At 18, you are technically an adult. But no matter how grown up you feel, during the first year of university most students are still teenagers who have never lived away from home. Living in a new place, going out as often as you want and drinking as much as possible makes first year the ultimate bonding experience, everyone stuck in the same very hungover boat.

Despite most people’s nostalgic memory of first year, every UK university seems to have an issue with sharking, when older students target freshers to sleep with, enjoying taking advantage of drunk, naïve teenagers. There’s very little anyone can do to fix this problem, as generally these older people are just other undergrads doing it informally. Cambridge, however, systemically enables predatory age gap relationships and creates a culture of sharking unlike anywhere else.

“Cambridge systemically enables predatory age gap relationships and creates a culture of sharking unlike anywhere else”

Everyone has a horror story about a student and their supervisor, lecturer, coach, or even DoS, yet Cambridge still partially allows sexual relationships between students and staff. Rules prohibiting staff with ‘direct responsibilities’ for students from having sexual relationships with students only came into effect in June 2024 in a bid to prevent student exploitation. However, just this term a Varsity report showed that multiple members of staff accused of sexual misconduct were allowed to keep their jobs. At a university where close academic relationships are created with staff via our unusual supervision system, we should be more rigorous than other universities about student safety, not less.

The same problem filters through every part of Cambridge life, from sports clubs to societies. Drinking socs may not be above board with the University but remain a staple of college life. While the premise of a society where you have to drink yourself into oblivion to get in should be bad enough, the insane initiations and selection criteria make some of these societies genuinely sinister. There is a well-known culture of recruiting younger students based on appearance, particularly older boys choosing the fresher girls they fancy the most.

“The insane initiations and selection criteria make some of drinking societies genuinely sinister”

Once freshers are in the society, socials and nights out inevitably get a bit creepy. Handcuffing male and female students to one another, drinking games that pressure young people into uncomfortable situations or revealing their sexual histories, and horrible initiations are not just common, but totally normalised. By making these societies illegal they are far harder to hold to account on a university wide level, and drinking soc ‘welfare’ officers are hardly a rigorous check on exploitation.

One of the strange by-products of the college system is that post- and undergraduates often end up living side by side, sharing societies, eating together and even living in the same flats. Suddenly the age gap between a fresher and a third year appears tame compared to dating a thirty year old MPhil-er. It’s usually a positive thing that we have so much contact with postgrads at Cambridge, but it can enable relationships that never would have been possible at other universities where there is a greater separation of age groups.

I know this sounds like an overreaction to normal Cambridge things, but we’re being naïve if we don’t acknowledge that our current culture puts young female students in harm’s way. The 2018 National Union of Students' “Hidden Marks” study showed that over two thirds of female students have experienced some kind of harassment at university, something that is no shock to any of the women here. Calling it by a silly name and making it into a joke gaslights victims of sexual harassment, or more serious issues like assault, that what happened to them is something to laugh at and forget. The first step to start taking this problem seriously is to stop calling it sharking and call it what it is – sexual coercion, peer pressure, and harassment.

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