Fair Agenda

This week our movement helped achieve something great: the passage of new national standards that will make universities safer for students.

The National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence is the culmination of 8 years of joint campaigning by the Fair Agenda movement with partners like End Rape on Campus Australia, Dr Allison Henry and the STOP Campaign. And on Monday it was passed by the House of Representatives – the final hurdle to it becoming law. 

You may remember from my communications over the many years of this campaign the harm and failings of many university approaches to sexual violence to date. Amongst the kinds of issues our movement’s advocacy has been focused on addressing include: 

• Universities' and residences' actively harmful and traumatising responses to student reports of sexual assault, including:
  • Victim-blaming during reporting processes,
  • Failing to provide basic safety measures,
  • Threatening to sanction survivors if they tell others about their complaint, and
  • Failing to provide student survivors with updates or outcomes after they filed complaints about sexual assault.
• Universities' failing to screen staff being hired into positions of power and influence over students for prior convictions of sexual assault; protection orders; or active complaints about their use of sexual violence.
• Universities and residences failing to remove known perpetrators of violence on campus; or provide basic protections against them causing further harm, and
• Creating onerous barriers to student survivors accessing necessary accommodations or adjustments after rape.

The new National Code will set detailed and enforceable standards that will address these kinds of issues.

Its contents were shaped by representatives of Fair Agenda and our campaign partners over months of consultations. The 30 pages of the full Code contain critical and meaningful detail that I can’t convey in full here, but its features include:

• Requiring universities to ensure their prevention education and training is: accessible, trauma-informed, evidence-informed; and monitored and evaluated.
• Requiring universities' responses to gender-based violence to be person-centered and trauma-informed.
• Requiring universities to respond to any disclosure of gender-based violence with a risk assessment to manage and monitor identified risks to a survivor’s safety on an ongoing basis.
• Requiring alternate teaching and living arrangements be provided for a victim-survivor where necessary to ensure their safety. 
• Requiring universities to have timely and safe processes.
• Requiring a provider to impose sanctions proportionate to conduct – including exclusion or expulsion. 

Each university’s leader will be responsible for ensuring these clear and specific standards are met - and there is also power for the federal Department of Education to enforce financial penalties where a university fails to meet these standards.

This reform will be transformative for student safety. I’m so proud that our movement has played a critical role in building pressure for this reform; and thankful to the thousands of Fair Agenda members and partners who have contributed to this campaign in so many different ways over the past 8 years. 

This major reform was 8 years in the making; and the product of persistent collaboration between advocates and movements. If you’d like to see some of the collective campaign effort leading to this point, you can see a snapshot the Fair Agenda team created of the advocacy that led to this reform here.

Today we mark this significant step forward for improving safety in universities. But sadly they are not the only institutions failing and actively harming victim-survivors of sexual violence. So tomorrow we refocus our efforts building momentum for the many other changes needed – including access to timely care and forensic medical exams; access to sexual assault services for healing and recovery; and more trauma-informed court processes. We hope that you’ll join us in these important campaigns as well. You can add your support on Fair Agenda’s campaigns page here. 

We also know that this change comes too late for many. To every victim-survivor that has been harmed by their university or TEQSA’s response to their report – we’re so sorry for what you were put through. You deserved better. We hope you’ll do something to take care of yourself today.  

If you have been impacted by sexual assault you can access support from state and territory sexual assault counselling hotlines on: 

NSW - NSW Sexual Violence Helpline: 1800 424 017
QLD - Sexual Assault Helpline: 1800 010 120
VIC - Centres Against Sexual Assault: 1800 806 292
SA - Yarrow Place: 1800 817 421
ACT - Canberra Rape Crisis Centre: (02) 6247 2525
WA - Sexual Assault Resource Centre: (08) 6458 1828
NT - Ruby Gaea: (08) 8945 0155
TAS - Sexual Assault Support Service: (03) 6231 1817