This week, the Australian Human Rights Commission released Change the Course. It is a landmark report into sexual assault and harassment at universities. The undertaking was propelled by survivors, student leaders and support organisations.
It should mark the beginning of making campuses and university-affiliated venues safer for all young people. The onus has ever been on those with power to make it so. The results of the national survey, across 39 universities, make for grim reading. More than one in 20 students (6.9 per cent) were sexually assaulted at least once in 2015 or 2016. Women are four times as likely as men to have been assaulted in a residential college. Queer students are more likely to be sexually harassed than those who identify as straight. Trans or gender-diverse students are also more likely to be sexually harassed than women and men.
Beyond the numbers, we must imagine the psychological and physical impact on thousands of young people who are making their way in the world. Sexual assault and harassment should not be normalised or minimised as part of the university experience, as they aren't (or shouldn't be) in other settings like sports, church or work.
It is not a sordid rite of passage, a shadow cost of higher learning. As ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt reminds us: 'Each statistic is a person. A colleague, a classmate, a friend.' Universities owe a duty of care. The relevant Ignatian term is cura personalis, care for the entire person.
Yet such incidents are severely underreported, in part because students feel disempowered. Only 4 per cent of respondents think that their university is doing enough to provide information and support regarding sexual assault, and 6 per cent think so in relation to sexual harassment.
In brief, sexual violence at universities corresponds not only with the sexual violence that occurs in broader society, but the systemic failures and cultural permissions that make it prevalent.
The Human Rights Commission correctly frames remedies in structural terms: lines of accountability; awareness and training programs; developing and auditing processes for responding to incidents (including counselling services and proper documentation); independent and regular tracking of university policies. It says something about the utter depth of inadequacy thus far—that all this amounts to a mere baseline.
Structures can of course be mended. Practices can be enforced. But the greater challenge, as always, is cultural. That is what makes change meaningful and therefore permanent.
"It is not a sordid rite of passage, a shadow