further education colleges had experienced homophobic bullying in the last year. Stonewall believes that the universities that take steps to combat homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic bullying and promote their work in this area will encourage these young people to carry on in education and to apply to study at their institutions.
In addition to examining Stonewall’ s published research, UUK approached the organisation directly for further input. Stonewall has not conducted any specific research with university students, although their latest hate crime research( 2013) did show that the 18 – 24 age group were most likely to have experienced a homophobic hate crime or incident – 21 % of this age group had experienced this in the last three years, compared to 17 % in general.
Stonewall’ s input highlighted that anecdotally, there are some examples of good practice in the sector, such as Brunel University’ s LGBT Peer Support Network which is made up of four students, both undergraduate and postgraduate and from different backgrounds, who can be approached for advice and support. 104 De Montfort University runs a month-long Student Pride celebration across LGBT History Month, which also provides an opportunity for the university to signal their zero-tolerance approach to hate crimes, bullying and harassment on the grounds of any protected characteristic.
As we have seen from the evidence on violence against women and sexual harassment, Stonewall’ s own research shows that LGBT + people can feel that incidents are not serious enough to report. Therefore, awareness raising and communication around these issues should aim to dispel this perception to help break down barriers to disclosure. Institutions should use a variety of outlets to communicate with students to ensure that information is clear and accessible, while also unambiguously indicating the kind of behaviour that will not be tolerated.
Stonewall’ s recommendations for dealing with harassment or hate crime on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation at an institutional level call for a focus across very similar factors to those highlighted by the Taskforce:
� anonymous or third party reporting, which is‘ explicitly LGBT-inclusive’ � �
� build links with specialist LGBT support services and organisations
clear monitoring mechanisms should be in place to understand the nature and scale of the problem as far as possible, and any trends in when and where incidents occur
effective staff training
UUK also engaged with Galop, an LGBT anti-violence and abuse charity. 105 In addition to the above, this highlighted a number of other factors that should be taken into consideration when responding to a student reporting an incident, including:
�
Ensure the response is tailored to the person reporting – they should be offered options of how and who they would like to make the report to.
104 http:// www. brunel. ac. uk /__ data / assets / pdf _ file / 0006 / 358323 / LGBT-Peer-Support-Poster. pdf
105 http:// www. galop. org. uk /
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