‘Has ‘Banter-Culture’ gone too far?’ And Other Questions I Want Answered.

‘Has ‘Banter-Culture’ gone too far?’ And Other Questions I Want Answered.

I’m sure that most of you will have heard about the eleven men who have been temporarily suspended from Warwick University this week over messages in a group chat. If you haven’t heard then here’s a quick breakdown: These students made explicit threats of rape to female students which has left the women on campus feeling unsafe and threatened.

Some of the messages that were sent are too obscene to be included here, but they’re along the lines of: “rape her in the street while everybody watches”. If that doesn’t make your skin crawl and your stomach turn then I don’t know what will. The students involved have passed the threats off as ‘banter’ which, when you think about it, doesn’t make it any better if they think that these kind of threats are funny in the first place. This admission leads to the question: has ‘banter culture’ gone too far?

In a word, yes. If this kind of exchange is being considered ‘banter’ then the definition of banter needs to be re-evaluated. As a woman, this seriously concerns me - what if this is happening at my own university? What if the Warwick boys hadn’t been caught when they did? Why do these men think that this kind of abuse is funny?

Maybe it’s to do with their upbringing, maybe it’s to do with their societal status from attending such an institution as Warwick, maybe they’re just terrible people with no conscience or moral compass. Whatever the reason, I can only hope that we are all in agreement that this is not acceptable.

If this was the first instance of such ‘banter’ to be brought to light in similar circumstances, then maybe - just maybe - it could be classed as one bad group of men being awful, and not a trend. Unfortunately, very similar things have happened at Exeter and Coventry universities in the last year alone - and it’s only May.

Coventry University’s cricket team have a group chat in which they rate the skills of girls they’ve been intimate with, then give them a score out of ten, and those messages are absolutely too obscene to be included here, but are available to view online.

For this so called ‘banter’ to be at the expense of women in 2018 proves that something along the way has gone very wrong - maybe the education of these people is to blame, have they not been taught to respect women? Maybe they have and it’s gone out of the window for the chance to be included in social groups. Maybe they couldn’t care less about respecting women, or even women’s safety. But in my opinion, and many others, it’s not banter, it isn’t funny, and it doesn’t have a place in University.

Women aren’t the only group who are being targeted by these sick jokes. Exeter university’s Law group chat recently had a scandal in which people of colour were the subject. Frequent use of racial slurs and ‘jokes’ about buying slaves were brought to light in March, and luckily one of the five perpetrators was punished, unlike in the other cases, by having his training contract at Hill Dickinson LLP taken away from him. The other four were suspended whilst the incident was investigated.

It is 2018. 62,685 cases of race-related hate crime was recorded last year alone and approximately 85,000 women are raped annually. With these statistics at hand, why do these people think that the jokes they make are funny? Consider the impact of this ‘banter’ on people who have been a victim of hate crime or rape - seeing these messages being excused as jokes must be extremely hard for them considering the trauma that they have been through.

Why is this happening at university level? Surely, by the age of 18 a person must know that these things aren’t funny or appropriate to joke about - what went wrong? Why is the onus on women and people of colour to keep themselves safe, and not on those threatening them to not make the threats in the first place?

Why can’t we answer these questions?

-LC

If this is happening at your University (or in any situation) then report it to your university Student Union Welfare Officer or the police as soon as possible, your identity will be kept a secret and you could be protecting a lot of people.

If these incidents have affected you in any way then please reach out and get support.

National Rape Crisis Helpline: 0808 802 9999

Equality Advisory Support Service: 0808 800 0082

Statistics come from the Home Office and RapeCrisis.