University Spiking: How Not to Tackle It

The start of a new university year is always exciting. Academia! Learning! Meeting new people!

Unfortunately, around this time we also see a rise in drink spiking at the parties, clubs and bars attended by students.

The act of ‘spiking’ occurs when someone slips alcohol or drugs into someone’s drink without their knowledge or permission.

This isn’t a new problem for universities – Bristol’s student paper the Epigram published an investigation on the increase of spiking incidents in the city last year.

Additionally, there have been claims on social media of people now being injected whilst on nights out in Edinburgh, along with regular drink spiking.

Palatinate, the Durham student newspaper, has reported an increase in spiking incidents across the student body. This has become an unfortunate and terrifying feature of going back to university.

So the university has tried to reassure the student body. Which has gone about as well as their attempts to reassure students of colour on racism.

Recommended Reading: Racism: What more should universities do?

Durham Wellbeing said in a now deleted tweet: “Drink spiking is something you can prevent from happening to you and your friends.”

They also included a ‘#dontgetspiked’ slogan, which did not go down well with students.

Students, public figures, and the General Secretary of the UCU called them out on Twitter.

The Wellbeing Service may as well have tweeted: “try not to get raped x”. It would have been just as effective.

This feeds into the narrative that sexual assault is the victim’s fault rather than putting the onus on the perpetrator. I should be able to leave my drink in a pub alone without the fear someone is going to drug me in order to possibly assault me.

We all do everything we can to not get assaulted: from walking in well-lit areas, not walking home alone drunk – but it seems the assaulters aren’t really getting the message.

A commitment by Durham University to expel and help bring criminal charges against any student who is found spiking drinks might be a better message to put out there.

We all know that universities are generally terrible with dealing with sexual assault, but you would hope with everything that has happened to Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, and many other women who have been sexually assaulted and murdered, they may actually start taking this seriously.

Recommended Reading: Sarah Everard and the Met Police failure

Then again, I had the same hope after the Black Lives Matter protests and, well, it seems on both fronts that I’m just constantly being disappointed.

The idea that you can stop yourself from being assaulted needs to end. We need to re-focus the problem on the fact that there are people in the world that are cruel and feel entitled to another person.

They are the problem – and universities need to get better at dealing with students like this.

In the meantime, I have a better, more effective anti-spiking message which is free for all universities to use, no need to pay me for it: