99 Percent Of Sexual Assaults At Sydney University Go Unreported Each Year, Study Finds
"The University has failed to prevent sexual assault from happening."
Sexual assault and rape culture on university campuses has made plenty of headlines this year. The University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales have both had high-profile instances of on-campus sexism, while the University of Sydney has had several.
In May, the university’s Wesley College came under fire for publishing a journal detailing female students’ sexual histories and ‘awarding’ them titles like ‘Best Ass’ and ‘Biggest Pornstar’, while a survey conducted by the university earlier this year found that one in four respondents had experienced sexual harassment or assault in their time at uni.
Now new information from that survey has come to light, revealing that the reality of sexual violence on Sydney University’s main Camperdown/Darlington campus may be much more serious than previously believed. Sydney Uni student newspaper Honi Soit reports that up to 340 incidents of sexual assault, indecent assault and acts of indecency go unreported at the campus every year.
The university-commissioned study, which can be found here, found that only “one percent of incidents” are reported to an on-campus official, and that only 1.4 percent of “the most serious incidents” were reported. Honi Soit estimates that, if those figures are accurate, up to 1,700 instances of sexual and indecent assault may have gone unreported on Sydney Uni’s main campus over the last five years.
The report also noted that “awareness of existing processes for reporting and support was not widespread”, and that “41 percent of the students who reported [their] incident to the university said that the university’s formal procedures did not help them deal with the problem”.
Sydney Uni SRC Women’s Officer Anna Hush told Honi Soit that “the University has failed to prevent sexual assault from happening” and that “there needs to be a fundamental overhaul of the reporting system”.
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Via Honi Soit. Feature image via Daniel Neubauer on a Flickr Creative Commons licence.