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Recommendations drawn from research with students

The recommendations and insights below are drawn from our pilot study questionnaire, our comprehensive survey of 430 University of Newcastle students, and 48 in-depth interviews we conducted with student victim-survivors (2021-2023).

Key Student Recommendations

Creating education and awareness about gender-based violence and driving change
  • Education and awareness raising should form a key higher education intervention to embed gender equity and to build knowledge and capacity to help eradicate gender-based violence.
  • An explicit commitment from institutional leadership to mobilising higher education to help challenge all forms of GBV would significantly contribute to the national agenda to end gender-based violence and embed gender equity.
  • The capacity of higher education to act as an agent of change against GBV should be leveraged through high quality professional development and learning and embedded curriculum in key subject areas (such as Medicine and Health, Law, Social Work and Teacher Education).
  • Universities need to develop explicit, embedded, formal educational provision that addresses gender inequity and challenges GBV in all of its forms. Provision should elevate the voices of survivors to inform content. Provision could include information about the services and supports available to students experiencing GBV, meeting the need for greater awareness of how students access help.
  • The role of higher education in challenging GBV enables a broader understanding of gender equity at the level of cultural change, including zero tolerance of social and institutionalised forms of misogyny.
  • Listening, embedding and including voices of victim-survivors into HE prevention, response and ongoing evaluation should be a central pillar of policy-making.
  • Provide paid time for teaching staff to communicate with students about their needs for adjusted due-dates and other considerations, and to be available to support students who disclose experiences of GBV.
  • Provide employment continuity so that more staff have adequate awareness of the kinds of supports that students can access and can inform students of these supports in a meaningful manner. Both academic and professional staff require quality professional development to understand how GBV impacts on existing university procedures, and where they can get help and support in assisting their students as they navigate coursework and service provision.
Audit and transform academic processes to remove structural barriers, cultural inequities and educational disadvantages for victim-survivors of GBV
  • Universities should audit processes such as ‘adverse circumstances’ applications, extensions, and scholarships to remove automatic requirements for documentation.
  • Where the provision of ‘evidence’ of adverse circumstances is deemed strictly necessary, consider allowing counsellors, relational navigators and psychologists to submit documentation on behalf of students in order to avoid retraumatisation.
  • Universities should develop user-friendly and timely processes for refunding fees, editing academic transcripts and removing HECS-HELP debts accrued during GBV experiences.
  • Great attention is needed to the relationship between flexible and responsive time structures and inclusive pedagogical, curricular, assessment and support frameworks and practices.
  • Academic deadlines, which are a source of stress for many students, often exacerbate crises for victim-survivors of GBV. Current processes to extend deadlines require disclosure and documentation which are not appropriate for these students, and which greatly increase the risk of student withdrawal and disconnection.
  • Greater understanding of the sensitivities around disclosure and creating appropriate frameworks for the recognition of the impact of GBV is needed. This must avoid harmful practices of disclosure that retraumatise and/or produce stigmatisation of victim-survivors.
  • University counsellors and student support services staff need additional training and expertise in how to effectively and appropriately respond to students seeking help for GBV-related issues, whether incidents occurred on or off campus.
  • Universities should offer a range of immediate supports such as hotlines or online anonymous reporting for GBV victim-survivors to make contact with the institution in a timely manner if they are assaulted, or if class content exacerbates histories of trauma.
  • Universities need trauma-informed processes for handling all reports and complaints. This includes the need to communicate regularly with students about the progress of their report or complaint, and understand that the time-line for resolving reports and complaints has a big impact on the trauma experienced by victim-survivors. Each interaction with the institution has the potential to deepen trauma, so systems of reporting need to be designed to be user-friendly, transparent, and as accessible as possible.
  • Awareness should be raised that students who have experienced GBV-related trauma often fear consequences for their studies and their status in the institution/program of study if they report instances of GBV due to experiences of social stigmatisation.
Provide economic security for victim-survivors
  • GBV victim-survivors are particularly vulnerable to financial insecurity, and financial crises that put students at risk of withdrawing from their studies, homelessness and re-exposure to family violence. Awareness of the conditions of profound financial hardship many victim-survivors are experiencing while they are studying might help find ways to alleviate the challenges this presents.
  • Universities should use their influence to advocate for the provision of a livable income in the form of government support for living costs or scholarships from government or universities as essential for student victim-survivors to thrive in higher education.
  • Scholarships and grants that provide financial assistance are a recognition of the multiple barriers to higher education for GBV survivors, including profound financial hardship.
  • The process of applying for any GBV specific scholarships should be carefully considered within a framework which is mindful of the sensitivities of disclosure.
  • Universities should offer accessible crisis accommodation for victim-survivors of GBV who find themselves facing homelessness.
  • Compulsory unpaid work placements create incredible financial strain for many victim-survivors of GBV which compound financial insecurity, time-poverty and caring responsibilities. Such placements risk pushing students out of higher education. Placements should be paid, or students provided with a living allowance while they perform them. Greater flexibility is also needed around the duration and load of placements.
  • Universities should expand the eligibility of means-tested supports and scholarships to incorporate the experience of GBV victim-survivors who may be mature-age, working students, whose income appears higher, but who carry larger financial burdens and responsibilities than other students.
Establish a Gender Justice Hub for a whole-of-institution approach
  • Create a research-informed Gender Justice Hub, framed by gender justice principles to enable the collective agency, reflection and voices of student victim-survivors to guide institutional change.
  • The Hub would create trauma-informed spaces of support, solidarity and connection for student survivors to end the current perception that experiences of GBV are uncommon for university students and are individual incidents rather than manifestations of entrenched gender injustice.
  • The Hub would facilitate online forums for discussion, support and knowledge-sharing among victim-survivors, physical drop-in spaces connected to services and supports, and offerings directed to victim-survivors such as the Claim Our Place workshops provided as part of the Gender Justice Hub at the University of Newcastle.
  • Greater collaboration with expert GBV agencies outside of the university is needed to both build higher education-oriented expertise as well as to generate connection across the (non-linear) journeys of surviving GBV, including crisis support but also opportunities for lifelong learning, and accessing and participating in higher education.
  • Generating collaboration should also offer increased profile for the social, expert and community services students can access to support them through and beyond their studies.
  • A relational navigator framework would enable student victim-survivors to successfully navigate complex higher education systems, social, expert and community services, healthcare, housing and legal support and transition processes.
  • Campus safety should be broadened beyond a focus on lighting and presence of security. Instead, promotion of efforts towards education and awareness of GBV as a society-wide issue affecting campuses should be made. This will create a broader sense of efforts to create environments of safety and awareness, needed to progress towards being able to claim that campuses actively are achieving being ‘safe spaces’.
Download a printable file of the recommendations
“And you really don’t sort of speak up until it either gets to breaking point. And I suppose, in a way, it’s sort of hard to navigate in that setting because, yeah, you just feel, not only in your personal life, a lot of shame and guilt, but also as a student. And when I think I had to do adverse circumstances to get out of the debt when I did leave. It was yeah, having to go through that process, of like, getting a letter from your psychologist and your GP as to why you didn’t drop out at census date. So, it just brings a lot of shame and guilt on victims because that idea of society it’s victim blaming. It’s their fault. So, overall, you just don’t want to speak up about it.” Interview participant
“…what they’re not taking into account, with coercive control, it is very hard to put it on paper… for things like coercive control, you can’t put that on paper. People are not going to put some of the sexual abuse that goes on. They’re just not going to put that down. So you’re never going to get the full story and the full extent, and then you’re putting the onus on the victim to prove how bad off they are and things like that. So why is the onus on the victim?” Interview participant
“And I kept trying and trying and I ended up with like a $20,000 HECS debt and not passing any subjects, which I was a little bit angry about because I think, looking back now, that the university probably should have recognised that and either, you know, they probably shouldn’t have just let me keep enrolling in units. Like I don’t think that was very ethical. But I’m not putting the responsibility of that onto the university. But I think because what was happening was I would withdraw before the exam usually. And then it wasn’t recognised as a failure so it didn’t go on the progression thing which is really annoying because now I feel really stupid. It was a really, really terrible time and I ended up paying for it in more ways than one. Because now I have that on my academic record and then when you go to do things like PhDs and stuff like that, you have it follow you around and you have to explain” Interview participant
“But, yes, it was just awful and gross and really hard to deal with and even in terms of applying to get fails waived or HECS debt waived I wasn’t able to get that done until [senior executive staff] basically just did the application for me whereas prior to that it’s a really long form, you have to provide so much information and it’s just very overwhelming to deal with and especially if you have to explain why” Interview participant
“There’s been times in the past where I’ve been so stressed and this is the other thing is you’ve been so stressed that there’s been so many things going on that a due date will just lapse and you’ll realise the next day, and then you can’t do the adverse circumstances because it’s like your due dates already lapsed. And so then it’s all of these extra requirements to try and explain, I dropped the ball, right, because we do. And I think the other thing that’s frustrating is that because I am a student who I do try and get it right and then there’s the students who just don’t care and they regularly will lodge an assessment task a day or two late on the presumption that no one will ever even realise and they don’t. It’s very hard to see why there’s such strict procedures around it" Interview participant
“when topics are brought up of sexual violence and the domestic violence and stuff it can trigger me sometimes, especially the sexual assault ones. So it’s still important for me to do those classes so I want to do good at them because that’s what I want to do in the future. But, yes, when it’s still fresh and still currently happening it’s really confronting because you look at what’s happening and you’re like that’s what I’m going through. [Staff provide content warnings in class] They’re really compassionate about it which is nice but I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment so I’m like I’m going to sit through it because I need to know it. It’s not like it’s something I can avoid my entire career, especially when it’s what I want my career to focus on. So I’m a lot better with it now because I’m out of my situation that I was in but during my first year I was still in that situation so it was a little bit more confronting to deal with” Interview participant
“But, you know, even just somewhere where someone can go to access support kind of immediately. Whether that be face to face or an online thing or something like that. Because, I guess, if you’re triggered when you’re in - when you’re at uni if there was some sort of support that you could access that was instant, I mean, that would be helpful” Interview participant
“…he was just treating it as a complaint, but I kept on having to say to him, "The longer you draw this out, the longer this trauma is going on for," and he just didn’t get it. I got quite cross at him at one stage.” Interview participant
“…I’ve had concerns the whole time about whether you do [report instances of GBV], whether you don’t, am I going to get my Honours degree or am I going to be shut down? Yeah so a hundred percent I’ve had that fear. From me being me and going right, disability and you’ve done this and you’ve done that, and I’ve gone to focus groups and gone “this is what students are telling me and this is what I think” and are my grades lower because of that? Yeah, all of that. Yeah a hundred percent fear, the fear around it.. We’ve got a lot of smart women but a lot of us Interview participant
“That’s also half the problem is once you say everyone ... all of society is telling you, "Leave, leave, leave." You leave, and then when you get out there, you’re faced with a society that just cannot handle what you’re going through, and they don’t want to listen to it because it makes them feel uncomfortable. By all this advocacy work at the moment, we’re actually doing victims a disservice because there’s no one to catch them at the other end and meaning that there are services out there, but society as a whole, a majority of them turn their back on victims when we walk out…” Interview participant
“…the social work degree needs to basically practice what it preaches. It’s very big on self care and take time out for yourself and make sure you have that moment, you know, blah, blah, blah, so you don’t burn out. But, you know, third year placement has taught every student that that’s just not - it’s not doable. You’ve got students that are working full time for free then have to work on top of that to make sure they’ve got a roof over their heads and there’s a 10 unit course on that. It’s, like, who has time for self care? Unless you’re very very privileged and you have someone fully supporting you and you have enough money that you can go out and, you know, pay for yoga to do a yoga session every second day or whatever, it’s just not realistic. So this whole practice what you preach, you know, you want to talk about self care, you want to make the degree available so it can have self care actually embedded in it rather than put it on the student and then throw all this other stuff on top of the student” Interview participant
“I think more groups like that so you can sort of come together and know that you’re not alone. Like, I’ve found a lot of my groups on Facebook, and like as much as I’d love to get off Facebook I can’t because I have my support there. I think that the arts program sounds like it would be very interesting and very good because then, I think workshops on how to like going through a similar experience or how to deal with that, like just in general, like for those that are going through domestic violence who have been sexually assaulted, relationships and all that, like ways to cope so instead of, because to get into a psychologist it’s months wait. Like I’m on the waiting list, I’ve got an appointment but it’s not ‘til September” Interview participant
“Multiple casual safe spaces to hang out. More open discussions about it - with ALL students. Infographic posters about how to identify different forms of abuse, and how to set and enforce your own personal boundaries, in multiple settings." Survey participant
“Having maybe an impartial or independent advocate to be able to go to outside of the university… I know there’s groups and clubs and all that sort of stuff but a specific advocate independent of the university would be good maybe, so that if you do have concerns and you feel like you’re experiencing gender-based violence within the university you can go. And they find out who makes complaints – they find out!” Interview participant

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Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education
University of Newcastle,
Callaghan, NSW, 2308

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This project was prepared on Awabakal, Darkinjung, Gadigal, Wonnarua and Worimi lands. We acknowledge the unceded lands on which we work and we pay our respects to Elders past and present.

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The cover artwork was produced by participants in the Claim Our Place program. Elements from participants’ artworks were collated by Anna Rolfe at the University Galleries.