Have you heard of Report and Support?

Content Warning: mentions of sexual harassment and assault

Out of around 50 people asked, most students had not heard of ‘the Tool’. One student asked if it was a phone number, while those who had heard of it said they were not familiar with the process of reporting, as they “have not had to use it, thankfully.” 

Report and Support is an online tool that allows anyone connected to the University of St Andrews to report concerns either anonymously or with their contact details. This can range from issues like bullying, discrimination, abuse, assault, harassment, or well-being issues.

There seems to be a gap, however, between student awareness and the University’s emphasis on it as its primary reporting platform. Following both a Daily Record investigation, which ranked the University of St Andrews third among Scottish universities for sexual misconduct claims, and recent cases of sexual assault and misconduct involving PhD student Jui-Yi Chen and tutor Aidan McKay, the University has increasingly highlighted Report and Support in its response.

So what exactly is Report and Support, and how does it work? “You explain what happened. You can do this anonymously or with your details disclosed. And then the first mechanism is support,” explained Alex Chun, President of Wellbeing and Community.

“One of the big misconceptions is that Report and Support immediately results in disciplinary action,” Chun said. The most recent publicly accessible report on the Tool, covering the 2023-24 academic year, recorded that 10.7% of students and 18.5% of staff reported non-anonymously due to worries about ‘repercussions for me and others.’

In the face of these figures, Chun emphasised that disciplinary procedures are not automatically triggered when reporting non-anonymously. “If you submit with your information, you'll be contacted and informed of different methods of support, and they'll put together meetings with you and help you choose what you want to do next,” Chun explained. “For example, if a student is harassed, they could either choose to take it to [the Student Conduct team] if it's another student, or they could choose to take it to the police. The University will help that student manage that as best they can.” 

“It doesn't have to be [about] another member of the University,” Chun explained, describing the different circumstances the system covers. “It could be something that happened in public. It could be something that you witnessed happen to another person. It could be something that happened to yourself in a classroom, in [accommodation], wherever.” 

After a student reports through Report and Support, it's read by Student Services. Then, Student Services emails or calls the student directly and attempts to get in touch with them to see how they're doing. The student is then asked what they would like to do. A lot of times, this results in a second meeting, which can be more casual, where they ask the student how they're doing, what support they need, and lastly, what they want to do next.

I spoke to Lee Smith, who identifies as queer, about their experience with harassment and reporting. Their experience with reporting highlighted some of the concerns Chun raised. The first incident Smith described involved verbal harassment on Market Street by people who appeared to be students at the University. Smith reported the incident, not to Student Services, but to Confessdrews, a popular student-run Instagram account that posts submissions of confessions and advice. “I remember typing on that because I wasn't necessarily expecting a change,” Smith said. “I just wanted to remind people that in St Andrews, as welcoming and safe as it can be, some people still find [the town] so comfortable as to be openly bigoted and nasty.”

When asked why Smith reported to Confessdrews, and not a University mechanism like Report and Support, they explained, “I suspected it would be tedious. [Confessdrews] was low effort. I just needed to talk about it.”  

The second incident Smith shared occurred in a residential area at night. Two young men shouted a homophobic slur after deliberately and forcefully bumping into Smith. Smith refrained from reporting this incident to the University as well. 

“A part of me didn't want to do it because I thought they weren't students,” Smith explained. “If they're not students, how was the University going to help?” Looking at the Report and Support page, “it’s very clear that it is a university-associated platform,” Smith said. They pointed in particular to the ‘tell us where this behaviour or incident took place’ section, in which the listed locations are places where students typically gather. The list did not include areas such as residential or public spaces where both town and gown interact.

In an attempt to retroactively report the incident, I sat down with Smith and went through the Report and Support website. This involved fifteen questions and ten pages, some with quite extensive drop-down menus. “This feels like just another survey,” Smith said. “I feel like the last thing I want to do when something's gone wrong is to suddenly go, ‘Oh, you know what, let me fill out this survey so that they can collect more data.’”

Smith felt that the emphasis on demographic data collection was symptomatic of the University’s emphasis on reactive approaches. “There’s nothing preventing these incidents from happening in the first place,” said Smith. “It’s just a ‘let us know that they did happen.’”

They suggested that increasing students’ awareness early on could encourage engagement over time. However, they added that “a culture of students recognising the tool as effective” is even more important. For Smith, this ultimately depends on student trust in the University’s capability and interest in being actively proactive and responsive. 

Bartosz Rogala is the Co-ordinator for GotSupport, a peer-support group that works with Student Services. He is also the next President of Wellbeing and Community. 

For Rogala, the Report and Support Tool has the potential to play a critical role in making sure students report issues. “If there is anything that students may disclose to us that we feel that the University should know about, then we signpost students to this tool,” he explained. However, “we're missing a very, very key part of responding to sexual and gender-based violence — understanding what it means to run proactive approaches to the issue,” he explained.

Rogala explained that a lack of accessible information on the reporting process raises questions: “What does it mean to [submit] a disclosure to Report and Support? What happens if you do it anonymously versus with your name? What does the University do with that data?” The procedure’s transparency “is a big part of an issue like SGBV [Sexual and Gender-Based Violence] because it is such a personal, such an intimate issue for a person experiencing it,” he explained.

“To say that this tool is the golden pathway towards supporting [SGBV issues] feels a little bit disingenuous,” said Rogala. “I feel like there's a lot more work to do before that or alongside reporting support to make sure that students actually feel like they can report these issues to the University.”

“There needs to be a lot more clarity on what Student Services, the police, and different areas like sexual assault centres and SARCs [Sexual Assault Referral Centre] and FRASAC [Fife Rape & Sexual Assault Centre], or people that deal with these things. What does it mean when you reach out to these people?” Rogala explained. “It's a multiple-hour process going in there. If you hear all of that and then you don't know how that process is going to look, there is no way that you'll even think about wanting to go to a place like that.”

Rogala feels that increased clarity will also deter perpetrators. "People who perpetrate need to know that if they even think or act on whatever they're thinking about, that there will be a clear and direct plan of how the University will respond to it.” 

“I think the approach needs to be a lot more large-scale, a lot more encompassing of what survivors need, what perpetrators are doing, bringing together those two things and making sure that we make real change,” he explained. “That's where I slightly am on the disagreement side of Report and Support.”

Rogala also finds the format of the Report and Support Tool is lacking in humanity. "The biggest thing on my mind as someone who runs a service is actually thinking about the students who may never engage with the service itself, right? The students [who] are [sitting] in ABH, in their own room, not really seeing the possibility that something like Peer Support is available.” 

“If students know that there is a human that they can go and talk to and help them navigate this process, it's easier to then think about how that disclosure is going to look,” Rogala said.

When asked about how the Tool responds to feedback, Rogala stated that there were frequent forums to discuss Wellbeing and the Report and Support Tool. Student Services also conduct yearly reviews of the Tool. However, Rogala feels like “there is a lot of talking, not a lot of doing.” For example, “the University was awarded the EmilyTest Charter, and a lot of the time we see that the University puts this everywhere,” he said. The Emily Test GBV [Gender-Based Violence] Charter is an accreditation run by charity EmilyTest and awarded to universities that complete a comprehensive programme and meet the charity's minimum standards for addressing GBV on campus.

Rogala noted that recent media coverage of sexual misconduct in St Andrews highlights a gap between the University’s achievements and students’ experiences. “What we’re seeing and what we’re experiencing doesn’t always reflect these amazing awards and achievements,” he said, adding that implementing change can be slow. “The process [by] which it takes to make change is one of the most difficult things to deal with. It takes so, so long to get something done.” 

While a spokesperson for the University in a previous interview stated that higher reported disclosures can be attributed to better infrastructure for reporting as a result of the EmilyTest Charter, Rogala said that these figures were still quite low.

Rogala gave suggestions on how the Report and Support Tool can be improved, including creating social media campaigns on how Report and Support works, and looking at incorporating other resources, such as easily accessible self-swab kits.  

Chun explained that the slow implementation time can seem like the Tool is lacking. “I've been working with them on this for three years now. Through that, I've understood that sometimes implementation can be slower than students want,” Chun said. “We're here for four years, but the University [has been] here for a lot longer. If it takes six months for the legal team to check everything and make sure it's good, then that feels like a lot for students. Sometimes updates do take longer than I personally would like, but it has been updated every single time.”  

“Even if you don't think you should report, chances are you should, because it can help provide evidence and data that shapes university policy,” Chun said. ”Without students telling us what needs to be done, the University can't really work towards fixing things.” Even a single report about feeling unsafe in a particular area could lead to increased security patrols along that route, they explained.

Chun highlighted two specific improvements made to the Tool in response to feedback. First, the landing page was updated to be more inclusive by removing intimidating and dense legal jargon. Second, the reporting categories were clarified to convey that students can report incidents occurring in off-campus locations, such as in front of Tesco.

In response to student feedback involving increasing microaggressions, Chun is working on launching a “questionnaire discussing microaggressions and reporting practices.”

“I do think that whether it's a perception that report and support is extremely formal, or if it's just too long to fill out, there is something barring students and staff from reporting microaggressions on Report and Support,” they said.

Both Rogala and Chun emphasised the other services available beyond Report and Support.

“There [are] many, many different statistics about sexual and gender-based violence, but the majority of them say that most cases aren't reported,” Chun said. “The reporting process can be re-traumatising to survivors. So it is very much up to the individual. That being said, I do hope that no student ever feels like they're alone [or] they can't come and talk to someone about this. We have many different avenues other than Report and Support because it can be very difficult to just write everything down, as opposed to talking to someone.” 

Rogala stated that the subject of this article “is one that's really, really important to show to our survivors in St Andrews, to highlight to them that we aren't just hiding, and that we will do work towards this. We will show what is available, but also, we won't just stop at what is available. We're going to continue working to make sure there's more available to them, too.”

More information on the issues raised in this article can be accessed via Rape Crisis Scotland on their website https://www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk/help-helpline/ or by calling the National Rape Crisis Helpline on 08088 01 03 02. Advice and support on reporting sexual assault from the University can be found by visiting https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/students/sexual-misconduct/.