Red flags to watch out for in relationships also apply to your flatmates
The team at OUSA Student Support dealt with 77 incidents of flatmate violence during 2020.
According to Sage Burke, the manager of OUSA Student Support, this number was “about the same” as 2019. That number was “bad to start with,” and given that a lot of students went home during the Covid lockdown, maintaining the same number as 2019 is “not great … my observation is that even though the numbers were the same, the individual situations were worse.”
At an estimate, he said that the cases that Student Support deals with are normally “70% psychological violence.” In 2020, he estimated that “at least 50% were very physical.” “We’re also having more reports of sexual violence in flats,” he said.