Sexual violence surveys should measure institutional response, not just prevalence
Updated Jul 10, 2026
A university can publish a harassment policy, meet a regulatory deadline, and still leave students feeling unsafe or unconvinced the institution will respond well. That is why Bridget Steele, Victoria Tan, Deanna M. Giraldi, Michelle Degli Esposti and David K. Humphreys' Studies in Higher Education paper, "Experiences and perceptions of sexual violence in a UK university: results from the second iteration of the OUR SPACE survey", matters for universities using student voice evidence to understand safety, trust, and institutional response. We are interested in it because the paper does not stop at prevalence. It asks how experiences of sexual violence shape students' feelings of safety and their judgement of how the university handles sexual misconduct.
Context and research question
Sexual violence is now a live governance issue for higher education, not a peripheral welfare topic. Universities are under growing pressure to show that prevention, reporting, support, and follow-through all work in practice. For UK Student Experience teams, PVCs, and Market Insights professionals, that creates a harder question than simple compliance: how do students who have actually experienced harm see the institution, and where does confidence in the response begin to break down?
This paper tackles that question through the second iteration of an institutional online survey administered to all enrolled students at one UK university in 2024. The study adapts established campus-climate and sexual-experience survey instruments, then examines not only the prevalence and nature of sexual harassment and sexual assault, but also students' feelings of safety and their perceptions of how the university handles sexual misconduct. That design makes the paper especially useful for UK higher education because it links student safety evidence to institutional trust rather than treating them as separate problems.
Key findings
The headline finding is that the survey identified high levels of past-year victimisation, with women reporting substantially higher rates of sexual assault and sexual harassment than men. The abstract also reports that perpetrators were predominantly men, most often fellow students, and that incidents frequently took place on university premises. For universities, that matters because it places sexual violence firmly inside the student experience rather than outside it. This is not only a matter of external risk. It is a matter of campus conditions, peer culture, and institutional responsibility.
Students who had experienced sexual violence reported more negative views of their institution's response to sexual misconduct. That is the most consequential finding for student voice practice. It means the students with the strongest reason to rely on institutional support may also be the least likely to see that support as credible. A university can therefore underestimate risk if it looks only at prevalence and not at whether affected students believe reporting routes, communications, and responses are trustworthy.
The paper's conclusion captures the institutional challenge clearly:
"universities must move beyond compliance to address the cultural and structural conditions that enable sexual violence."
The study also shows why safety evidence should include place, relationship, and institutional context. When incidents are often linked to fellow students and to university premises, student safety cannot be framed as an occasional issue that sits outside normal university life. It belongs in discussions about induction, campus culture, accommodation, support visibility, staff training, and how concerns are routed once raised. For UK teams, that is a practical reminder that safeguarding evidence should be read alongside the wider student experience, not in a separate silo.
The second iteration of the OUR SPACE survey is important in its own right. Repeating a survey at institutional level makes it possible to track whether confidence, perceptions, or risk patterns shift after policy or service changes. One-off surveys can reveal that a problem exists. Repeat listening is what shows whether the university has become safer, clearer, and more credible in students' eyes.
Practical implications
First, UK universities should treat sexual violence surveys as response-and-trust instruments, not only prevalence instruments. Closed questions on exposure to harassment or assault matter, but they should sit alongside questions on safety, confidence in support, and perceptions of how cases are handled. The recent OfS sexual misconduct survey analysis points in the same direction: institutions need to know not just where harm is occurring, but where confidence in the route from disclosure to action is weakest. The benefit is a more actionable evidence base for safeguarding and student experience teams.
Second, institutions should govern this evidence more carefully than a routine student survey. Sensitive feedback of this kind needs clear access rules, small-number protections, escalation thresholds, and named ownership for follow-up. A structured process such as the student comment analysis governance checklist is useful here because it helps teams decide who can review the evidence, how it should be segmented, and when a pattern requires intervention. The benefit is sharper local diagnosis without treating fragile evidence casually.
Third, universities should pair closed survey results with governed open-text analysis. Students may say they feel unsafe, unsure about reporting, or unconvinced by institutional handling, but the operational reason often sits in comments: uncertainty about where to go, fear of not being believed, poor visibility of support, or frustration with how previous concerns were handled. A reproducible method such as the NSS open-text analysis methodology helps teams compare those comments consistently, and Student Voice Analytics can support that work where institutions need to review recurring patterns across several feedback routes. The payoff is clearer action on the parts of the response that students actually experience.
Finally, universities should treat visible follow-through as part of the safety response itself. If students who experience harm are also the students with the weakest confidence in institutional response, then rebuilding trust requires more than policy wording. It requires visible improvements to communication, support access, reporting routes, and campus practice, with enough clarity for students to recognise what changed. The benefit is not only stronger safeguarding. It is a better chance that future student feedback will be honest, timely, and usable.
FAQ
Q: How should a UK university apply this paper when designing a local sexual violence or campus safety survey?
A: Build the survey around four strands: prevalence, feelings of safety, confidence in support, and perceptions of institutional handling. Then add one or two carefully governed open-text prompts, for example asking what makes it harder to seek help or what would make the reporting route feel more usable. Review the results with restricted access and a clear owner, because the evidence only becomes useful when someone is responsible for acting on it.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is an institutional survey from one UK university, based on 2024 data and adapted survey instruments, so it should not be treated as a sector benchmark for all providers or all student groups. It is also based on self-reported experience. Its strength lies elsewhere: it connects prevalence, safety, and perceptions of institutional response within one design, which makes it a strong practice-oriented model for universities building their own evidence.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It reinforces that safety-related student voice is not only about whether incidents happened. It is also about whether students trust the institution enough to report, seek support, and believe follow-through will be real. When universities combine closed questions, careful open-text review, and visible action, student voice becomes more useful for safeguarding, quality work, and institutional accountability.
References
[Paper Source]: Bridget Steele, Victoria Tan, Deanna M. Giraldi, Michelle Degli Esposti, David K. Humphreys "Experiences and perceptions of sexual violence in a UK university: results from the second iteration of the OUR SPACE survey" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2026.2693160
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