Impact in Qualitative Research: Phoebe Martin on exploring campus sexual harassment
Dr Phoebe Martin is a Research Associate at King’s College London working on the project ‘Visual and Embodied Methodologies for Addressing Gender Based Violence’. Her research looks at the intersections of art and feminist activism. Her PhD, completed in 2022 at University College London looked at how activists in Peru use creative interventions around gender violence and reproductive justice. These actions, including art, performance, and audiovisual media create new spaces for social and cultural change in difficult political contexts.
This year the VEM (Visual and Embodied Methodologies) Network held a series of workshops with KCL students to use the technique ‘photovoice’ to reflect on their experiences and understandings of sexual harassment. These workshops formed part of a wider project using VEM to explore intersectional gendered violence and how these methods can be used to understand different forms of violence and new ways of working with these topics.
We know that sexual harassment is widespread on university campuses, but it difficult to establish the true scope as it is understudied. Campus sexual harassment can include cat-calling, inappropriate behaviour, unwanted touching and worse.
For students at a large central London university, the limits of the ‘campus’ are blurred: King’s spaces and residences are spread across the centre of the city. To explore students’ understandings of safety on campus from their own perspectives and in their own words, we turned to creative methods.
Photovoice
We held a series of workshops using the technique ‘photovoice’: this is a visual methodology in which participants capture images on a theme and write their own captions. In the workshops we asked students to take photos using their camera phones representing safe and unsafe places on campus and in their lives. They then sent these to us along with captions describing why they chose these images. Participants could also ‘stage’ scenes to represent particular issues, or be creative in their framing.
We did two different sets of photovoice workshops. In Spring 2024 we asked students to take photos in their own time, and then held a follow up focus group workshop a month later. In Autumn 2024, we held a second workshop where participants took photos on Strand Campus during the workshop, sent those to us via WhatsApp, and then we discussed their images in the same workshop. The second workshop format was more successful, as in the first iteration it was difficult to get participants to come to the follow up focus group, whereas for the autumn workshop their ideas and images were still fresh. However, in this workshop participants could only capture images within campus, so we didn’t see their experiences commuting or in student accommodation.
during the day, the campus feels safe [...] during the evening study spaces are empty, lights turn off, and buildings are quiet, and [students] start to feel on edge
Findings
The themes that emerged in the two workshops were: time, space, travel and home. Below we present some of the initial findings and images, based on students’ own descriptions, and discussions in the focus groups. These reflect the issues that participants themselves raised as in need of addressing.
Time
Most of our participants felt that during the day, the campus feels safe: there are lots of people around, and safety is not a concern. However, during the evening study spaces are empty, lights turn off, and buildings are quiet, and they start to feel on edge. Some of this is based on the perception of threats, but students did also recount particular incidents, for example when a male student exposed himself to a female student who was studying in an otherwise empty study space late at night. Another student recounted that a member of the estates team once started ‘chatting her up’ while she was studying at night. The quiet nighttime campus can make students feel vulnerable and allows some prey on that vulnerability.
Space
Keeping safe has much to do with perceptions and emotions around fear and threats, who might be a threat, and when what spaces feel safe. The newly renovated spaces in the Bush House buildings on the Strand Campus are designed in a way that make many feel safe. The exceptions to this are student bars and clubs, and some avoid on campus bars. Some students feel that ‘alcohol makes people unpredictable’, and it also ‘gives people an excuse to behave in a certain way’. Those who do enjoy a drink cover their glasses at all times or bring bottles with them they can close in order to avoid spiking. Overall, most students say they feel safe on King’s Campus, particularly in the newly refurbished buildings such as Bush House, with barriers, guards, and light and clean study spaces. However, all those barriers and fences, might also lock us in, and keep other possibilities out.
Travel
One theme that emerged particularly clearly was the journey to and from campus as an ‘unsafe’ space. Students think carefully about how they come to and from campus. Public transport is perceived as very safe according to some – as these tend to be busy places with security staff around - and very threatening by others. Students told us about incidents of abusive language, sexualised behaviour, and threats of physical contact. Some students only travel in daylight, making their days in winter particularly short. Others avoid taking public transport at all, restricting their freedom of movement to places that can be reached on foot.
Home
At the end of the day, coming home and being at home does not feel safe to all. Some students who live in residencies told us about maintenance staff who have the key to their rooms, and will enter without warning, making student residents feel understandably unsafe.
Conclusions
These images represent just beginning of our work with students to understand their perceptions and experiences of safety, sexuality and harassment on campus. These findings enabled us to broaden our definition of campus sexual harassment. As well as capturing ideas that are hard to put into words – for example general embodied feelings of safety – we also found issues that can be directly addressed in policy, for example greater privacy for students in residencies. Building on these findings and this methodology, over the coming term we will use other visual and embodied methodologies to explore new perspectives and build a more complex picture of students’ own understandings of these themes, and to communicate change to the university, policy makers and other students.