Gender-based violence and safety work in Higher Education

Safety work describes the strategies that women implement to avoid men's violence, particularly in public spaces. These strategies involve resource, time and energy but paradoxically cannot actually produce safety. In this research, we extend the concept of safety work to Higher Education to make visible the work that goes into engaging with the learning environment for survivors of gender-based violence. We move beyond the application and/or problematisation of trigger warnings to focus on what Higher Education tutors and student survivors of gender-based violence do to facilitate learning. Drawing on empirical data from UK Higher Education staff in the arts, humanities and social sciences via surveys and focus groups, and focus groups with student-survivors of gender-based violence, we explore what is done in the classroom to make the space conducive for learning (and teaching). We start by critically examining views of and engagement with ‘trigger warnings’ and then critically engage with Ahenkorah’s concept of the ‘accountable space’ to argue that it should not be the responsibility of victim/survivors to have to perform safety work but that we should all consider how to create these conditions. The value of bringing safety work into the ‘trigger warnings’ debate is that it allows us to consider the materiality of the labour involved even as we recognise that the safety it promises is illusory. We argue that we should move beyond the illusion of safety in the classroom and create conducive learning spaces for all: including student and staff victim-survivors of gender-based violence.