University of Manchester to investigate sexual harassment of female medical students

The University of Manchester has launched an investigation after about 20 female medical students complained of receiving anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night from male callers who intimidated and sexually harassed them. The calls have been going on for at least three years, according to Charlotte Buttercase, a final-year medical student and one of those targeted. Woken in the dead of night, female students have been told they are being watched, or have been asked to perform sexual favours; while in other cases callers have screamed gender-based slurs at them. Buttercase, 24, described her own experience: “On 16 April 16 I was phoned at 2am from an anonymous, no-caller ID and in a two-minute interaction I was subjected to sexually harassing comments. “Given I was alone in a dark room at 2am – it was one man speaking and three men laughing – I felt incredibly intimidated, demeaned and belittled by this event.” Speaking to fellow medical students later, Buttercase discovered 16 calls had been made in a space of 22 minutes that night, and she was the fifth woman that had been called. Others have since come forward with stories of sexual harassment, in person and via phone calls. In an open letter to the university’s vice-chancellor, Duncan Ivison, Buttercase called for a formal review of what she described as a “pervasive culture of sexual harassment” in the school of medical sciences. …