Image credit: Angela Griffin
Angela Griffin
Universities are places of learning and, for most of us, they are places where we learn to be adults. While I was at university, I lived out of home for the first time, learned to cook for myself, learned to make friends, I explored volunteering opportunities, first jobs, and I discovered who I was. A lot of these important life firsts came with their own difficulties as it turns out finding yourself can be a painful process, but facing these difficulties are an important part of growing up. However, one difficulty no university student should have to face is sexual violence.
Unfortunately, sexual violence is a sad reality for a huge number of university students. The National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) conducted in 2021 found that one in twenty students had experienced sexual assault and one in six students had experienced sexual harassment since starting university. For students living on campus, these rates were even higher with 25.8% of sexual assaults recorded in the NSSS occurring in university residences.
When I first came to study at UNSW, I was 19 years old and was social justice minded. I threw myself into feminist spaces getting involved in groups such as my university’s women’s collective, and Sydney’s Reclaim the Night rally. In the time that I was involved in these groups, I heard story after story from my women and queer friends who had experienced sexual violence, and activists who had been burned out by the monumental trek uphill toward societal change. At this same time, in 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) released the ‘Change the Course’ report (the AHRC report). This report investigated Australian university student experiences of sexual violence and made nine recommendations for universities to prevent and respond to sexual violence.
In 2021 I completed an honours thesis for which I asked student activists like me how they felt their universities had implemented the recommendations included in the AHRC report. This thesis found that students involved in sexual violence activism in 2017/18 were more likely to express satisfaction with their universities implementation of the AHRC report recommendations than those involved more recently. Students involved in activism and advocacy in the years immediately following the release of the AHRC report expressed that their universities were shocked into action and that their universities explicitly prioritised including student representatives in decision-making processes. Therefore, many students involved in 2017/18 felt a level of ownership over the subsequent changes made.
Students involved in 2020 and 2021 however were more likely to express disenfranchisement with, or a lack of knowledge about, their university’s approach. One student was a Women’s Officer in 2020 and stated that:
“I personally had very little contact with the University regarding the implementation of the Change the Course report… The minimal contact I had with the University was related to providing feedback on other projects unrelated to the topic of sexual misconduct.”
Many students also felt their universities had quietly discontinued a prominent focus on sexual violence during the pandemic. This sentiment was supported in the recently released Senate Inquiry into current and proposed sexual consent laws in Australia conducted by the Legal & Constitutional Affairs References Committee. The Committee was tasked with reviewing current and proposed consent laws in Australia and it particularly highlighted high rates of sexual violence occurring at Australian universities. In the report, the Committee found that: “…despite these efforts [actions taken by universities in the aftermath of the AHRC report], the committee heard that the university sector’s commitment has, at best, waned and, at worst, stalled.”
Universities, like many slow moving institutions, need external pushes to continue efforts toward sexual violence prevention and response. In 2017, this push was the release of the AHRC report and associated student activism. Today, the push is coming from the findings of the Senate Inquiry. When it came to making recommendations for change, recommendations 15-17 related to universities. These final three recommendations were that:
- Universities Australia conduct a second NSSS with results made publicly available no later than 2025.
- The Commonwealth Government implements an independent taskforce overseeing universities’ policies and practices to prevent and respond to sexual violence.
- The Commonwealth Government commissions an independent review of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
In recent years, I have noticed a drop in university engagement on the issue of sexual violence. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated economic concerns pushed the issue off the university agenda and it is in universities’ best interests to keep this up and to ignore the problem. I implore Universities Australia and the Commonwealth Government to implement the three university related recommendations in the Senate Committee report and I hope that this report can act as a fire to ignite the issue of sexual violence on university campuses once again. Students deserve better. It’s time to do better.
Author bio:
Angela Griffin (she/her) is a Research Assistant at the Gendered Violence Research Network, UNSW Sydney, and has a background completing research and consultation with university students. In 2021 she completed her Bachelor of Social Research & Policy (Honours First Class). As part of this degree, she completed a thesis exploring student activist experiences of their universities implementation of the recommendations included in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2017 ‘Change the Course’ report.
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