An interview with Dr Anni Donaldson, co-author of the Equally Safe in Higher Education Toolkit and the Equally Safe in Higher Education Research Toolkit. These are a part of a project known as the ESHE Toolkit. The ESHE Toolkit was designed to support the prevention of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) on Scottish campuses and the work is directly funded by the Scottish Government as part of their national Equally Safe Delivery Plan. Anni also supported the national implementation of the ESHE Toolkit in Scottish universities as required by the Scottish Government.
Location: Zoom (Glasgow, Scotland, UK and Berlin, Germany!)
In the UK, GBV work is delegated to the four nation governments - Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland. The release of the Universities UK 2016 Taskforce Report Changing the Culture was one of the reasons Anni and her colleagues started their work on GBV in higher education. They were provided funding by the Scottish Government over two years to develop the ESHE Toolkit.
Anni spoke about how the genesis of this increase in work to prevent violence against women in Scotland was feminist activism, making the issue a priority for the Government. In the early 2000s, the Scottish Government created the domestic abuse services settlement fund which gave local authorities funding in partnership. Since then, there has been a strong partnership approach across the GBV sector. Anni was a part of this network in coordinating community responses to violence against women. She worked in this field setting up and managing services for 15 years.
“Universities are places that look at everybody else's lives but don’t look inward at their own.”
Anni says that prior to 2016 there was some prevention work going on in school and lots in communities, but a massive hole in universities. The National Union of Students Report, Hidden Marks, was the first study of women students’ experiences of harassment, stalking, violence and sexual assault in the UK. Following the launch of this research in 2011, Anni started pursuing work to address sexual violence in university. In 2015, she received funding to develop the ESHE Toolkit.
“The reason for developing the ESHE Toolkit was that we needed something practical we could pull together, based on feminist and gendered analyses of abuse.”
The Scottish government's 2018 Equally Safe strategy for preventing and eradicating violence against women and girls focuses on bringing about change through national coordination (although with a lack of focus on universities). Anni and her colleagues decided to create two toolkits - one as a practical day-to-day strategic toolkit and one research-specific toolkit. In doing so, they established a steering group of people from across the sector to inform the toolkits' development. They echoed the Equally Safe strategy by adapting it to the university sector and piloting it at the University of Strathclyde. All of the work was in collaboration with other people, including working closely with rape crisis centres and women's organisations.
Three core elements of the development of the ESHE Toolkit include that it is:
Practice-based
Evidence-based
Developed in partnership.
They developed research tools, survey instruments, qualitative interviews and questionnaires to support the sector to collect GBV data.
“It needs to be a whole-of-campus approach, addressing all forms of gender-based violence and across all people on campus.”
Following the development of the ESHE Toolkit, the second two years were spent supporting implementation, including to test the research methodology. They attempted to get all 19 Scottish universities to sign up, but struggled because universities were not willing to engage.
“Universities are patriarchal institutions. They are very hierarchical and market driven.”
Anni and her colleagues also struggled to get any researchers to do this work in their own institutions. Universities always have an eye on their reputation as commercial organisations and they don’t want their product to be contaminated, even though Anni and her team told them they would get lots of ‘brownie points’ for tackling this. Anni spoke about how there hasn't been much work in colleges to address GBV except for EmilyTest - an organisation set up in memory of Emily Drouet.
“Emily's story has been an incredible shock of reality.”
Despite Emily's story being (you would think) a wake-up call for colleges and universities to start taking this issue seriously, they still don't like to look at themselves critically and engage in reforms - like the implementation of the ESHE Toolkit. You can’t change a culture by running a few training programs, however organisations like EmilyTest will keep the momentum going.
Later the Scottish Funding Council intervened to require all institutions to provide information and data each year, including equality outcome agreements whereby all institutions were required to implement the ESHE Toolkit and report on how they are meeting the toolkit requirements.
“I became a feminist in my teens and have always been driven by my feminism. It’s hard to separate politics from my job and work. It’s a work in progress and I won't stop. I’m very proud of the work we do but the job is not over. My activism is part of how I use my energy and creativity.”
Everything Anni does is underpinned by a strong theoretical framework of feminist and trauma-informed approaches. As a feminist researcher, she focuses on bringing together activism, feminism and research. She believes that collaborative partnerships are vital and that they have shown time and time again to be successful in actually tackling GBV.
Anni and her colleagues have made a tremendous positive impact on the GBV landscape in Scotland through their work on this project and beyond. It was a privilege to be able to speak to someone who has already left such a mark on history in the most amazing way.
In solidarity,
Camille Schloeffel
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