‘It’s a lot of shame’: understanding the impact of gender-based violence on higher education access and participation

Abstract

This paper draws on new empirical research examining the impact of gender-based violence (GBV) on students' experiences of higher education. While GBV across the life-course is an extremely prevalent and pressing social problem, it has been invisible within higher education. Indeed, experiences of GBV, which may profoundly shape access to and participation in higher education, are largely perceived as irrelevant to student equity, unless experienced on campus. Institutional silence around the impact of GBV on student equity is related to the gender injustice of misrecognition, whereby the social problem of GBV is located at the personal level. This manifests in the social emotion of shame, experienced at the personal level as disconnection, isolation and not belonging. This paper draws from our analysis of 47 in-depth interviews with student victim/survivors exploring their experiences of higher education to illuminate how deficit discourses and stigmatisation intersect to reproduce gender injustice in higher education.