Needle spiking: A new social contagion?

On 17 October, a thread appeared on the Mumsnet forum “Feminism chat” posted by a mother worrying about her teenage daughter, studying at Exeter University. “Apparently there have been several reported incidents of students in Exeter nightclubs being injected in the back (not by people they are with) while out,” she wrote. “I'm not saying this is fake, but I'd like some more information – it sounds a bit modern day urban legend to me,” another poster quickly replied.

But then came the counter posts: “Think it’s happening in Nottingham as well,” said one. “This happened to DS’s friend in a club in Sheffield, felt a sharp prick then felt totally out of it. They took her home and she was OK the next day,” added another. Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, Stirling – parents from all over the country had heard the same reports from their young daughters.

Nine days later, another thread appeared. By now the concerns about spiking by injection had spread to all British universities and was beginning to affect student behaviour. “[Daughter] is in her first year at Reading Uni,” a woman posted. “Seven girls have recently been injected at the students union and she has a friend at another uni who had her drink spiked. She is now afraid to go out at night and she and her friends have kitchen parties instead. I think it’s really sad that they are having to stay home as it’s considered too unsafe to go out at night.”

In late October, a handful of young women spoke to the press about their experiences, and a campaign to demand action from police and government gathered pace. Urgent questions were asked in parliament after which Priti Patel, the home secretary, ordered a review into the extent of spiking incidents and how they were carried out. Students organised a boycott of nightclubs – a “girls’ night in” – to highlight how unsafe they felt in bars and clubs, and push venues to tighten their security. All across the country, female students on university campuses were living in fear.

The problem of drink spiking has been on the rise for decades, with reports doubling in just the past three years. And every autumn there is a new wave of allegations of drink spiking coinciding with fresher’s week and the arrival of new students at UK universities.

But this year was different: reports of attacks involving a hypodermic needle were new, and spread fast over a mere fortnight. By the beginning of November, police were investigating 56 such reported incidents, with more rolling in each week. So far, only three arrests have been made and no charges brought. There has been only one report of an ambulance being called to an alleged injection spiking event in Preston, with medics confirming that the victim’s injuries were consistent with an intramuscular injection. In Nottingham, police have also confirmed that skin breaks have been confirmed that could be explained by the use of a needle.

Yet despite reports of victims finding puncture wounds on their skin, little evidence has been found by doctors of the physical effects of injection spiking. The drugs used may wear off quickly, just as in drink spiking, making the crime harder to prove, but doctors involved in examining and treating suspected cases are perplexed. Not all those who have reported events to police have also sought medical care, which adds to the confusion.

A report by the FullFact website at the height of the crisis last month found that although some alleged attacks were indeed consistent with needle spiking, a widespread outbreak of such crimes – by now being anecdotally reported across university campuses – was highly unlikely. It simply isn’t possible, doctors and other experts confirmed, that so many injections of toxic substances could have been completed in a non-clinical environment and without the consent of the victim.

Delivering a sufficiently large dose would require the victim to remain still, or the use of a very large (and very visible) needle. “If someone is jabbed with a syringe their reflex action is going to be to move away within a second or two,” forensic toxicologist John Slaughter told FullFact. “The opportunity for someone to actually inject enough drug from that syringe to have the effect, I would think, is fairly low. I’m not saying it’s absolutely impossible, I'm just saying, in my opinion, it’s unlikely.”

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Nevertheless, the anecdotal reports all bear consistent hallmarks: a sharp, scratching sensation, followed by the feeling of blacking out. As reported by The Independent, superintendent Kathryn Craner of Nottinghamshire Police, said: “We do not believe these are targeted incidents; they are distinctly different from anything we have seen previously as victims have disclosed a physical scratch type sensation before feeling unwell. This is subtly different from feelings of intoxication through alcohol according to some victims.”

Yet, there are far more reports made of needle spiking than authorities can substantiate, or even suspect. In Scotland, the NHS issued a statement reminding students that the drug most often used to spike others is alcohol itself.

Something significant is happening to these women, but are they all experiencing the same thing?

The term social contagion describes how, as human beings mirror one another, ideas and beliefs can spread quickly among a population. The speed of transmission has been speeded up by the arrival of social media. And interestingly, such contagion is not only limited to ideas and beliefs; the spreading of types of behaviour, witness statements and even of physical symptoms among groups is also well documented.

In June 1999, Coca-Cola was forced to withdraw 30 million cans and bottles of soft drinks from sale across Belgium and northern France after customers in these regions complained of cramps, nausea and other physical problems after consuming the drinks. Extensive testing found no evidence of a problem with the products and no reason for the symptoms that so many were experiencing. Interestingly, an unrelated warning had been issued about dioxins in Belgian meat in the preceding months, and the scandal had brought down the national government. The Coca-Cola outbreak was found to be nothing more than the spread of mass panic.

Seven years later, in May 2006, an outbreak of a strange virus was reported in Portuguese schools. Symptoms included rashes, difficulty breathing and dizziness. Some schools were closed temporarily as medics rushed to investigate the disease and track its spread. But the symptoms were similar to the virus depicted in a popular teen girls’ TV show, Strawberries with Sugar, in which characters’ lives were at threat. In Portugal, more than 300 students across 14 schools reported symptoms, yet after extensive investigation the outbreak was categorised as mass hysteria by the Portuguese National Institute for Medical Emergency.

And just seven years ago in 2016 thousands of people in the western world reported sightings of people dressed in “evil clown” costumes near schools or on the edge of woods. There were a number of confirmed cases of individuals setting out in costume attempting to scare their neighbours, but they were few. In fact, most reports were merely the imaginations of an anxious population after widespread coverage of the “craze” across US, UK, Canadian and Australian media. These people did see something, but what they saw was only a reflection of their innermost fears.

In his book, Herd, the author Mark Earls exposes how human behaviour is predicated not on what we think, but what others think or feel – and how that makes us feel.

“Most human life is a response to other people, either real or imagined,” he tells The Independent. “We don’t think about things or believe things on the basis of the fact that they are true, but on the basis that they fit with our perceptions, and on the basis of that they are something that other people think or feel.”

Human beings are, foremost, social creatures who “feel first and think second” and this dictates every part of our behaviour, from how we respond to threats to our fashion choices and taste in music. And the thought process is often bypassed entirely.

“Humans are doing things. We can think, but it’s hard and we’d rather not, and we try to avoid it,” Earls says. “Rational thought is really hard work and it can take up to 45 per cent of the body’s energy to think really hard. We can feel exhausted afterwards, so we find lots of shorthands and one of the most important shorthands is what other people think.”

Trends in anything – from fashion to music to language to our deepest fears – can “seem to arrive from nowhere” but then spread very rapidly. So ideas or trends that have a “bubbling volatility” come to the surface and then spread incredibly rapidly. Emotional contagion is well observed as part of this type of spread, with emotions sweeping through populations and even leading to shared physical experiences.

“One of our powers is to use the brains of other people to work out what’s going on,” Earls explains, and this could be a partial explanation for why large numbers of young women are reporting either being a victim or knowing a victim of needle spikings, despite a much smaller amount of evidence that a number of isolated incidents are indeed taking place.

“The idea of someone going around with a needle is particularly graphic,” Earls says. “This is just like we have always done telling stories about the big bad wolf. It’s really useful for us as individuals to overstate the fear rather than understate that fear. It’s really useful for us to create some object or agent that we can identify. Once you have got an object and you create that fear, it spreads very quickly.”

Sociologists have also mapped how physical clusters and psychological clusters can lead to the spread of ideas once they are rooted in an object as Earls describes. In this case, both are at play: there is the physical cluster of a university campus, where students are in close proximity to one another, and also the psychological cluster of identity as a university student. When young people at one university hear about shared behaviour or beliefs at another similar institution, they are more likely to be influenced by it.

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“If certain behaviours or attitudes are popular and are rewarded by their group, they are more likely to be adopted,” says Dr Nilufar Ahmed, psychologist and lecturer in social sciences at the University of Bristol. “The phenomenon of social contagion has been accelerated by social media which derives algorithms to push tailored information to our attention which can shift individual behaviour because we feel that these views must be the correct and dominant views.”

The desire to be part of a group leads to very rapid spreading of behaviours. In a 2018 research paper, Patricia Riddell, professor of applied neuroscience at Reading University, found compelling evidence of the spreading of academic emotions and behaviours such as motivation within educational settings. She told The Independent that the campus culture of the UK’s universities could also be contributing to the exceedingly rapid circulation of fear and anxiety around spiking events.

“Because of the way that the brain develops, young people are particularly influenced by social reward which comes from a feeling of belonging to a group. If members of your group have chosen to believe something, and they want their friends to believe it so that they feel that their group is protected, then the friends are more likely to buy-in to the irrational fear too. Thus, fears, whether irrational or not, can spread through the connections within a group,” she says.

In this case, the belief system would include a fear that women have to protect themselves against men creating the stereotype of men as objects of fear and women as the group that are being attacked. “It’s a simple that appeals at the level of emotion rather than more rational exploration of the facts. But, in combination with the wish to belong to a group, it can have the power to spread.”

But there’s a problem with this simple breakdown of events: women are being attacked. Regular spiking events, using drinks, are indeed on the rise. And the widespread sexism on campus, which has been routinely reported since 2015 and yet sadly goes largely untackled, means women do feel at risk during university life. A survey of thousands of students by Revolt Sexual Assault found that almost two thirds (62 per cent) had experienced some form of sexual violence while at university, yet only one in 10 had reported their experiences to police and 2 per cent had reported it to their university. A third had felt pressured into a sex act they didn’t want to take part in.

If this is the environment surrounding students, the spread of that fear – and, indeed, even the sensation – of spiking, and in particular spiking by injection, is not irrational at all. In the wake of the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa, it is quite the opposite.

When rioting broke out across the capital in 2011 after the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by armed police in Tottenham, north London, similar scenes followed across many of England’s large cities. In Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leicester and Wolverhampton, fires broke out, cars were burned, windows smashed and police attacked. But in some cities – notably Leeds – the anger didn’t bubble over into violence. Why did the ideas or beliefs that led to violence in some cities not catch light in the same way in others?

Fergus Neville, lecturer in social psychology at the St Andrews University, and Clifford Stott, professor of social psychology at Keele University, worked together on a deep study into the reasons behind the riots and how the social spread of ideas led to the epidemic of violence.

Professor Stott says the research team quickly dismissed the term “social contagion” as irrelevant to the spread of behaviour they were addressing.

“Our study on the riots is called Beyond Contagion and the reason for that is that it’s really important to break down the assumptions that we have when we deploy that term,” he explains. Contagion, he says, suggests ideas spread by mere awareness, but the resistance of some cities to join the fray shows that’s inaccurate and an insufficient explanation. “When you use ‘contagion’ in a catch-all descriptive way, you’re actually just describing spread; what we’re seeking to explain is the conditions around spread. One of the things that underpins and reinforces the use of these terms is their ideological function. If you have a group where you have powerful inequalities, it’s in the interests of those who [benefit] to appropriate the idea that this is irrational.”

So the team dispensed with the term social contagion and replaced it with spread. And in seeking to understand why ideas could spread rapidly in some areas and not others, they found some common themes. In cities and in boroughs where rioting broke out with ease, there were some common factors: poverty and deprivation, yes, and a sense of isolation from society – but most importantly there was a practical breakdown in local policing. Stop and search was common; trust in police had been utterly eroded. lLocal people felt in constant conflict with the authorities, on a daily basis on and on the very streets in which they lived out their lives.

So, as Stott says, it was an “emotion that spread across the country in droves”, but that emotion was rooted in the reality of daily life for people in those communities – a reality that was not shared by the people of Leeds, where policing methods found to be more collegiate and community focused.

What does that mean for reports of an epidemic of spiking by injection? The same analysis applies: the spread is a reflection of the daily lives of young women at UK universities. As Stott surmises: “It’s an expression of the reality of people’s lives that’s experienced in terms of sexsim and inequality in the context of going out … Going out is a fearful action where you are left vulnerable and you need to understand that structural reality if you want to get to grips with why this issue is there. It’s not men who are experiencing this fear.”

Stott is clear: these women’s reports are not fabricated or hysteria. They are true in what they tell us about their bodies and their lives. “There has been some kind of an assault and this is an expression of that vulnerability that these people feel as well. It makes a lot of sense of their subjective experience: that, in essence, is the issue.”

For Fergus Neville, the language of both events raises a similar issue – that the spread of a perhaps skewed perception of risk is always a bad thing. The security of membership of a group is also beneficial not only to victims and potential victims of spiking, but also those seeking to tackle the problem of sexism on campus and also drug spiking in the night time economy more widely.

“It may be perfectly rational for certain groups to be concerned about these issues, and it’s important that their concerns about safety are not written-off as the consequence of irrational emotionality,” he says. “If one did want to communicate to these groups to allay their fears, then in-group members are the most credible sources of information, so communication from trusted members of their social group would be best placed to assume leadership positions, rather than those seen as outsiders or even as those who are part of the problem.”

It’s important to remember that the crime of spiking of drinks and spiking by injection has occurred right across the country and almost exclusively with young women as the target victim. Investigations are ongoing and police are analysing how widespread the use of hypodermic needles may be, even where evidence in the emergency room is still scarce. The charity Rape Crisis reports that it has received extra calls around spiking attempts this year, though it points out that this increase in reports regarding drink spiking and date rape drugs increases every autumn with the start of the university term. Nevertheless, men are committing crimes against young women and a focus on the female response to that may divert attention from the source of the problem: male violence against women.

“There are absolutely people that perpetrate this crime, and the night time economy provides the opportunity for them to do so,” a spokesperson for Rape Crisis explains. “Women should not have to live their lives in fear and the vast majority of women will be able to enjoy nights out without experiencing this. Alongside horrifying high profile crimes against women, failings within the criminal justice system for rape victims and survivors, and now widespread reports of spiking – it can start to feel that we cannot escape rape culture and its impacts.”

A report by Rape Crisis, titled “The Decriminalisation of Rape”, recommends that police officers recieve specialist training in how to deal with any reports of rape and sexual assault so that any reports, including instances of date rape drugging, can be managed effectively including giving victims specialist support in a timely fashion.

“Women are right to feel anger about this. We should be furious that we have to consider changing our own behaviours because of violent men. That fear and that anger is justified and any concerns should be treated seriously.”

For policing, community safety and proper access to criminal justice, authorities of course need to unpick which accounts of spiking suggest a physical attack with a needle has taken place and which may be the result of physical sensations created by the climate of anxiety and repression in which young women live their lives, especially at night. But for what this epidemic of spiking accounts tells us about the lives of young women, it doesn’t matter at all.

As Mark Earls concludes: “We are none of us very good witnesses of our own lives. We remember things that didn’t actually happen. We all have to find a way to deal with false memory syndrome, to respect people’s personal experience without saying this is all imagined, and we have made it all up.

“We all ‘make stuff up’, and experience shouldn’t be belittled.”