The following material has to be placed in the wider context of longstanding and deeply rooted prejudice and discrimination against women in many societies, along with the high levels of sexual abuse and harassment in some organizations, professions and institutions. Nearly all the material relates to recent decades and the main focus is on higher education, with some of the most extensive accounts coming from the US. In the following chapter I shall comment on US society, its criminal justice system, campus policing and control and compliance.

‘Shattered dreams’: prejudice and discrimination

Human societies typically have levels of social distinction based on ethnicity, faith, wealth, territory, resources and gender. That stratification shapes a hierarchy that determines and communicates social standing, as in: the Indian caste system; the South African apartheid regime; and in the US the post-Civil War ‘Jim Crow’ laws in some states and institutions discriminating primarily against Black people. Running through all these widely understood or formal distinctions is placing people socially, politically, economically and domestically, accompanied by power systems that keep people in their assigned category. In brief, caste and class convey systems based on the assumed innate superiority of one group over others held to be indelibly inferior. Importantly for this work and cemented within systems, there has been – for centuries and across societies – deeply rooted discrimination against women, which has largely confined them, caste-like, to domestic and menial tasks and to male submission. Here I will just sketch a few salient features of prejudice and discrimination that have affected, and continue to affect, women in many societies.

First, women have historically not only been excluded from many male preserves but also were feared and denigrated. If they challenged male hegemony they were labelled as irrational, hysterical or seductive and in certain periods they were scapegoated as witches with allegedly special powers. Women who spoke up, domestically or outside the family, could be shamed through having a ‘scold’s bridle’ restraining device attached to their head or be forced to wear a chastity belt (Chollet, 2018).