provide a helpline for sexual violence/ domestic abuse
Anonymous submitted on
Tuesday 29th November 2022
Complete
5 in 6 rapes are never reported to the police.
1 in 4 women have been raped.
The volume of students at Southampton thus creates an alarming amount of students and staff that will be in need of support, and not reporting incidents to the police leaves those suffering unaided. I want to create a platform, including a helpline, built of volunteers that will receive training from an external organisation such as YellowDoor that will be deisgnated just to our Univeristy staff and students.
Responses
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Students' Union replied on
Friday 27th Jan 2023 9:39am
I'm going to close this You Make Change now but if you need anything else please contact me welfare@susu.org
Students' Union replied on
Friday 20th Jan 2023 9:40am
Hi,
Thank you for submitting this You Make Change. I contacted Nightline in November to ask if there was the possibility of setting up a Nightline service again in Southampton - this is a service that allows students to call up and receive support from other students. Unfortunately, at the moment, Nightline is currently undergoing changes to their process for setting up Nightlines so they are unfortunately unable to directly support the setup of new Nightlines. I have also reached out to Strutsafe to create a helpline service but unfortunately they don't set up other schemes in other locations and they have also had to halt their walking service due to some of the logistical challenges. Unfortunately, without the support of another organisation, we wouldn't have the capacity to move forward and maintain a large program like this.
There are many other charities who provide this service up and down the U.K and we feel that by replicating something like this within SUSU will not be able to provide the quality level of support other charities do provide and will be taking away service users who may actually benefit from higher quality support from professional charities. We also currently do not have the resources or the staff capacity to facilitate this currently. However, this being said, the university currently provides 24/7 support to all students and I am currently in the process of introducing more support for sexual violence and domestic abuse within the services they offer. I am currently due to meet with the Head of Student Wellbeing to discuss how we can embed this into the current university wellbeing service. As you have shown a key interest in introducing a service like this, I think it would be great if we could meet and discuss this further so I can feedback your ideas to the student wellbeing team and combine them with any current plans we do have. If you would be interested in doing this please reach out to me on welfare@susu.org
Thank you.
Actions
Forwarded to Vice President Welfare and Community
Friday 2nd Dec 2022 9:33am
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