In the higher-education context, the policy of some institutions to make Take Back the Night events mandatory for students, compelling them to attend regardless of whether they want to or not, has come under criticism by some women's rights activists as being hypocritical and inherently self-defeating. After a 2015 controversy at Virginia Tech emerged in which a mandatory event had some football players in the audience laugh at accounts of sexual assault, try to leave early, and otherwise disrupt the process, 'Womanspace' Co-President Malavika Sahai remarked, "Requiring people to go to an event encroaches on that safe space... f you don't want to be there, you really shouldn't be there."