The message included a forwarded email, which she said had been sent by the Physics Society to all first year physics students. It read “Freshers’ Lunch…This will be mainly a chance for you to scope out who’s in your department and stake your claim early on the 1 in 5 girls.”

For female students to be sent an email from a university society marking them out as sexual prey before they’d even started their course seemed extreme and inappropriate. But a few days later, we received another email, this time from a recent graduate who returned to his former university to help out during freshers’ week. He wrote of his distress at the “horrific normalisation” of sexist attitudes and sexual pressure during the week’s festivities.

He described a group of excited male first-years who told him about a new trend: “slut dropping”. The process, they explained, involves driving around town with friends in the early hours of the morning and offering a lift home to a young woman they deem a “slut” (usually a woman in a “post-club state”). After asking her address, they drive as fast and as far as possible in the opposite direction before forcing the woman out of the car and using a camera to film her “standing by the side of the road as they drive away”.  Some of the images find their way onto the internet, part of a disturbing new trend of ‘slut-shaming’. On one occasion, the first-year added, it had taken the girl eight hours to get home. When asked how he knew, he explained that they were ‘friends’ on Facebook.

 

Read more here: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/slut-dropping-and-pimps-and-hoes–the-sexual-politics-of-freshers-week-8203400.html