Semester two is in full flow and that means so is the famous Plymouth Confessions Instagram. Plymouth Gazette was lucky enough to have a sit down and a cuppa with the admin of Plymouth confessions.
Plymouth Confessions pages have had a varied and vast history, but by far the best known is @plym_confessions.
I tracked down the admin of the page, which has made even more of a splash. It shares stories and helpful information to keep people informed and safe.
The page typically shares funny stories and gimmicks sent in by the students of Plymouth, but often shares experiences related to spiking and assault.
A conversation with the confessions admin
Who started the page?
I didn’t start it, I took over the page in January 2020. A student in the year above who didn’t want to run it anymore contacted me, maybe because I sent in so many confessions. There were three admins before that, and the other two left, so they didn’t want to run the page alone.
Why run the page?
At the time I thought it was cool, and there was a stigma around the page after a previous page took advantage of young girls until he was found out. My curiosity and a will to make it safer drove me to say yes.
What is the funniest confession that’s been sent in?
I think my confessions are the funniest but I’m not sure which one is my favourite. During lockdown, the confessions got drier, and it turned into a matchmaking and room finding thing that we refuse to do now because it’s a lot of faff. The confessions are the most amount of fun. There are confessions we’ve had recently that haven’t been posted yet which I think are really funny.
Is there anything you won’t share?
We don’t share anything if it’s a bit dry, or if it’ll hurt someone because people do send in malicious things. There isn’t anything we haven’t shared because it’s *too* scandalous.
Do you have any favourite confessions?
My favourite at the minute is due to go out, a guy and his girlfriend have been banned from pryzm because they were caught having sex. It wasn’t particularly different but it made me laugh.
Also, a gay guy once sent in that he was getting with his female housemates’ boyfriend. We advised him to maybe not do it, but it was very juicy.
When did you decide to start sharing helpful resources for charity and activism?
We started a little bit of activism a while ago, we’d share things like RAG events and things to help people be a bit safer. The first big thing was when it was announced that 97% of women said they felt they’d been harrassed/assaulted, we shared a lot of stories where people opened up about their experience as victims in any capacity.
We made sure to include trigger warnings after a lot of people gave us grief, some confessions were triggering and there were some that people thought we shouldn’t have posted.
It was important to us that people felt listened to, and people who hadn’t experienced that level of abuse had an opportunity to understand. I even shared my own experiences too.
The spiking stuff feels different, maybe because even though I’ve had bad clubbing experiences, I’ve never been spiked, but it’s more prevalent in the news right now. It’s important that businesses and venues get held accountable. We’ve been accused of slander against bouncers and hurting the nightlife industry but they have a responsibility to keep us safe.
We might share our messages about bouncers, good and bad, soon. But the messages that say “not all bouncers” are very reminiscent of other messages against other movements.
Why do you do it? How much longer do you see yourself running the page?
Because I enjoy doing it, I’ve not thought about packing it in soon, but it isn’t my top priority. I might ask for some more people to co-run it soon. I’ll hand the account over when I finish my degree because I don’t think it’s right for non-students to run a student confessions page.
I want people to run it with us, then take over because some of the information is sensitive and vulnerable. Students confide in the page, and it’s important that if they want to share that information, that the information is safe.
So who is it that runs the page?
To keep them safe, the identity of those who run the page remains a secret. It is said that it will stay this way.