• Figures obtained by voice.wales via a Freedom of Information request points to huge levels of sexual misconduct experienced by students, with 561 disclosures in just three years.
• Prior to 2017 there are no centrally held stats on sexual misconduct on campus and as such no measure of the problem.
• Lack of proper record-keeping raises questions for universities across Wales about how serious they are at tackling sexual assault on campus.
Image: Cardiff University campus, by Tom Davies
Cardiff University received 218 tip-offs about sexual misconduct in one year alone, new figures found by voice.wales show.
The statistics, obtained through the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, point to a shocking prevalence of sexual misconduct amongst the students of the prodigious Russell Group institution.
Cardiff University’s Disclosure Response Team has served as the first point of contact between students who have experienced a sex crime and the University since 2017.
A disclosure is described by the University as a student contacting the Team for support for something they experienced themselves, “those reporting on behalf of another and anonymous[ly].” They add that more than one disclosure can be made about the same alleged offence.
Between 2017-20, the Disclosure Response Team received a total of 561 disclosures supplied to the University, 131 of which were specifically for rape.
However, only eighteen people were reprimanded due to an outcome of an investigation by the University during this period. These outcomes can range from an apology letter to the survivor to exclusion from a part of the campus.
Although the University has refused to give voice.wales more detailed information about what punishments were handed out, we do know that during this period one person was permanently excluded due to sexual misconduct during the 2017-18 academic year.
A spokesperson for the University told voice.wales that some of these disclosures will be regarding perpetrators who did not attend the University or have since graduated and so cannot be subject to an investigation.
The 2019-20 academic year saw the highest number of disclosures since the university started collecting the figures with 218 sexual misconduct tip-offs recorded. This figure is comprised of 77 instances of unwanted sexual contact, 93 sexual assault, and 48 students filing accusations of rape. Nine of these 218 ended in a full investigation.
These numbers represent a surge from previous years held on record, with 179 total sexual misconduct disclosures in the 2017-18 academic year and 164 instances in 2018/19.
Disclosures of incidents to the Disclosure Response Team by year
| Academic year | Unwanted sexual contact | Sexual assault | Rape | Total |
| 2017-18 | 54 | 76 | 49 | 179 |
| 2018-19 | 63 | 67 | 34 | 164 |
| 2019-20 | 77 | 93 | 48 | 218 |
A University spokesperson said that these stats represent “numbers of disclosures of incidents, not numbers of students, made to the Disclosure Response Team”.
voice.wales also found during the course of this investigation that the University had no official definition for the categories of “unwanted sexual contact”, “sexual assault”, and “rape”, leaving questions as to how accurate these figures can be.
The University has told voice.wales that the number of registered disclosures is not a true representation of the level of sexual misconduct on campus due to additional informal accusations also being made directly to individual members of staff.
Historically, accurate record-keeping of sexual misconduct figures at Cardiff University has been left to the wayside. voice.wales could only gain access to three years of data because the institution does not hold information from previous years in a format that can be easily analysed.
This in itself raises several pivotal questions about the importance the institution puts on the levels of sexual misconduct and how reluctant they might be to admit problems on their campus to prospective students.
Concluded cases of sexual misconduct where a reprimand has been given
| Academic year | Outcomes to investigations | Permanent expulsions |
| 2015-16 | 6 | 0 |
| 2016-17 | 7 | 0 |
| 2017-18 | 4 | 1 |
| 2018-19 | 5 | 0 |
| 2019-20 | 9 | 0 |
A spokesperson for Cardiff University told voice.wales: “We are pleased with the success of our approach, and the numbers of informal disclosures, in part, also reflect the proactive measures we’ve put in place to make it easier for students [to] come forward.”
Cardiff officials have made efforts to soothe these alarming statistics in their FOI responses, putting the scale of the problem in the context of the population of the Welsh capital.
The university said that it “has a student population in excess of 31,000, a staff body of nearly 7,000 and is set within a major city with a population of over 300,000.”
The prestigious Russell Group institution has the highest number of recorded sexual misconduct disclosures of any Welsh University by a significant margin, though the lack of a unified approach to reporting misconduct across institutions makes comparisons difficult.
A batch of FOI requests were sent to all universities in Wales which revealed that little effort has been made to collate sexual misconduct figures across the board.
Cardiff University has made pains to improve how they receive tip-offs, though it has only been a late development. Cardiff University has the most encompassing reporting procedures via their use of the Disclosure Response Team and will have more disclosures because of this.
The Team was set-up in October 2017 and as such there are no centrally held figures on sexual misconduct disclosures on campus before its introduction, nor has there been any effort to collate any past data into any easily usable format.
voice.wales was told that each of the 24 schools within the university kept their own figures prior to 2017, but without a first-call complaint response team many sexual assault and rape accusations were raised through informal channels without leaving a paper-trail.
Figures for the 2020-21 academic year were not immediately available.
Cardiff University Students’ Union and NUS Wales were contacted but were unable to provide comment.
