Six universities have banned sex between lecturers and students and two authors have claimed that more should be doing the same.
The measures came into place after a survey found that only one in 20 institutions in England and Wales expressly forbids it.
Some 51 universities said they discouraged the relationships while 45 didn’t give any guidance.
Lancaster, Leeds, Nottingham Trent, the University of Greenwich, the University of Roehampton and UCL are the only universities which explicitly prohibit lecturer-student sex.
The authors of Unsafe Spaces: Ending Sexual Abuse in Universities disagree with the position that it’s wrong for universities to get involved in the private lives of consenting adults.
Eva Tutchell and John Edmonds argue that universities have a responsibility to protect their students and that ‘almost every’ relationship between a lecturer and a student ‘ends by hurting the student’, according to Times Higher Education.
They add: ‘It feeds a suspicion of favouritism which weakens faith in the assessment process and leaves a residue of disharmony and cynicism which persists well beyond the end of the affair.’
Ms Tutchell is an education consultant and Mr Edmonds is a visiting academic at King’s College London and Durham University.
The pair are unsure whether a sexual relationship between a lecturer and a student could ever be fully consensual because there is the possibility that the former will abuse their power.
They even suggest that the lecturers involved in such relationships are often ‘serial predators’.
Their book, which is set to be published on September 24, also estimates that a minimum of 15 percent of female students have been abused and three percent of male students have been abused.
Meaning that at least 50,000 students across England and Wales are sexually abused every year.
They found that 61 universities had recently introduced new complaint procedures in cases of alleged misconduct but only nine had noticeably made changes towards becoming more professional and evidence-based.
The universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Sussex; Keele, Durham and Lancaster universities; Goldsmiths, University of London, Imperial College London and the London School of Economics.
However, Ms Tutchell and Mr Edmonds suggested that a few of those had a ‘wake-up call’ as they were recently been the centre of sexual scandals.
The pair are fighting for a ‘major programme of reform’ for universities to be able to tackle sexual harassment and they are calling for institutions to carry out detailed surveys to find out the full scope of the issue.
Source: dailymail
