By Juliette Font, WAVE Youth Ambassador 2024-2026
Universities are supposed to be spaces of learning, innovation, and equality. Yet across Europe, they are also places where women and LGBTQIA+ students disproportionately face gender-based violence (GBV): harassment, coercion, psychological abuse, sexual assault, rape.
Recent surveys show that GBV is not an occasional issue but a structural reality. The EU-funded UniSAFE project (2021–2024), which surveyed more than 40,000 students and staff across 15 countries, revealed staggering prevalence rates. The urgent question is no longer whether GBV exists in universities, but what universities are willing to do to stop it.
Violence as a common student experience across Europe
- 66% of women surveyed in UniSAFE reported at least one experience of GBV;
- The most frequent form was psychological violence (57%), followed by sexual harassment (31%).
- LGBTQIA+ students face compounded risks: higher levels of harassment, outing, and exclusion, as sexism, homophobia, and transphobia intersect.
Country-level studies paint the same disturbing picture:
- In France, six in ten students have been victims or witnesses of GBV during their studies.
- In Sweden, despite strong gender equality frameworks, widespread GBV persists in academic life.
- In Central and Eastern Europe, survivors face stigma, institutional denial, and systemic silence.
- In the UK and Ireland, harassment in residence halls, sports clubs, and student societies is often brushed off as a peer-to-peer problem.
- In Southern Europe, professor-student harassment remains disturbingly common.
Across all contexts, the conclusion is clear: for many women and LGBTQIA+ students, the university experience is marked not by safety, but by constant risks of harassment and violence.
Institutionalized violence: the second violence
If the prevalence of GBV is shocking, the deeper violence lies in how universities respond – or fail to respond.
Survivors describe confusing complaint systems, lack of confidentiality, fear of retaliation, and above all the sense that protecting institutional reputation matters more than justice. In many contexts, complaints vanish into opaque procedures, leaving students retraumatized and unheard.
This institutional silence amounts to a second form of violence: survivors are harmed first by perpetrators, then again by universities that silence or dismiss them.
Emerging responses: glimpses of progress
Not all responses are failures. Some initiatives offer promise:
- GenderSAFE (2024-2027): building harmonized reporting systems and survivor-centered support services.
- GENDERACTIONplus: developing zero-tolerance policy templates for universities.
- National campaigns in Switzerland and elsewhere raising awareness (through accountability lags).
But research warns against awareness without accountability: campaigns alone risk shifting the burden back onto survivors.
Call to action: from recognition to transformation
The time for surveys and reports has passed. If universities are to be truly safe spaces, they must:
- Create transparent and independent reporting systems that protect survivors.
- Build independent support structures with legal and psychological help.
- Provide mandatory training for students, professors, and staff.
- Enforce real accountability, sanctioning perpetrators and communication outcomes.
- Pursue cultural transformation, dismantling hierarchies of power and ending the normalization of harassment.
This is not only about protecting individuals. It is about defending the very integrity of universities as institutions of knowledge.
Conclusion: breaking the silence, building safe universities
Gender-based violence in European universities is no longer undeniable. What is missing is not knowledge but courage.
Universities must choose between maintaining the facade of equality while perpetuating silence or becoming leaders of cultural and structural transformation.
The call is clear: Break the silence. Protect survivors. Enforce accountability. Transform culture. Anything less is complicity.
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Author Bio:
Juliette Font is a WAVE Youth Ambassador (2024–2026) and a Master’s student at Sciences Po. In 2021, she led the #SciencesPorcs movement, breaking the silence around gender-based violence in Sciences Po schools and French universities. From 2022 to 2025, she directed research and data analysis at the Observatoire des VSS dans l’Enseignement Supérieur, authoring three reports, one of which was awarded by the Women’s Foundation. She has participated in conferences, media debates, press articles, and documentaries on gender equality, and continues to fight for safe schools and universities. Today, she contributes to the EU-funded GenderSAFE project and collaborates with leading institutions and international organisations in France, Europe, and beyond to advance gender equality in education and research.
References
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