Unknowingly drugged in a nightclub, young women are mobilizing

They have decided to boycott nightclubs so that a new kind of aggression stops. In Manchester, UK, dozens of young women demonstrated on October 27. “We hate people who drug us and those who let it be”, chants one of them. These British students denounce increasing cases of young women drugged without their knowledge by injection. “I knew something had happened to me. I wondered why my hand was like this”, says Sarah, stung during a night out at a club.

According to British police, 56 cases of injection undergone have been recorded in the past two months. This phenomenon is in addition to another already known in nightclubs, the use of GHB, an odorless drug poured into the glass of victims with the aim of sexually assaulting them. “People who do this must have much harsher sentences”, says Sacha Lord, Manchester nightlife advisor. In Belgium too, for the past fortnight, testimonies of assaults suffered in nightclubs have multiplied. British students are asking for more searches at the entrance to clubs to feel more secure.