Film director Spike Lee tells The Late Show with Stephen Colbert sex strikes could work on university campuses where there’s ‘an abundance of date rapes’

US film director Spike Lee has said a sex strike could work on university campuses where there’s “an abundance of sexual harassment and date rapes.”

Appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his latest film Chi-Raq - which tells the story of a gang leader’s frustrated girlfriend who persuades other women to abstain from sex until their men agree to end their reign of violence - Lee said: “I think a sex strike could really work on college campuses where there’s an abundance of sexual harassment or date rapes.

“Second semester it’s going to happen. Once people coming back from Christmas and some stuff jumps off, there’s going to be sex strikes in universities and college campuses across this country. I believe it.”

Watch the interview:

According the team behind a recent film called The Hunting Ground - which exposes rape culture at American universities, and has been touring campuses across the US and UK - “staggering statistics” have shown how one in five women in college are sexually assaulted, yet only a fraction of these crimes are reported, and even fewer result in punishment for the perpetrators.

A recent campus survey by the Association of American Universities - which assessed the incidence, prevalence, and characteristics of incidents of sexual assault and misconduct on US campuses - also found that, overall, almost 12 per cent of student respondents across 27 universities reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation since enrolling.

Lee’s Chi-Raq, though, has been inspired by a satire by Aristophanes - a comic playwright of ancient Athen - called Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece use sex as a weapon to stop men from making war.

The pair also discussed gun culture in the US when Colbert brought up the incident of 17-year-old black Chicago resident Laquan McDonald who, in 2014, was killed by white police officer Jason Van Dyke after being shot 16 times.

Footage of the shooting was caught on dashcam which was released by police on Wednesday and Colbert wanted to know whether is was the right move to make, even if the video would incite a violent reaction.

Lee staunchly agreed with the clip’s release and said: “Number one, they’re [the police] worried because they think black folks in Chicago are going to run amok - and I don’t know if that’s necessary - so I think there’s a way to have peaceful demonstrations without tearing stuff up.

I’m hopeful that nothing crazy happens and I’m glad that the tape is being released because this is democracy. I sometimes think we pick and choose what America should see.”

Following the release of the dashcam footage, President Barack Obama said he was “deeply disturbed” by the incident.