This collection comes in the midst of some promising and challenging times for activists, students and academics in the UK and beyond who have been researching and campaigning on the issue of gender based violence (GBV) in university communities. In the context of emerging research evidence and in the face of increasing public awareness of and media attention on this problem, these are indeed the first steps towards acknowledging and addressing it in countries including the UK and Australia. This chapter explores the context and contours of some of the recent and emerging debates on GBV in university communities within which this collection is located.

We understand GBV as behaviour or attitudes underpinned by inequitable power relations that hurt, threaten or undermine people because of their (perceived) gender or sexuality. This definition recognises that GBV is influenced by and influences gender relations and problematises violence premised on hierarchical constructions of gender and sexuality. Women and girls constitute the vast majority of victims of GBV, and men the overwhelming majority of perpetrators (Watts and Zimmerman, 2002; Hester, 2009). GBV includes a continuum of behaviours and attitudes such as domestic violence, sexual violence, sexist harassment on the streets, trans/homophobic expressions and behaviours, and expressions on social media which normalise sexism and sexual objectification. These expressions and behaviours are connected through what Kelly (1988) described as a continuum of incidents and experiences. The continuum of incidents (Kelly, 1988, 1989) refers to the conceptual connections between acts that constitute the wallpaper of violations – the behaviours and expressions so commonplace that they often recede into the minutiae of everyday life – and the less common ‘sledgehammer’ events (Stanko, 1985) that are more widely recognised as harm, which are both underpinned by and reinforce gendered power hierarchies. The everyday expressions and behaviours scaffold a culture of gender inequalities that sustains and enables the rarer acts. The associated concept of a continuum of experiences (Kelly, 1988) captures the subjective perceptions and the commonalities in how women and sexual minorities experience these expressions and behaviours as violations. Hence this conceptualisation suggests that we cannot address one end of the continuum – for example, rape and domestic homicide – without problematising the everyday manifestations of sexism and gendered hierarchies (Bates, 2014).