UK: Why is the government taking the NUS’s ‘lad culture’ survey seriously?

Article here. Excerpt:

'You thought starting university was meant to be fun? Think again. A new league table, published in time for freshers’ week 2016, ranks universities on the basis of their local crime rate. The Complete University Guide has published the results, alongside a guide to ‘sexism on campus’, which gives students tips on how to scope out their university’s attitude to sexism and sexual harassment. But as the survey points out, official data for crime specifically against students is not available, so these figures are chosen because they relate to crimes ‘most likely to affect students’.

The growing panic about sexual violence on campus is based on various reports published by the National Union of Students (NUS). The most recent claimed that ‘50pc of study participants identified “prevailing sexism, ‘laddism’ and a culture of harassment” at their universities’. The reportwas written by the director of Gender Studies at the University of Sussex, Alison Phipps, and research associate Isabel Young. Titled ‘That’s What She Said’, it featured interviews with just ‘40 women students across the UK’. Yet it claims to present hard evidence about the ‘social, personal and educational impacts of lad culture in higher education’. The report was able to produce shocking statistics by asking participants to answer broad questions about everything from unwanted chat-up lines to actual sexual assault.'