Universities are key sites of gender-related violence in the UK, including in digitalised forms. Crime survey data show that full-time students are more likely to have experienced sexual assault than people in any other occupational type (OfS, 2022), and Office for National Statistics data show that between March 2018 and March 2020 students in England and Wales were over three times more likely than the national average to have experienced sexual assault (Lewis, 2022). There are similar patterns in other countries, for example, Australia (Heywood et al., 2022), Columbia, Bangladesh and Nigeria (Miles, 2023). In the USA, where research on sexual harassment and violence in university settings has a much longer tradition, the National College Women Sexual Victimisation Survey in 1996/97 found that between 20% and 25% of women university students would experience sexual victimisation before they graduated (Fisher et al., 2000). The latest (large-scale) survey conducted by the Association of American Universities showed a prevalence rate among women undergraduates for nonconsensual sexual contact by force or inability to consent of 26% (Cantor et al., 2020). In this paper, we draw on our data from the first UK study of university staff perspectives on ‘lad culture’ to argue that universities are what Kelly refers to as ‘conducive contexts’ for gender-related violence. Our data were generated through in-depth interviews with 72 staff in a wide range of roles across six universities in England (Jackson & Sundaram, 2020). We build our analysis and argument drawing on Liz Kelly's concept of 'conducive contexts' and Raewyn Connell’s ‘gender regimes’. This integration of frameworks enables us not only to develop new understandings of what makes universities conducive contexts but, importantly, also to consider which types of higher education institutions, which particular contexts within institutions, and which institutional cultures are especially conducive for gender-related violence. In doing so, we offer a novel and nuanced, theoretically-informed understanding of how gender-related violence is enabled within universities, which has significant implications for how to address it.

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