University students create ‘Spike Report’ receiving more than 160 cases in first week
- Platform created for women to report if they have been spiked without their details being publicly disclosed.
- More than 160 cases sent in just one week since the report launched
- Founders together with Girls Night In movement to present data to local councils
Two university students have created a reporting platform for women to report how and where they were spiked.
Best friends and founders of equal rights blog E-Galitarian, Della Claydon and Elysia O’Neill, have begun sharing spiking stories anonymously sent to them via Instagram DM.
The first story shared on Instagram has already encouraged a response from the alleged club in question.
“People started tagging ‘sinners’ in the comments and then they did actually comment back. I think it shows when people are commenting, they don’t want to lose that business,” Della said.
“We hope to be able to post follow-ups from this telling our audience the venue has responded and actioned this from it. People might then feel safer to return to these clubs.”
The friends decided to create the platform after realising there was little existing data raising awareness on the matter.
“We put out a post on a whim outlining the policy changes we felt needed to happen. And one of the things we suggested was a publicly viewable database for women to look at.” Elysia said.
“We checked at the time just to see if there was one and there was not, so we just thought, why not just do it ourselves?”
We can really collect some data that allows for some accountability on their actions
Among the 160 genuine cases they have received, however, some trolls decided to take advantage of the public anonymity of the system.
Della said: “Unfortunately, we had a few trolls that were putting silly things in, which is annoying as we’ve now had to add an approval process.
“Ideally, we didn’t want to do this as one of the core values of our site is to provide women with a voice regardless but unfortunately people will take advantage of that.
“Our graphic web designer has cleared through 20 already today.”
Keen to improve the service, Della and Elysia already have plans in place to add additional details to the report.
“We’re going to include further questions since speaking with the community,” said Elysia.
“At the minute we just allow for a description of the incident but we’re looking at including a rating system to gather data on how well the bouncers responded and whether they had reported it to the police.
“We can really collect some data that allows for some accountability on their actions.”
Della added: “We’ve also received feedback to include a section for people to add in the side effects they suffered with.
“People aren’t really going to police or hospitals due to the lack of trust but if they can go on our report and recognise similarities other people have reported, this might help them identify which drug they were spiked with too.”
The girls, who have both been spiked previously, are in conversation with fellow spiking movement Girls Night In.
“They’ve asked for us to lead on approaching venues and councils in their area with the data we have so far. We have a meeting set up with the Newcastle branch next week.” Della said.
“Working together we’re going try and do something.
“Now that we’ve got this data, we know there are lots of people out there that this is happening to, so we want to run an online focus group event to hear from those affected what changes would help make them feel safer and enjoy their night out again.”
They hope that by presenting this data to both local councillors and the venues in question, will help lead to policy changes among the venues themselves or on a wider governmental scale.
“If we get knocked back, we get knocked back. We’re passionate enough about this so we’re going to keep moving with it.”
If you have been spiked or know someone affected by spiking, you can anonymously report the incident to the E-Galitarian spike report.