As we continue with our Spiked? campaign to help protect you from drink spiking within our venues, we're delighted to announce that a range of anti-spiking products, including Spikeys, StopTopps and NightCap scrunchies have landed at the SU this week.
In October we announced a range of measures to help protect you from drink spiking within our venues. Since then, we’ve been working with our partners to develop a plan of action to tackle this pernicious crime, including getting you on board to help shape our anti-spiking strategy.
As we continue with our Spiked? campaign, we're delighted to announce that a range of anti-spiking products, including Spikeys, StopTopps and NightCap scrunchies have landed at the SU this week.
Spikeys
If you've been out this week, you'll hopefully have seen that we're now restocked on Spikeys - they’re absolutely free of charge and simply pop into the neck of the bottle to prevent people from dropping a substance into your drink.
While they may be free to you, please get in the habit of requesting one with your initial purchase and then look after it all night where possible.
Why? Spikeys are silicon plastic in design and are not intended to be single-use plastic. The venues sell approx 2000+ bottles per night and if we were to provide a Spikey with each bottle sold we would use our stock availability up within two weeks. Spikeys cost 20p per unit so across a single term we would need to spend £4.8K minimum which would have to be built into our costs and therefore increase the cost of bottled drinks in the venues. We want to avoid that so re-using the ‘Spikeys’ throughout the night is the most cost-efficient way that our members can support us and themselves.
StopTopps
We are very aware that the majority of our drinks are served in glasses/cups of some nature, and that in the past we have not had anti-spiking measures in place for these products – welcome Stoptopps! These are self-adhesive single-use foil lids that will fit onto any drinking vessel up to 100mm wide. Stoptopps are available on request from the bar for all poured and served drinks.
NightCap: The Drink Spiking Prevention Scrunchie
In addition to the measures identified above, we have also secured some NightCap scrunchies for use on drinks. Available for £3.50 from the Union Shop, these can be used as a traditional hair scrunchie and double up as a fabric drink cover which can be used by individuals as personal mitigation against spiking, especially when in off-site venues.
Testing kits
Testing kits are available from the Advice Centre if you are worried that you have been a victim of spiking. The kits are effective up to 48 hours post-incident, but are not forensic and as such cannot be used to prove an incident occurred.
Open conversation update
On Wednesday, we hosted an open conversation on student safety within Tommy’s Lounge. This was an opportunity to have an honest discussion about safety on campus and within our venues and the action you wanted to see taken. Thank you to everyone who came down and got involved - following the conversation we'll be looking to build a working group, including students, to progress the initiatives discussed.
Our goal is that this working group will give us a long-term platform to keep pushing the conversation around spiking, ensuring that perpetrators know that what they are doing is wrong and a crime, developing our processes and procedures so our venues are as safe as possible, and ensuring we make it as easy as possible to report incidents.