'I'm living on a knife edge, it's horrible'

Violence against staff is on the rise. Phil Baty looks at the fear behind the figures

Abigail Smith lives in constant fear. She is a senior lecturer at a Midlands redbrick university who has been stalked by a female undergraduate student for the past two and a half years.

"It's horrendous. I helped her out and offered her a shoulder to cry on when she came to my office threatening suicide, but after that she would come to my office every day, and come to my lectures whether they were for her course or not. She would hang around by my car and, I believe, my house."

Before long, the obsessive behaviour took a more disturbing turn. "She began sending letters and cards, one day saying she loved me, another saying she hated me and making threats," said Dr Smith (not her real name).

"She would maul me sexually at every opportunity, and threatened to accuse me of sexual assault, which I'm pretty sure would get me suspended and could ruin my career. I'm living on a constant knife edge."

Dr Smith's misery was eased slightly when she made the decision, in desperation, to move from a home near the campus to one 40km away. And things improved further when the stalker switched courses - and switched her obsessive attention towards another member of staff.

"But this woman is still on campus, she is still around to make someone else's life a misery and certainly still has a hold over me," Dr Smith said.

Her story appears to be one of countless examples of threatening and intimidating - and sometimes even violent - behaviour towards university staff uncovered by The Times Higher .

Requests under the Freedom of Information Act to all universities and colleges of higher education have unearthed more than 1,000 reported incidents in the past five years, ranging from verbal abuse to physical assault.

While all the cases reported to The Times Higher made it to the official records of the institutions, and were clearly acted on by the relevant authorities, perhaps the most startling element of Dr Smith's case is that her harassment was never formally recorded. This means that it was never recognised, let alone acted on, by her employer.

"When I went to my head of department, he just laughed," Dr Smith said. "I took it very seriously, and said I was distressed. But he thought it was funny. So I didn't take it further."

Dr Smith's case hints at a hidden world where university staff are left to suffer in silence. The range of responses to The Times Higher's FoI request suggests that the 1,010 reported cases are the tip of the iceberg.

While some logged dozens of incidents in painstaking detail, thirty-seven universities, with thousands of students each, had no recorded incidents over the past five years.

These included Southampton University, which has about 23,000 students, Liverpool University (22,000 students), Plymouth University (23,000) and Bristol University (20,000). A further 25 institutions reported a total of between one and three incidents over five years.

Deborah Lee, senior lecturer in sociology at Nottingham Trent University and author of the forthcoming book Students Behaving Badly , said it was inconceivable that there were really no problems in such large institutions, with such large student cohorts, over so many years.

"With so many staff and students together every day, there are bound to be many incidents even where universities are not recording it," she insisted.

She said that it was a vicious circle - universities failed to take the issue seriously enough, so staff felt reluctant to report incidents, and universities, in turn, believed there was no problem.

"I think that there is a problem in that people do not feel that they can report incidents, or do not think that their managers will take them seriously, but hopefully, by publicising the issue, The Times Higher will prompt more people to come forward."

Lorraine Sheridan, a senior psychology lecturer who just completed the largest-ever survey on stalking for the Network for Surviving Stalking, said that 12 of the 905 self-reported victims of stalking in her survey were academics.

She added that despite the modest number of university staff in her survey, academics were particularly vulnerable to intimidation and aggressive behaviour, because it was part of their role to act in loco parentis and provide pastoral care to students who were often under serious financial and academic pressure.

One recorded case at Loughborough University involved a female student sending "inappropriate and indecent" emails to a male academic.

"I find that male academics, especially, are far too embarrassed to report female stalking or harassment," Dr Sheridan said.

"If you are, say, a fat, balding 53-year-old man stalked by a 19-year-old girl, you may fear that managers will accuse you of encouraging it, or that they feel you should be able to handle it."

She said that although academics and university staff were vulnerable, higher education was one of the few "public" sectors not to take a hard line against the mistreatment of its staff - despite the risks of open campuses and light security.

For lecturers' union Natfhe, universities are far too quick to assume that the student - a fee-paying "customer" - is always right. "The pendulum has swung too far towards students, where their complaints are treated as valid even where there is no corroborating evidence, while academics are exposed to unacceptable levels of risk," said Andy Pike, Natfhe's national higher education official.

Universities strongly denied that they were failing to take matters seriously. Southampton said that although its committee of discipline had not been required to meet for the past five years, it did have appropriate reporting structures and would take all incidents "very seriously indeed".

Barry Taylor, director of communications at Bristol, accepted that it would be "incredible" to suggest that just because the university had no formally recorded incidents in its central records that such incidents had not and do not occur.

He said that the lack of any recorded episodes at Bristol indicated that when such events did occur, they seemed to be sorted out at departmental level.

"The university has carefully considered processes. We would have no qualms about carrying them out, and would put up no barriers of any kind that would prevent or discourage staff from using them," he said.

phil.baty@thes.co.uk

DEATH THREATS, OFFENSIVE WEAPONS AND RUDE SONGS

From drunken high jinks to stalking and death threats, universities reveal the abuse their staff face from students.

• Napier University records that, in 2004, "an email was sent to a member of staff, by a student, containing abusive language and a death threat".
  
• At Teesside University, out of three incidents against staff one involved the "protracted intimidation by written communication from a student that continued after the student completed the course".
  
• Of 25 recorded incidents at the University of the West of England, one involved a student who confessed after attending a meeting with a senior member of faculty that he had carried a knife into the meeting.
  
• Of 33 incidents at De Montfort University, 11 involved violence. One report says a member of staff was "confronted with offensive weapons". De Montfort, when asked for details, said no staff had been involved.
  
• At Essex University, one of 14 reported incidents involved a student "banging on the student tutor's door with a metal bar" and the "use of threatening and offensive language".
  
• At Lincoln University in 2003, a student was prosecuted for "physical violence against a member of staff" and was "sentenced to a term of imprisonment".
  
• A Loughborough University student was fined £200 and suspended from his halls for "singing sexually explicit lyrics in public".
  
• A Trinity College Carmarthen student was given a formal warning and was suspended in 2000 for sending "unsuitable emails containing distasteful adult jokes to tutors".
  
• At Northumbria University, a 1999 case involved a student who "reacted badly" after having exam results withheld because of a question about the payment of course fees.