‘Closing their eyes’: university rape reporting criticised

A campaign group has criticised universities that are “unable or unwilling” to say how many of their students were raped last year, but academics have questioned whether institutions are doing anything wrong.

Enough, which describes itself as a social movement seeking to prevent rape, sent 100 UK universities Freedom of Information requests on the topic. Thirty-four provided data on the number of rapes reported to them during 2025-26 but the same number said they were unable to because they did not record rape separately from other forms of sexual misconduct.

Twenty-six refused to respond or failed to do so within the 20-day time frame for FoI responses.

Enough said that universities risked “closing their eyes” to the reality of rape on campuses. The 34 institutions that did record data on rape reported 106 incidents last year, and the non-profit said that this was likely to be a significant underestimate.

In surveys of English students conducted by sector regulator the Office for Students (OfS), about 14 per cent of respondents report being a victim of sexual assault or violence.

“Rape must be measured to be addressed,” said Katie White, co-founder of Enough, which had an online promotion for its self-swab DNA testing kits for sexual assault banned by the advertising watchdog earlier this year.

“When universities group rape with all other forms of sexual misconduct, they are obscuring the prevalence and importance of this crime.”

However, experts suggested it was far from a settled question.

Last year, the Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that about 7.3 per cent of women had been the victim of sexual assault by rape or penetration since they turned 16. However, only 2.8 per cent of rape allegations recorded by police led to prosecutions in the year ending March 2024.

Graham Towl, emeritus professor of psychology at Durham University and an expert on sexual violence in higher education, said higher education institutions ought to know that students, particularly young women, are at an “inflated risk” of rape.

But he said there had historically been “insufficient” regulation on addressing the problem, until the OfS introduced its regulatory framework on harassment and sexual misconduct in 2025.

English institutions must now maintain a “single comprehensive source of information which sets out policies and procedures on subject matter relating to incidents of harassment and sexual misconduct”.

“It was pretty much an indictment of the sector that the regulator had to step in and effectively make universities do something about it,” said Towl.

Nonetheless, Towl said he would be “disinclined” to record the offence as rape on university campuses, stressing that institutions “fundamentally aren’t criminal justice agencies”.

“I would record it as non-consensual penetrative sex,” he said. Towl said he would always encourage reporting to universities because they can use the monitoring to “potentially provide counselling support” to those affected, as well as making “educational adjustments” for individual victims if need be.

University of Oxford research fellow Bridget Steele, who analyses the causes of gender-based violence and how policy interventions might respond to it, said recording rape separately from other forms of sexual misconduct was a source of “tension in the field”.

“Some people talk about sexual violence as though there’s a severity of incidents, with many people thinking rape is the most severe,” she said. “But there’s also been this movement from survivors and activist groups to say that trauma comes in all different forms.”

Steele said she believed universities had a vital role to play where other procedures might let victims down, and suggested institutions could do more to monitor “the nature, the details and the context of that violence”.

“To what extent is alcohol involved, what is the setting – is it in a bar, a campus setting, a private residence?” she asked. “Something I’ve been saying for a while is part of the reason why institutions are responsible for dealing with sexual violence misconduct cases in the way that they are is because of the failure of the legal and justice system to handle misconduct and sexual violence cases.”

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com