There must be barely a woman in Britain today who doesn’t relate to the Everyday Sexism Project. Any woman will find experiences similar to her own, scrolling through the endless pages of street harassment, sexual assault, prejudice. Then there are those accounts which, hopefully, most of us are distanced from: rape, domestic violence. These sit alongside the others, a gallery of black eyes and shadowed memories, and it is for all to see how closely related they are.

It is one of the first things Laura Bates, founder of the project, points out. Her voice crackles over Skype, but the tone is brisk, smart, collected. “I think what has come out of the project more than anything is just how connected everything is. I’m realising that we can’t tackle one thing in isolation without tackling other things.” She says that it has become increasingly clear that the same attitudes underpin street harassment and “the more serious issues like domestic violence and sexual abuse”. The only way forward is to tackle the core, problematic sexist attitudes, and thereby address the symptoms as a whole.

Calling up the site, it’s interesting to note the strain that reverberates through the often shockingly blunt language. Take “Bec”, who walks home “with a large umbrella and personal alarm” because a woman she knows was raped and murdered: “I don’t feel safe in my city anymore. These are the measures I take daily to protect myself”. A few posts later there’s the story of Amy, who was repeatedly harassed and raped by her brother’s friend when she was 6 years old. Her entry suggests someone who is still trying to cope with the trauma: “I don’t know what else he had done, but I do know he did more. I just don’t remember what.” When seen as stemming from the same social problems, Bec’s fear of her own city seems to be a potentially terrifying preface to something much more sinister. Meanwhile Amy’s recount of her childhood abuse is seen in the context of life-long fear of sexist mistreatment; a state that pervades women’s lives. Even when she’s Bec’s age, it seems, Amy may have cause to fear walking in the street at night.

The accumulation of the stories is chilling, and the on-going collection has provided a spring-board for ground-level work by Bates and her colleagues in trying to tackle the issues displayed. She says it is “about a cultural shift, about changing ideas”. I ask what this means in terms of, for instance, policy making. “The fact is that a lot of the legislative and structural changes that we need have already been achieved, but isn’t at all translating in reality.” She gives the example of prejudice in the work-place: “There are fantastic laws against workplace harassment; everybody should be free of it, completely, according to the law.” Yet the Project receives thousands of entries from women who are still experiencing sexism, from sexist jokes to serious discrimination and sexual assault. “It’s about tackling the overall ideas about women, the assumptions about women. Women being othered, being treated as different, as second-class citizens.” There is a repeated sense, both in my discussion with Bates and in the entries themselves, that the issue not being taken seriously. The effect on women’s psyche is disturbing.

Bates mentions her work with young people in the area of sexual assault. She recites the legal definition from heart (I look this up later, and it is word perfect): “if someone touches you without your consent, and the touching is sexual, and they do not reasonably [have cause to] believe that you give consent, then that is sexual assault”. Young women, she says, are amazed at this. “[They] are growing up being socialised to accept that guys will grab their bums, or put their hands between their legs. They always react with shock: ‘that’s not sexual assault, it’s normal.’” The recount is depressingly familiar for many of us, who may recognise the attitude in ourselves. Bates continues: “they say, ‘I wouldn’t report that to the police, they wouldn’t take it seriously.’” The social sentiment trivialising sexism is something that people in related industries must battle every day; from feminist activists, to domestic violence and rape crisis workers. Bates points out that this makes her job a lot harder, and it’s certainly one of the key reasons that the Project is so needed. “Really frequently people say, ‘what more do you want? You women, you’ve won equality, you can have your cake and eat it too, now; this is a fair and liberal society.’ There’s this huge reluctance to acknowledge how big the problem really is.”

Bates points to the grim irony of this: “one of the biggest problems is that we have come so far”. “I also think there’s a problem with the fact that, understandably, a lot of people just don’t see it happening,” Bates continues. “It is often something that happens in isolation. The worst street harassment happens when you’re alone, in an isolated area, on an empty street.” She cites the most dangerous workplace harassment as typically happening in one-on-one meetings, or when someone corners you in the photocopier room. “So it makes a lot of sense that some people who aren’t sexist themselves find it very hard to accept how bad it still is. They don’t want to admit it; they’d much rather say, ‘this must be a mistake’, or, ‘you must be overreacting’”. Such overwhelming cultural denial “makes it much harder to fight, because people are always approaching it from a slightly cynical point of view.”

I ask whether women, too, are implicated in this. Bates is brief: “Yes, definitely. Some women.” The Project itself is not, however, gender exclusive (or gender defining in any sense). Men contribute, and Bates says that it has always been a principle of the site to include men’s experiences. “The project has not been about vilifying men or about suggesting that all men are sexist for a second.” I read out an account by a man that I find particularly interesting: “John” writes that he “used to enjoy” going out to play pool, but now is sick of the way that when women hit on him, and he explains that he has a fiance, he is accused of being gay. I’m intrigued by the way that men, as well as women, can feel pressured to remain indoors, to hide themselves from aggressive sexuality in a sense that recalls much female experience on the site. Bates agrees, and affirms that the site is “very much about tackling sexism wherever it comes from, and acknowledging that women can absolutely be sexist towards both men and other women, and that men can be victims of sexism. It’s very much a people versus prejudice movement, not a men versus women issue.”

She says that in practical terms, the moves we take to tackle sexism against women often also address sexism experienced by men. “So, for example, men being denied paternity leave. Or being praised for babysitting their own children. Or finding it difficult to look after their own children because there are no changing facilities provided in men’s toilets. Those are three really common stories that we get from men. They obviously come from the same root idea: that women are natural homemakers; women are the carers; women are the ones who ought to be at home looking after the children.” These “sexist, genderist stereotypes” harm us all.

Nevertheless sexism, Bates says, is an issue that “disproportionately affects women”, which is why the majority of entries the site receives are from people identifying as women. Yet this is not to say that there is any sense of homogeneity. She says that one of the things she’s “most proud of” is the diversity of submissions: “they really do come from women of all ages, of all races and ethnicities, of all sexual orientations, employed and unemployed, religious and non-religious”. She expresses a hope that the Project encourages intersectionality in feminism, which she says her experience of the site has convinced her must be “at the heart” of the movement. Issues surrounding intersectional feminism, which is often seen as describing an identifiable set of political beliefs, are much debated.

Third Wave feminists in particular sought to redefine the feminist movement to be more inclusive, and to recognise the way that prejudices converge, overlap, and feed one-another. In considering the site before reading it in depth, I had held a vague sense that it must be its own special ivory tower. Surely the kind of woman to get involved, to share her story, is likely to be educated and able to express herself; never mind the fact that she is surely likely to have heard about it through an existing interest in feminist issues. But the more you read, the more it becomes clear that these experiences really do come from all backgrounds. Bates says it is something she is profoundly aware of: “just by virtue of being online, there are a huge number of people who are excluded. I really try to offset that,” which is why a lot of the Project’s work is about taking the stories “as a starting point”. The experiences are used to do grassroots work, practical work in communities.

Moreover, the Project is springing up all over the world, with localised operators in a range of different countries seeking to encourage and enable as wide participation as possible. Illustrating the intersection of prejudices Bates feels to be a key feature of the Project, she explains: “we’ve heard from disabled women who have had men ask them if they’ll do a pole dance around their walking stick. We’ve heard from black women who are being exoticised and sexualised by men in the street, screaming about their bums. We’ve heard from Chinese women having men make jokes about mail-order brides, and about their eyes. Obviously there’s a real crossover there, and I hope that the site helps to highlight that.” Part of the core of this intersectionality is the equal weight given, across the Project, to the expression and communication of ones own encounters. The Project has achieved something extraordinary in giving women (and it is those who self-identify as women) a voice to reassert the urgency of their experiences. Daily, it illustrates the pervasion of prejudice attitudes and their debilitating effects worldwide; despite professed beliefs to the contrary, which persist in many apparently developed societies.

Bates points to the core feminist principles of giving women the ability to express themselves: “So much of the oppression of women historically has been through silencing. The silencing of women as hysterical; the silencing of feminists as over the top, angry, humourless; the silencing of incredible, pioneering women’s achievements, which weren’t included in the history books.” Looking through the site it’s notable how many women recognise this sentiment in their own lives. Often the pain of having your experience discounted is felt to be as horrific as the experience itself. There are instances of teenage girls who, its apparent from their accounts, have learnt that their trauma doesn’t matter. Already they are being led to believe that their opinions and thoughts don’t matter, and that they themselves, by extension, don’t matter.

The result is that submissions are often wrought with a sense of release, an energy unleashed by the freedom of safe communication and, crucially, validation. As Bates says, “it’s the really quite raw, visceral power of women finally speaking out, often about things they’ve never been able to talk about before.”

I’m no television executive, but if I were, I’d be on the phone to David Attenborough twice daily just to get him to do a series on Freshers week. I mean, that stuff would sell. You can almost hear Sir David’s avuncular, pipe-and-slipper tones begin: “Observe, here, the pairing ritual of the Fresher male when he sees a potential mate” – all over a clip of some absolutely wasted midlander with hands busier than a tourettic mime artist. We are something of a new species during the first few weeks of university; a kind of homo freshian. Because, what else can we be? We are surrounded by newness, and there’s no pitch of normality yet with which to align.

Of course, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy the last few weeks. I did, and it would be a pretty insular individual indeed who says that there’s no point in a week devoted purely to mingling – because, after all, you’re not just exchanging pleasantries for nothing. Amongst the intimidating-looking crowd, most probably anyway, are the friends of your adulthood, a pretty daunting thought considering you haven’t even found someone to go to lunch with yet. But it’s fair to say that the shock of being around a group of complete strangers does unlock something vestigial in us all. Deprived of any familiarity in which to wield our tried-and-tested manoeuvres, we resort to almost instinctive behaviour. If we’re not out parading our own brand of ‘uniqueness’ with a kind of peacockish strut, then we have out our self-defence antlers, poised and ready. And don’t think that I’m exempting myself from all of this – for the past fortnight I’ve been telling anyone that passes that I’m a guitar playing northerner.

But by a long way, the weirdest behaviour, in any anthropological sense, takes place about a week before Freshers even begins. It’s the ritualistic division of couples who are attending separate universities – an apparently painless romantic massacre that occurs every year. Perhaps it’s my doe-eyed faith in poetry, but I can’t help but find the thought of this relationship genocide extremely unsettling. Perhaps greeting card shareholders should consider assigning it a status as a national holiday, ‘University Heartache Wednesday’ or something, just to really cash in on all this unchecked sadness. Because, of course, the implication of the desire to break up isn’t personal problems, or an admission that the individuals don’t care for each other anymore – it’s basically: “While I haven’t met anyone else in whom I have found a greater affinity or emotional connection, they will at least have the altogether more important quality of contiguity.” And wouldn’t that be so much easier to convey on handy card, complete with a joke?

But isn’t it all just a little bit shallow? In another three years, will all those same people, with the same phlegmatic coolness, divide again, in order to be single for their first day at the office? Doesn’t this sort of behaviour concede a reliance on physicality? Of course, I’m being highly unfair on these people – their argument may even be valid. Are adolescent relationships just not watertight enough to survive long-distance? Are the grounds on which teenagers define their affection for each other simply too tentative to sustain feeling over, as Auden puts it, “the still and lucky miles”? Perhaps, as the breaker-uppers might argue, that kind of intense relationship is best left to the adults.

The long-distancers are usually easy to spot. They’re probably texting avidly, or using any opportunity to hamfistedly mention their significant other: “it’s funny you say that, my boyfriend went to the moon only last year”, or “ah, my girlfriend is also a communist”. But be fair, what else can they do? To not mention your partner would be tantamount to some sort of deception. If they were stood right next to you, after all, you’d be expected to introduce them to your new friends, so why should their absence change anything?

Or perhaps it’s just genuine loneliness. It’s no doubt a strange feeling to be apart, one that renders a relationship less like a celebration of mutual affection and respect, and more like an albatross around the neck. It’s hard to be sanguine, but the truth is, if the long-distancers think they’ve got it tough now, at least the next month or so will be tolerable. What won’t be, I reckon, is the first holiday, and that first reunion, where all these star-crossed lovers run into each others arms and find someone else. For in this new person is blent an alien outlook; a new set of in-jokes and memories. It’s not that they’ve changed completely – in fact they may be as kind and sweet as they ever were – but the metaphorical carpet of shared experience, which sustains most flimsy teenage relationships, has been pulled away, leaving the individuals to share stories that the other one neither understands nor cares about. There’s the mention of names and places that might as well be characters from a film as far as the other is concerned. Ultimately, it’s not the affection or love that’s unsustainable – it’s the people themselves. And without adequate contact during term, that affection is lagging behind almost, like the overweight, asthmatic kid during cross-country. These long-distance runners can only hope he catches up sooner or later.

There’s that famous film, about the lion that remembers its two owners again after 35 years in the wild. And it’s overwhelmingly emotional – the footage has usually been dubbed with “I Will Always Love You” or something, and lion and human hug and wrestle and weep like the end scene from ‘It’s a Wonderful life’, only furrier. But I always like to think of the bits they didn’t film, perhaps about 15 minutes after, with all three of them stood awkwardly around, without anything to say, the silence being eventually ended by the lion who says: “well, I best be going. But perhaps we should go for a drink sometime?”

Or maybe I’m just being miserable about it all.

God, I miss Hannah. 

Robert Walmsley: No 

Let us be honest, taking the fingerprints of all overseas students, at a university, is clearly a dubious thing to do. It is uncomfortable, because the working assumption behind it seems to be that all foreign students want to abuse the student visa system and it is only by closely monitoring them that we prevent them from doing so.

In reality, the vast majority of foreign students are perfectly legitimate. The reason they are here is to get a good education and nothing more.  International students enrich British universities both financially and culturally and are often well-integrated into the university community.

Catching out ‘fake’ foreign students, by whether they attend lectures, does not seem a particularly cunning plan either. Like all students, foreign students are just as capable at oversleeping and missing lectures. Except now, the consequence of missing a few of your lectures, at certain universities, is that you are suspected of being an illegal immigrant.

The issue is not whether more efforts need to be made to stop illegal immigrants using student visas, but whether this is an efficient way of doing so. There seem to be far more intelligent ways of distinguishing the bogus students from the legitimate ones, without stigmatising all overseas students. For example, in the first place, determining whether overseas students are capable of paying for or have a loan in place, to pay their fees, seems a much better way of separating the legitimate students from the illegitimate ones.

It is estimated foreign students contribute up to £8bn, directly and indirectly, to the economy each year. Overseas students, in the UK, pay as much as £35,000 in fees per year to study here. The fees, which foreign students pay, are also used to subsidise the teaching of domestic students. Furthermore, this monetary valuation of foreign students does not account for the social benefits they bring to our universities and the friendships British students form with them.

Discouraging international student from attending UK universities, when so many universities are facing a substantial funding gap seems like an obviously bad idea. So, why then are universities introducing these checks? It seems that the reason is pressure from the government. The UK Border Agency has consistently failed to distinguish between bogus and legitimate foreign students, with 100,000 overseas students suspected of using the education system to get into the country last year. Consequently, the task is now being ushered upon education institutions to do this themselves and so foreign students are being subjected to more tests, as a result.  In addition, there has been a perverse incentive for the government to reduce the number of overseas students ever since it, rather stupidly, decided to include international students in its immigration cap.

The fundamental problem with measures like this is that they do not only discourage false foreign students, they discourage all foreign students, from coming to study in the UK. Most universities, including Oxford, will hopefully recognise this and conclude that fingerprinting international students is simply inappropriate.

Jack Chisnall: Yes 

There’s nothing that gets the alarming bells ringing quite like the association of the words “restrictive measures” and “foreign students”, but I think it’s important to be pragmatic as much as it to be idealistic. It’s all very well talking, with dreamy-eyed sobriety, about the sacrosanctity of ‘education’, and how a fingerprinting system is a gross overreaction to a minor problem, but ultimately, this is a question of the laws we set for ourselves, and whether or not we are going to abide by them.

Let’s make it absolutely clear, of course, that of the 300,000 internationals given student visas by the EU, a majority work hard, and more than justify their right to study in the UK. For many universities, their £2.5billion contribution in tuition fees is invaluable, but has this bred a system which allows fraudulent students to ignore their studies, and find work instead?

We have to answer this rather uncomfortable question with statistics, instead of some unfounded stereotype about international students. There were reported last year some 106,000 cases, by colleges, of bogus students, clearly not using their visa for academic study, but in order to work and live. Of this number, very few are even pursued by the relevant authorities, and in all, 0.14% of cases lead to deportation. I’m no flag-waving patriot, attempting to scaremonger – I would simply point out that there’s an obvious juxtaposition here. If so little of these cases are even considered, what is the point in the first place of a notification system which allows colleges to alert the government of people potentially abusing the immigration system?

There’s a squeamishness around this issue – and quite rightly. If anything, it’s gratifying that information which portrays international students in a negative light inspires in us a kind of careful criticism. But is this now bordering on hypersensitivity? Last year, London Metropolitan University was controversially stripped of its right to sponsor international students after it was revealed that a substantial amount of this number did not attend any teaching seminars, such as tutorials or lectures, and couldn’t speak English in a practical way. 2,600 students already at the university were threatened with deportation. Of course, people who argued that this was damaging to the UK’s reputation for welcoming international students had a valid point. There may indeed be a need for taking a pinch of salt given how valuable international students are to this country – but again, wouldn’t this kind of apathy undermine the British system of law? We either abide by our laws, or we change them.

Whether or not the University of Sunderland’s decision to introduce fingerprint identification is a piece of appalling discrimination depends upon these laws. It seems slightly ridiculous to question why it is only foreign students who are checked, given that this is the purpose of any form of border control. It certainly isn’t a polemic against foreign people. The only way to settle this argument however, is to see whether all these regulations detrimentally affect the UK in terms of foreign applicants, and that is something only time can tell.