Comments from UWSU LGBT Report 'How Safe do you Feel?'

Jul 09, 2014, 10:21 AM

#lgbt #university #westminster #homophobia #transphobia #campus

The LGBT socitiey at the University of Westminster produced this report, How Safe do you feel? following a month long survery in LGBT History month. The society did this was because for years, they heard many complaints about how difficult it was to be gay, bi and trans on campus - but no-one was prepared to escalate concerns for fears that it would have reprisals for them.

The report put the fears and concerns of members into something that could be presented and actioned on. The report found that 1 in 3 of the respondents had suffered homophobic or transphobic abuse. 1 in 3 had also seen homophobic or transphobic abuse happen to other people. We asked people how often they felt safe on campus, based on our findings the average was only around 70% of the time. This audio has voiced up some of the comments from the report.

The report was aynonymous so all of these comments are voiced up, however, they all come from real students responses to our survey.

[Play Clip] In: 3" music - 'I'm not out to many people' Out: 'Unfortunatly that is not the current picture at our university' 4" music Dur: 01:44"

What was striking from the survey was how little students felt represented, and how little support there was for them. 36% didn't think the university did enough, while a further 32% said it should be doing a lot more. As that last clip elaborated to University is supposed to be the place students find themselves; but if only 50% of the people that filled out our survey are out, and if 8% aren't even out to the society then there is clearly something inherently wrong on campus.

The University of Westminster isn't the only University with this problem, following our report the national arm of our society NUS LGBT released a similar report. It found that between 1 in 3 and 1 in 5 suffered some sort of abuse. The picture it painted on anational scale compared with our report did show it is worse here than the national average. You can download a copy of the UWSU LGBT report with the shortlink http://tiny.cc/uowlgbtreport