Welcome to the NUS Tackling Lad Culture Hub. This hub aims to provide information about the NUS Women's campaign work on tackling Lad Culture and resources for students’ unions who want to create their own local strategy to tackle Lad Culture.

Tackling Lad Culture Strategy Benchmark Tool

The first step to creating an effective strategy to tackle Lad Culture on your campus is to do your research. NUS and the nine Tackling Lad Culture pilot unions have produced a benchmark tool which aims to help students’ unions and institutions work together to create an effective joint strategy to tackle lad culture. It can be used by student officers and staff to benchmark practice across five principles that underpin effectively tackling Lad Culture.

Principle 1: Collaborative and long term strategy

Staff, officers and students should work together to ensure a long term cross-institutional and intersectional approach to shaping and monitoring progress. We’ve written a guide to help you create your Strategy to Tackle Lad Culture.

Principle 2: Robust institutional and union policies that hold people to account

Policies applied throughout the educational environment should be democratically decided, used to set out expectations of behaviour, encourage people to champion a safe and inclusive culture and holds members of the community to account over their actions. That's why we launched the #StandByMe consultation in April 2016 to collect students’ unions' views of what polices and procedures should be in place to support students who are affected by sexual assault, which you can read here.

Principle 3: An open, constructive and diverse environment to educate each other

All students and staff should have opportunities to explore the impact of lad culture, oppression, power and privilege, listen to people from diverse backgrounds, and to develop an understanding of the importance of liberation, equality, diversity and sexual consent. You can find out how to develop effective awareness raising initiatives in the Creating your Strategy to Tackle Lad Culture guide. We understand that there can be some push back when trying to raise awareness of Lad Culture so we’ve also developed a briefing on overcoming barriers.

Principle 4: People with the tools to challenge Lad Culture

All students and staff should possess the knowledge and skills to use institutional processes where appropriate and to be active in challenging all forms of oppression and not bystanders. We’ve made a briefing on Training to Tackle Lad Culture to provide ideas on how this can be done.

Principle 5: Accessible network of survivor centred support services

The principle that all students should have easy access to reporting methods and support services if they experience sexual harassment, assault, hate crime and discrimination and that these services are focused on their wellbeing. We've worked together with Rape Crisis England and Wales to create the #StandByMe Partnership Scheme Toolkit and Disclosure training workshop and presentation. We’ve also used the responses from the #StandByMe consultation to create a manifesto for student survivor support.

You can download NUS resources and resources created by individual unions here.