While violence in higher education has most often been examined in relation to peer-to-peer student violence (Turan et al, 2011; AHRC, 2017), academic-to-academic bullying (Meriläinen and Honkanen, 2019; Björklund ad Jensen, 2025), academic-to-student (Sinkkonen et al, 2014), or institutional sexism (Gray et al, 2026; Gray et al, 2024), very little attention has been paid to violences enacted by students towards academic staff (Banyard et al., 2017). Since the early 2000s, a growing body of work, largely concentrated in North America and United Kingdom, has examined academic experiences of student-perpetrated violences (Lee, 2006; Lampman et al, 2016; Lampman, 2012). In Europe, Asia, Oceania, South America and Africa, scholarship on this issue is limited. This presentation contributes to this gap through a cross-regional study of Swedish and Australian higher education, bringing together research conducted by the author in Australia (Smith, 2022; Willis & Smith, 2024) and parallel work in Sweden (Brax, 2024a; Brax, 2024b).

Sweden is frequently positioned as a global leader in gender equity and egalitarian labour regimes, making it a critical European case for examining how student-perpetrated violence is experienced and governed within ostensibly progressive institutional contexts. Australia provides a contrasting yet comparable system shaped by intensified marketisation, managerialism, and student-as-consumer discourses. Examining these nations side-by-side enables analysis of how shared global pressures in higher education are mediated by differing gender, labour, and governance regimes.

The central research question guiding this presentation is:

How do academics in Swedish and Australian higher education contexts experience, interpret, and respond to student-perpetrated violences, and what does a cross-regional comparison reveal about changing power relations, institutional responsibilities, and academic working conditions?

The research draws on feminist theories of violence, which conceptualise violence as relational, cumulative, and embedded within social and institutional structures rather than confined to isolated incidents (Kelly, 1988). In line with this scholarship, the paper uses the term ‘violences’ to encompass a range of student-perpetrated behaviours, including hostility, rudeness, harassment, coercive control, and physical assault. Feminist research has long critiqued hierarchies of violence that rank some harms as less serious or less “real,” noting how such hierarchies function to minimise and dismiss the experiences of minoritised groups (Kelly, 1988; Crenshaw, 1991).

Drawing on the concept of a continuum of sexual violence, this study understands psychological abuse, verbal hostility, and coercive behaviours not as precursors to violence but as forms of violence in their own right, existing on a continuum with more overt physical harms (Kelly, 1988; Boyle, 2019). Such hierarchies of violence have historically been weaponised to silence women and other minoritised academics, including non-White, LGBTQI+, disabled, and Indigenous scholars (Crenshaw, 1989; Kelly, 1988). Student-perpetrated violences are therefore analysed as practices through which power is exercised, boundaries are enforced, and academic authority is challenged or undermined.

This feminist framework is complemented by critical scholarship on neoliberal higher education, which highlights how marketisation and student-as-consumer logics reshape academic labour and authority (Brown, 2015; Connell, 2019). Within these institutional conditions, academics are increasingly positioned as service providers subject to surveillance and complaint, altering power relations and potentially enabling or legitimising student-perpetrated violences.

Although the empirical data are drawn from Swedish and Australia higher education contexts, the analysis speaks to broader international transformations in higher education. By situating student-perpetrated violence within intersecting feminist and political–economic frameworks, this research contributes to European and international debates on academic work, institutional responsibility, and staff safety, as well as wider global concerns across many industries regarding sexual harassment, bullying, and discrimination in the workplace. 

This research employed a comparative mixed-methods design, drawing on original national data from Australia and secondary analysis of existing mixed-methods datasets from Swedish higher education contexts (Björklund & Jensen, 2025; Brax, 2024a; Brax, 2024b). Together, these data enable examination of both the prevalence and lived experiences of student-perpetrated violences against academics across two distinct yet comparable higher education systems. In 2024, the author conducted the first national Australian study specifically focused on student-perpetrated violence against academics. This research comprised a national survey capturing the scope and prevalence of student-perpetrated violences across all Australian states and territories, followed by in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics. The interviews explored how participants experienced and interpreted student-perpetrated violence, the emotional, professional, and career impacts of these experiences, interactions with institutional reporting and complaints processes, and reasons for reporting or non-reporting. Interview data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, an approach well suited to examining meaning-making, power relations, and institutional contexts (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Analysis was informed by feminist epistemologies, recognising knowledge as situated and emphasising reflexivity in the interpretation of participants’ accounts. This enabled attention to how violences are normalised, minimised, or rendered invisible within institutional structures, as well as how academics navigate and resist these conditions. Comparative analysis drew on secondary mixed-methods data from Swedish higher education contexts, which are frequently positioned as global leaders in gender equity and egalitarian labour regimes. These data provide a critical European comparator for examining how student-perpetrated violence is experienced, understood, and governed within ostensibly progressive institutional settings. Rather than assuming equivalence across datasets, the analysis adopted an interpretive comparative approach, examining patterns, convergences, and divergences across contexts to illuminate how shared global pressures in higher education are mediated by differing gender, labour, and governance regimes. By placing Australian and Swedish data in dialogue, the research tested common assumptions that stronger gender equality frameworks necessarily reduce gendered violence or ensure more effective institutional responses. This comparative methodological design enables identification of both structural commonalities and context-specific differences, strengthening the international relevance of the findings and contributing to European and global debates on academic labour, institutional responsibility, and staff safety.

Research on student-perpetrated violences in both Sweden and Australia remains limited, with only one academic in each national context examining the issue in depth. Swedish research has taken a broad approach to understanding threats and harassment in higher education institutions, including students and academic colleagues, identifying students as the most common group of perpetrators (Brax, 2024a). That research found that women experienced more violent incidents than men, and that victimisation was more common among academics working in the humanities and social sciences (Brax, 2024a). In Australia, some outputs (Smith, 2022; Willis & Smith, 2024), a national report (Smith, in preparation) and a paper (Smith et al., under review) specifically look at student-perpetrated violences where the victim was an academic. These findings indicate that women, gender diverse, non-white, Indigenous, younger academics and academics who spoke with an accent were more likely to experience student-perpetrated violences, highlighting the intersectional nature of harm within the Australian higher education context. Australian and Swedish research had similar findings in relation to academics self-censoring and changing their routines/behaviour in order to avoid or reduce exposure and incidents of violence. Additionally, many respondents in both contexts were unaware whether formal reporting pathways existed, or what reporting procedures or policies were in place. Taken together, these findings reveal a significant disconnect between formal institutional policies and academics’ lived experiences, echoing international critiques of higher education’s handling of workplace harm (Ahmed, 2021; Shore & Wright, 2015). By making visible a largely hidden form of workplace violence, this research contributes to international debates on academic labour, power, and institutional accountability. The paper argues that meaningful educational futures require moving from knowing about harm to acting through policy reform, cultural change, and clearer institutional responsibility.

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