as UK higher education is highly stratified, with levels of resources and prestige differing greatly between institutions (Boliver 2015). However, perhaps surprisingly, both of the case-example institutions discussed in this article had similar rankings in national league tables, and were not among the most elite, resource-rich institutions.This suggests that institutional prestige and status may not be decisive factors in shaping how HEIs navigate this issue, as even between two institutions of similar status, responses were very different.

Rather, this analysis has highlighted the importance of a “watershed case” as a decisive factor in driving change within an HEI. This case, as discussed, is highly unlikely to be an isolated incident but rather provides evidence of the high level of risk that HEIs and other education institutions carry in relation to addressing this issue. Given the prevalence of GBVH in higher education (Reynolds, Anyadike-Danes, Lagdon,Aventin, and Armour 2023; Steele et al. 2023), it should be assumed that all HEIs have had such extremely serious cases. It appears that it is the readiness of an institution to take them up and learn from them - and/or student/staff activism in pushing for change - that turns such cases into “watershed cases”.

Of course, it should not require the death of a student or staff member, or another serious failure, to incentivise HEIs to implement policies and practices to address GBVH.The question, therefore, arises: How does change occur without a “watershed case”? And how can gender transformation occur (using Engeli and Mazur’s framing) through the implementation of GBVH policies? The findings in this article suggests that legal frameworks - whether statutory or non-statutory - may be less effective in making change than might be assumed by policy makers. In the case of Institution 1, for example, it seems unlikely that the forthcoming introduction of regulation (Office for Students 2024) will immediately shift the institutional culture in ways that guarantee institution-wide commitment, resources, and support for staff responsible for such policies. As a result, such compliance-oriented changes may be ineffective; indeed, as Ahmed (2012) found in her work on equality and diversity policies in the UK, policies were designed to perform legal compliance but often did not influence practice. Similarly, in a study across three Nordic countries - Iceland, Sweden, and Finland - Angelica Simonsson and colleagues found that, despite the legal responsibility “to care” about gender-based violence, “this ambition was not matched by working conditions that would enable the appropriate care-giving work to be carried out in a sustainable way” (Simonsson et al. 2024: 15).

Furthermore, the new higher-education regulatory framework in England for addressing “harassment and sexual misconduct” is a light- touch one that will not involve systematic scrutiny of HEIs’ processes in this area (Bull 2024b, Office for Students 2024). Such a regime will not address the current lack of accountability measures for survivors or others let down by their institution (Bull and Page 2022). As a result, even with regulation, policy implementation in this area in the UK is likely to vary greatly across HEIs.

Instead, to achieve gender transformation, regulatory approaches should take into account the priorities of GBVH survivors: transparency and openness, alongside education and prevention (Bull 2024a), protecting others from suffering the same harm (Bull 2022), accountability within a “moral community” (Herman 2023), and multiple routes towards healing and justice (McGlynn and Westmarland 2019). While there are challenges in translating these priorities into institutional processes that ensure fairness to all parties, a progressive regulatory approach could create transparency by requiring data collection and publication from HEIs on this issue as well as by implementing structures that allow for independent scrutiny and better accountability of HEIs.

The analysis presented here has some limitations. First, as it seeks to provide a relatively detailed discussion of change processes, it only includes two HEIs. Second, the interview data reveal a snapshot of one moment and do not allow tracking change over time. Also, not all key actors at each institution could be interviewed. Despite these limitations, the article has gone beyond what policy analysis reveals, as it has outlined interviewees’ perspectives on implementing - or failing to implement - policies on GBVH.

In conclusion, this article has problematised analyses that homogenise the higher-education sector as uniformly blocking complaints or failing to address this issue. Rather, it reveals a more complicated reality where institutional actors are, for the most part, highly aware of the problems with their own institutional processes, and where HEIs have differing cultures around GBVH that shape policy implementation. As such, this analysis reveals space for hope that some HEIs are doing important work to address GBVH, even while progress is temporary and fragile.