We recently visited the University of Salford's Students' Union to meet management and staff at their students' union, Atmosphere. Over one afternoon, we delivered two training sessions on dealing with spiking and sexual violence in their venue.

Working with venue manager Andy, we integrated our sessions into Salford Students' Union's venue, Atmosphere's, pre-planned training day and learned that the student bar staff had a great foundation of knowledge on spiking and sexual violence to build on. We had some great conversations about the importance of empowering victims and identifying suspicious behaviours of perpetrators of spiking and sexual violence. The interactive nature of our training ensured all participants could apply the knowledge they had learned and gave them a platform to bring their own ideas around improving safety in their venue. After discussing at length the importance of talking to customers to create a safeguarding ethos and how to acknowledge and hinder red flag requests at the bar, the group applied all of this to real life scenarios taken from our Spike Report and our social media platforms to test their new tools. We further engaged in important conversations about how Atmosphere procedures can link with the policies and disciplinary procedures of the University of Salford to ensure zero tolerance approaches to these violent behaviours.