In the same week that the The Hunting Ground – a documentary that tells the personal stories of women who have been victims of sexual assault on American college campuses – was screened at campuses all over Australia, reports of misogynist behaviour from our own university students hit the headlines.
A Facebook page dubbed ‘Hotties of Melbourne University’, where photos of students were shared and rated for ‘hotness’, was finally removed last week after years of complaints. A group of male students from Philip Baxter College at UNSW were singing a song with lyrics like ‘I wish that all the ladies were little red foxes, and if I were a hunter I’d shoot up in their boxes.’ Anyone who has spent time among uni students will have similar anecdotes of misogynist behaviour.
So do Australian universities have a problem with sexual assault? Yes, says Heidi La Paglia, National Women’s Officer at the National Union of Students (NUS). The NUS released a report titled ‘Let’s Talk About It’ earlier this year after conducting a survey on campuses across the country in the second half of 2015. It found that 72 per cent of female respondents had experiences sexual assault or harassment at university. “It’s a very high number,” says La Paglia. “It’s clearly a problem.”
Source: Facebook
Widespread sexual assault and harassment is not a new phenomenon; the 2010 NUS survey revealed similar results. What has changed is the role of social media in the harassment of women.
“There are a lot of women’s collective pages where students join to participate in a safe space because Facebook has become so unsafe publicly,” says La Paglia. “Anyone who promotes anything related to gender quality gets attacked.”
Online forums gave people “free rein” to say whatever they liked without consequence. “It’s really good that people are talking about this because it means that consequences are coming into play,” says La Paglia.
Why is this still a problem in 2016?
Decades since women’s liberation upset the apple cart of traditional gender roles throughout society, why is misogyny still so common place at our universities?
These sexist subcultures reflect attitudes still prevalent in wider Australian society, which one of the world’s highest rates of sexual assault. Gender inequality is illustrated by “the fact that we have a gender pay gap between women and men despite the fact we have a law against it,” La Paglia says. “And the fact that children are still socialised to behave in different ways whether they identify as a boy or a girl.”
What is surprising is that misogyny is rife in universities, places that were previously epicentres of progressive politics and social movements. Explaining the origins of the retrograde views on gender held by the current crop of young adults graduating from Australian tertiary institutions is complicated, says La Paglia “It comes down to an underlying culture that treats men and women differently.”
What are universities doing about it?
In February 2016 Universities Australia launched a new campaign to prevent on-campus sexual assault and harassment. How effective the Respect. Now. Always. initiative is will be gauged by the newly developed Australian Universities’ Sexual Assault and Harassment Survey, to be rolled out later in the year. The product of collaboration between NUS, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Australian Human Rights Centre at UNSW, the new survey will address the current lack of information about the incidence of sexual assault at universities in Australia and help universities develop policies to better deal with the issue.
Nicola Heath is a writer whose work has appeared at SBS Life, Yahoo7 and Broadsheet Sydney. She tweets from @nicoheath.
