“You wouldn’t read about it” is an old classic Australian expression. Now we’re reading about Australian universities and their timid approach to managing a catastrophic level of sexual violence.
The figures are astonishing and appalling. According to the 2021 National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) 275 students are assaulted each week. Nice to know somebody’s learning nothing, isn’t it?
That’s 14,300 students per year. Maybe we’re importing our academic culture, maybe not. Maybe we have also achieved that sublime state of total insanity. Read those links for some staggeringly unpleasant info.
Bear in mind also that the fees you pay for being sexually assaulted are pretty high. About $15,000 to $37,000 per year depending on the degree. That’s a lot of money to spend on getting your life turned into a war zone.
Despite this, Australian universities rank reasonably well most of the time in the world rankings. Presumably, the students manage to take time off from getting sexually assaulted to get their degrees.
This leads to an interesting question. What is being done about it? As you might expect, not much, and slowly. The universities have signed up on a new “charter to sexual violence”.
That’s hardly good enough. Let’s explain the issues in different terms to Australia’s atrophied academia:
These are serious criminal offenses committed on your premises.
Failure to report a crime may be an offense.
A duty of care for students is at least implied and would be said to be obvious.
A person who trips over something on the grounds apparently has more coverage than people who may be scarred for life by a sexual assault.
These are young people. They can be severely traumatized by such experiences.
It’d be one hell of a class action, and a precedent if a university was held liable in any way for these occurrences. An unsafe working environment alone would be interesting.
This isn’t a “woke” issue. This is about young people at needless risk of situations which shouldn’t happen at all. It makes the universities seem weak and unable to manage basic facts.
How many prosecutions have taken place? What’s been done about offenders on university premises? Has anything at all been done?
Universities have a bad reputation for being incredibly mild and retiring when students act badly. There was a case of one student defecating in a public space and otherwise being obnoxious. Nothing was done. It seems the offending little urchin’s father was someone important according to the university chickens.
This is the payoff for at least a decade of similar chronic gutlessness. No discipline and people try to get away with murder. …Or is that a forthcoming attraction in Australian universities? Perhaps after the fees go up a few more tens of thousands of dollars? Pay your fees and get killed for a bit of light entertainment?
What the hell is this supposed to be about? Aesthetics? Advanced flower arrangement? Discrediting our major export education system just for the sake of it? Do we tell foreign students to come to Australia and get raped? Maybe they win some syphilis as a sort of door prize?
Enough of this rubbish. This atrocity cannot be tolerated at 1% of its current levels. Bury the little piglets causing the problems and the others will back off.
Here’s a suggestion:
Fix it or you’re out of those jobs you’re so obviously not doing. We can probably find more incompetent irresponsible idiots if we need them.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
