Universities have been told to improve the way they deal with sexual assault on campuses after a damning report found only 4% of students believed their university was doing enough to provide support for victims.
On Friday Universities Australia released a set of 12 guidelines aimed at helping universities respond to sexual assault and harassment on campus.
They include recommendations to “engage” with independently run residential colleges, improve staff training and create single points of contact to report incidents of sexual assault.
The guidelines are a response to a Human Rights Commission report released in August last year. The landmark report – which was commissioned by Universities Australia – found that one in 10 female university students had been sexually assaulted in the past two years.
The HRC report – which surveyed students at 39 Australian universities – found 51% of students were sexually harassed in 2016, and 6.9% of students had been sexually assaulted in either 2015 or 2016.
It prompted criticism from student and women’s groups who said students were often deterred from reporting assault or harassment because universities did not have sufficient reporting procedures in place.
The absence of clear sexual assault policies had “deterred so many people from speaking out” and students “simply don’t know where to seek help”, the women’s officer for the National Union of Students, Abby Stapleton, said at the time.
The guidelines released by UA on Friday conceded that most students who were sexually assaulted or sexually harassed did not “seek support or assistance from their university”, and nor did they “formally report their experience to their university or police”.
It called the under-reporting a “significant information gap” in understanding the “nature and scale” of sexual assault on campus, and suggested that universities introduce more formalised de-identified data collection policies to help “identify patterns of behaviour and the effectiveness of procedures while safeguarding privacy”.
“The person making the disclosure should be given the opportunity to review information for factual accuracy before it is formally submitted to the data collection mechanism,” the report accompanying the guidelines stated.
“A person who receives a disclosure should explain to the student that they will provide de-identified information to the university to help it better understand what is happening in its community.”
The release of the HRC report last year was part of an increasing awareness of the breadth of sexual assault, harassment and hazing on university campuses.
In November a separate study into residential colleges at the University of Sydney revealed a “huge drinking culture” in which students said they were pressured to drink and to have sex to fit in.
Another report released by the action group End Rape on Campus in February, which detailed decades of institutionalised hazing and misogyny in residential colleges, and prompted the University of Sydney’s vice chancellor, Michael Spence, to admit the university was powerless to stop ritual hazing on the grounds of independently run colleges.
Nevertheless, the UA guidelines include a suggestion that universities “engage with colleges and residential halls” — including those that are managed independently of the university — “to ensure consistency in responses, reporting and investigation approaches”.
The guidelines are not binding on universities but UA’s chief executive, Catriona Jackson, said she believed vice chancellors were “absolutely determined” to address the issue of sexual assault on campus.
“Anyone who read the Human Rights Commission report would have been shocked and made to feel sick,” she said.
“The stories were really shocking and every single university leader has since that point been absolutely determined to make clear to people considering harassing or assaulting people that it is absolutely not on.
“But we also need to be making sure that when these terrible things happen to students have every support possible and will be dealt with compassionately.”
