Sex pests, telling tales and censorship – the modern student’s zero-tolerance agenda

Apr 4, 2018 by Jill

by Andrew Tettenborn, The Conservative Woman:

A couple of weeks ago Jane Kelly on TCW pointed out a worrying tendency by police and prosecutors to overplay trivial sexual misdemeanours, with the result that (for example) a man who made a clumsy pass ends up with rapists and pederasts on the sex offenders’ register. For the moment, thank heavens, this is still exceptional. But on the good Jesuit principle of ‘give me the child and I will give you the man’, those in charge of our universities have been combining with a number of politicians in a rather alarming project to make this, or something like it, the norm in higher education.

Until 2016 universities’ attitude to sexual misbehaviour was largely pragmatic. On occasion they intervened in serious cases as part of their general efforts to promote student welfare, but generally the practice was to leave such matters up to the police. With less serious misbehaviour they might intervene where matters were particularly distressing, but as often as not did not get involved. There was much to be said for this approach. It dealt with egregious cases without allowing the welfare tail to wag the education dog, and reflected much of life outside the university, where people rightly learn to live with matters such as a hand on the knee or the occasional unwanted amorous advance without making an enormous fuss.

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