(Hetero)sex, 'fun' and university life: the discursive construction of women students' experiences of sexual violence at university

There is growing recognition of the issue of sexual violence experienced by women university students in the UK. Despite increased attention, problems with prevalence, reporting, support and institutional responses persist. There is, therefore, a need to better understand students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual violence and the context in which these incidents occur in order to develop effective, theoretically informed responses which follow from students’ experiences. This article presents findings from research which explored the nature and extent of women students’ experiences of sexual violence at one university in England. Reporting on semi-structured interviews with students, the article addresses a gap in evidence by using a poststructuralist framework to understand the dominant gendered and heterosexed discourses which shape the nature, extent and understanding of sexual violence and construct a ‘truth’ about expectations of university life. It applies and extends Gavey’s (2005) concept of the cultural scaffolding of rape to consider students’ experiences in the university context in which they took place. It is argued that these discourses produce contextually contingent gendered subjectivities which are at times resisted but are also amplified in the space of the university, further limiting the ways in which students can make sense of their experiences.