Wednesday 27th October saw Derby Women and a number of sports teams (men’s and women’s), nationwide, boycott nightclubs and other night-time venues in support of the “Girls Night In” movement. This is to specifically raise awareness, that more needs to be done to protect the users whom are predominately women. These facilities are suffering from an increasing number of spiking attacks, nationwide.
The movement was nationally recognised on the news and for our women, it was important to raise awareness within the club, no matter the venue; more needs to be done to prevent spiking incidents.
Sadly, most of our women will know someone who has been spiked during a night out, or have been spiked themselves. This can have scary and devastating consequences and treating it as “they’ve had too much to drink” needs to be an attitude that is changed. It isn’t about telling people to keep a better eye on their drink, questioning them “how they didn’t know” it had happened or suggesting they shouldn’t accept drinks off strangers. This movement is about sharing experiences and encouraging nightclubs to thoroughly search guests entering. Stop putting the pressure on the victims and prevent the offenders from being able to carry out these disgusting actions in the first place.
Those being spiked don’t need to go out with the fear that someone may put something in their drink or a needle in their arm; which has been happening more recently. Those who are going out to spike need to be stopped, searched and punished as this is a premeditated attack. Naturally, you want to write “women” getting spiked by “men” but no matter the gender, spiking is something that needs to be addressed and dealt with harshly. This can be done by owners and workers in nightclubs/bars taking it more seriously.
Some may ask, why boycott the rugby club? For us, Derby Women, we use the club as a social place at least two times a week. Somewhere we want to feel safe with our team mates and the rest of the Derby RFC community. In boycotting our usual Wednesday night social after training, we hope it attracted attention to those who usually see us and those who engage with our social pages that we wholly support the fact spiking; even within local venues we, as a club do not tolerate. It’s not about not supporting our local venues after an unprecedented year, it is about supporting the national movement of spiking prevention and venues taking more responsibility for the welfare of their customers.
