In honour of Women’s Health Week, Her Campus Bristol collected the anonymous accounts of people’s experiences with spiking. These are their stories.
TW: This article contains personal stories that may be triggering to some readers
Like any fresher, I was excited to go to University, to enjoy nights out and to make new friends. What I hadn’t taken into consideration was the potential danger on the very campus that I was supposed to be making my new home. As women, we grow up hearing horror stories of drink spiking, and as an eighteen year-old that had rarely left the village I grew up in, they seemed just that, horror stories. Not something real, not something that could happen to anyone.
I am now 21 years old, and I have had my drink spiked twice.
The first time I went to university, I went to the University of Warwick and things seemed to be going well. My drink got spiked when I was in a room full of students. My female flatmates got me home and spent the night on the phone to 111. Two months later I was packing my bags, moving back home and had a place at a different University.
I arrived at the University of Bristol full of optimism, but just three weeks later I was having to process the same issues and emotions that I was dealing with exactly one year before.
I’m scared to get a drink in a club again
Anonymous Contributor
Friends offered bittersweet reminders that I had “been so lucky”. Lucky that my friends had noticed. Lucky that they got me home safely. Lucky that I wasn’t alone. Lucky that I wasn’t raped.
I didn’t feel lucky.
I was in Barcelona with some school friends and hadn’t had that much to drink. All of a sudden, me and my friend were vomiting in the toilet of a bar, and felt our muscles stiffening
Anonymous Contributor
But how do you say that to people offering comfort? You can’t tell them that it didn’t feel lucky when I was sitting in the bathroom the next day more sick than I knew was possible. Or how it took more than I could ever have possibly imagined to simply face my flatmates the next day.
I knew they would be kind, they are kind, but I also knew they would want to talk about it and I’m still not sure how to talk about something I barely even remember.
It’s really sad this still happens and I wouldn’t ever want anyone to go through what I went through
Anonymous Contributor
Everyone I know has a story like this. Either it happened to them or it happened to their friend. A seemingly constant cycle of recovery or offering some sort of support.
Regardless of which of these categories you fall into, every woman I know walks around with their hand over their drink- glaringly aware of the risk posed- and this is evidently established. So evidently in fact, that a whole new method of spiking has begun.
I couldn’t walk, I was stumbling everywhere and my boyfriend had to pick me off the floor. The room was spinning like nothing before. My boyfriend recalls my eyes rolling back, me not being able to speak
Anonymous Contributor
I’m certainly not alone in finding this new phenomenon deeply upsetting for several reasons. But something that spun round and round in my mind was that I had been commissioned to write this article long before spiking by injection caught the eye of the media. I didn’t believe that spiking could get worse… Is it not enough that we are scared to drink in public? Now even being in public is a risk.
Once back I lost all of my movement, turned grey, was completely paralysed, couldn’t speak. My friends called the ambulance and I was taken to A&E. It was like a trapped-in syndrome, I couldn’t communicate anything
Anonymous Contributor
I know that my experiences are not isolated experiences and I know there may even be people reading this that have been spiked recently. But, sadly, spiking feels isolating in spite of this. So I should end this by saying that the alarming prevalence of spiking means that you aren’t alone in this and you have a whole community of others behind you.
I would like to thank all the people who contributed their spiking experiences. I am currently in the process of organising a potential support group for those that have been affected by these issues. If this is something that you are interested in, please click below and register your interest.
Interest form: https://forms.gle/r9GLDxg2UjcBi3he9