On April 2nd, any unassuming humanities student walking out onto the grass in front of the Arts Block after his last class to enjoy the sunshine would have been met with a disturbing sight – a man beating a life-sized dummy with a stick. Had that student lingered around, they would have seen the word “rapist” in bright red letters across its chest, and off to the side, someone recording a campaign video of the whole ordeal that would later proliferate in the Trinity social media ecosystem. This video provided a helpful, if vague, accompanying call for “a complete overhaul of our sexual misconduct policy”, lest anyone was to misunderstand the campaign as a call for extrajudicial violence.
The aftermath has been well-documented in the University Times and Trinity News, discussed at a rather fiery town hall, and a slightly less inspiring council meeting to censure the sabbatical officers involved. But after all this kerfuffle, students could be forgiven for not being exactly sure what the campaign was about, beyond a vague sense that College wasn’t doing enough. At the town hall,Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) President Jenny Maguire specifically highlighted section seven – presumably of the sexual misconduct policy which deals with “malicious / vexatious complaints” – as a clause that is abused by guilty parties and “used against victims and their allies”. In a meeting, Maguire also expressed that the SU were concerned with the fact that alleged rapists could bring bullying charges against victims and their friends in cases where no official case had been made.
Trinity’s current sexual misconduct policy was brought in in 2023 after a nationwide initiative by then-minister for Higher Education Simon Harris – one Maguire called “on paper the best in Europe”. It is certainly one of the most expansive. Possible breaches include everything from serious crimes such as rape and assault to “unwelcome comments about someone’s dress or appearance”. The test for whether a policy has been violated is that the behaviour has the “cause or effect of violating a person’s dignity, and creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for that person”. In 2024, the Dignity, Respect, and Consent Service (or DR&C) was launched to enforce these policies, and are tasked more broadly with, well, matters of dignity, respect, and consent.
The call for a separate policy on sexual misconduct in Trinity did not start with Simon Harris’ Implementation Plan. In 2015, Trinity News reported that a quarter of female Trinity students (in an online survey with a sample-size of 1038 male and female students) had been sexually assaulted and called for action on the matter, and in 2021, another article demanded a dedicated sexual misconduct policy on the grounds that “nearly a third of female students had experienced non-consensual penetration” according to a Union of Students in Ireland survey. These figures are rarely consistent on exact numbers, or whether they refer to rape, assault, or harassment, but they do sustain the narrative of an ill-defined “epidemic”: for this narrative to work, the whole point is that the definitions are blurry, that the link between everyday sexism and violent assault is self-explanatory. Riding the wave of the #MeToo movement, the Dignity, Respect, and Consent service was the university’s response to these calls for action.
But the mantra “believe all women”, which seemed to fuel the Student Union’s campaign, cannot be turned into university policy without running into concerns about due process, or bare reality. The Union wished to do away with the only measures of recourse within a service where all of the power to determine the process is already in the hands of the accuser – for example, whether the procedure is formal or informal. The SU was concerned with this dynamic when the accuser was an alleged rapist asking for recourse, but not when someone was making an accusation of assault. This is only conceivable in the post-#MeToo world where all women are pure, and all men are suspicious. But the right to due process should never depend on the nature of the infraction. False allegations water down the language of assault and should be prosecuted with the full force of the law. If women are seen only as innocent creatures incapable of lying or moral depravity, we are reduced to children.
And even with such measures for recourse in place, the DR&C is not fit to deal with either sexual crimes or false allegations of the same. With no legal power to prosecute crimes, it deals with accusations of sexual assault as “complaints” to be managed like concerns over a bad grade or a plagiarism case. The DR&C exists to handle the epidemic rather than the crime. Now it is also in charge of consent workshops and training, as well as the related “Speak Out tool”, which collects reports that are ostensibly used to “inform the development and delivery” of Trinity’s sexual misconduct action plan, despite being both anonymous and unverified. The stakes might be way lower than a legal case, but so is the bar. The sweeping ideas of the #MeToo movement in their final form is an impotent, bureaucratic grievance committee, driven by the vague sense that we’re doing something.
But why would we accept a process for sexual violence that we wouldn’t accept for any other crime? The DR&C would never be tasked with dealing with beatings or other assaults. One can hardly imagine the university investigating murder, so why should they be tasked with investigating rape? This is not helped by the common refrain that the justice system is somehow rigged against women who choose to report their crimes: only the police are properly equipped to deal with serious sexual violence. As Larissa Phillips wrote of her own harrowing experience of rape and recovery, imperfect as the criminal justice system is, “If we don’t treat our assaults as real crimes and report them to the police, our chances of a conviction are reduced to zero.”
The DR&C gives the illusion of justice. Of course victims who in the end decide not to report their crimes deserve sympathy and support, but this cannot come at the cost of due process for the accused. Even worse, the existence of such a service feeds the narrative that sexual crimes are somehow different to other crimes, less severe, and less worthy of criminal prosecution. The narratives and figures repeated ad nauseam about sexual violence – that up to one-third of women have been sexually assaulted, that women never make false accusations, and that anything and everything constitutes sexual harassment – obscure the horror of sexual violence, and give the illusion that a university complaints procedure could ever provide suitable punishment for a rapist. This fails women and victims of sexual assault most of all.
