Students are warning universities to take rape seriously ahead of the release of a national survey into the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment at universities.
A photo campaign launched on Saturday by the group End Rape on Campus (EROC) shows women holding up placards demanding their universities take stronger action against sexual assault on campuses and provide better support for victims.
EROC ambassador Nina Funnell said they launched the campaign to put a human face to the issue before the results were released.
"Too often when we talk about sexual assault we get so bogged down in the numbers and the statistics and we forget that behind each one of those numbers there is a real person who has experienced something traumatic," she said.
The Australian Human Rights Commission will release results of the survey into sexual assault and harassment across all 39 Australian universities on Tuesday.
Nina thinks the report is going to be a huge wake up call for both universities and the Australian public.
"We're expecting the results on Tuesday will be quite shocking for some," she said.
"We know very, very clearly from the anecdotal evidence we're hearing that sexual assault is a daily occurrence in universities across Australia.
"More recently it's become more and more difficult for the universities to sweep it under the rug."
In many instances, reporting sexual assault at universities has not been straightforward for victims.
"We have cases where students have gone to complain to their universities only to be told that they can't be told the outcome of the investigation because of the privacy of the offender.
"We've certainly heard stories of students being sexually assaulted and raped by staff members and students who have been disbelieved," she said.
One of the women involved in the online campaign, Imogen Grant, 20, who is a women's officer at Sydney University, said the campaign was a way to shine a light on sexual assault.
"I hope that the results are incredibly comprehensive and they bolster a lot of media scrutiny onto universities so that they will implement real change on campus and support survivors," she said.
University Australia's chief executive, Belinda Robinson, agreed the issue of sexual assault was a challenging one, but disputed that voices would be lost in the release of the results next week.
"I don't think women's voice will be lost at all," she said.
"While the report will be released on Tuesday, the conversations between vice chancellors and their students will be ongoing. This is not a one-off issue, this is not a one-off initiative."
"While we don't know the specific numbers here, we do expect this to be a challenging issue and this is why the report was commissioned — because universities wanted to know what the story was, they wanted the evidence base."
