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It has taken 13 years of advocacy to develop the new national code to address gender-based violence on campus and make universities accountable for the safety of students. By Madison Griffiths.
Finally, university action on gendered violence
Grace Binns was completing her first semester of arts/law at Monash University when she was sexually assaulted by one of the university’s exchange students at the Notting Hill Hotel near Clayton, in 2023. Binns turned to the university’s Safer Community Unit for help and was told that since the assault didn’t occur on the campus, nor at a university-affiliated event, Monash “could not take any direct disciplinary action”. She was referred instead to Victoria Police, who told her such cases take more than a year, and sometimes two to three, to proceed through to the court system.
“I was 19 years old, I’d just moved to the city from Bendigo and so I reluctantly came to the conclusion that if I were to prosecute, it would be more punishing for me than my offender,” she tells The Saturday Paper.
Monash University offered Binns a “motivational interview”, a process she had never heard of. It involved the Safer Community Unit contacting the respondent directly, notifying them of the allegation made against them and inviting them to “discuss their behaviour” with members of the unit. Binns asked if she could attend, but the unit insisted this was “not within the scope of [their] procedure”. When challenged by Binns, the unit said they did not have the resources to complete her request.
A Monash spokesperson told The Saturday Paper the university “do[es] not offer ‘RJ’ [restorative justice] options through our Safer Community Unit”, and claims that the ‘motivational interviews’ are designed to be “educative in nature, provide a warning about unacceptable behaviour, and the consequences under university policies, as well as criminal or civil proceedings, and to provide referral to appropriate support and resources, including behaviour change programs”.
It is customarily offered as a response option if Monash University deems the incident does not fall within its jurisdiction for disciplinary proceedings.
Two weeks ago, the Labor government – in response to alarming rates of sexual harassment and assault at tertiary institutions – introduced the mandatory National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence. The national code follows the establishment of a National Student Ombudsman, an independent investigatory body for student complaints. In conjunction with the ombudsman, the code obliges tertiary institutions and student accommodation providers across the country to appropriately respond to – and endeavour to prevent – such occurrences both on and off campus.
Sharna Bremner, founder and director of the now-retired advocacy organisation End Rape on Campus (EROC), was instrumental in drafting the code, alongside Dr Allison Henry and leaders of the STOP Campaign and Fair Agenda. Bremner describes the February 2026 implementation date as “13 years’ worth of work, culminating into a single moment”.
Since 2012, the three advocacy groups had compiled between them a long record of universities mishandling instances of sexual violence. “Universities were actively providing harmful responses, threatening to sanction victim–survivors … failing to remove known perpetrators,” says Renee Carr, founding executive director of Fair Agenda. “Universities have been told there’s a problem, have been asked to act, have said they would, and have continued to respond in a way that serves their own interests.”
“We didn’t start by intending to advocate for legislative reform,” Bremner tells The Saturday Paper. “But it quickly became apparent that that was the requirement.”
Over the span of her advocacy, Bremner engaged with more than 300 students – including Grace Binns – at some 40 higher-education institutions. “The same pattern of responses was being repeated,” Bremner says. “Students were not given the support they needed … fairly often institutions were covering the whole thing up.”
She recalls multiple federal education ministers telling her that the best way to address university shortcomings was to file complaints directly through the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). In June 2018, she did just that. Despite being told TEQSA was investigating each complaint, Bremner discovered in 2023 – through a Senate Inquiry into Current and Proposed Sexual Consent Laws – that the agency “did not investigate a single one of the 39 complaints made to them about inadequate responses to sexual assault and harassment”.
“The regulator was actively choosing not to regulate on this issue,” Bremner says.
Carr says the advent of a national code is “bittersweet for the countless victim–survivors who were harmed by university and residence actions and TEQSA’s many failures”.
Commonwealth Ombudsman Iain Anderson says the National Student Ombudsman was created not only in response to concerns that TEQSA wasn’t addressing individual complaints “but that higher education providers themselves weren’t responding appropriately to complaints raised by students”. While an ombudsman can’t enforce their recommendations, the national code gives a regulator power to do so. An independent taskforce in the Department of Education will be established to formally control and modulate institutional responses to gender-based violence.
Camille Schloeffel, founder and director of the STOP Campaign, says her advice on the code’s drafting was based on years of witnessing “a lot of different kinds of sexual violence” occurring in the residential colleges when she was a student at the Australian National University in Canberra from 2016 – behaviour she refers to as “the norm”.
“There was no institutional accountability, no training, no prevention and no support. There wasn’t even a dedicated reporting area, just one registrar,” she says.
Residential colleges have long been quietly criticised for ignoring and minimising outwardly sexist behaviour. Felicity Plunkett, who worked as an academic for more than 15 years, recalls that during her tenure at the University of New England, the principal of one of the colleges asked her to give “an after-dinner talk to a group of students”. On further questioning, she discovered that male students had started a group known as WADBOF – Women Are Dirt Beneath Our Feet. Plunkett declined, aware of the “incredibly dangerous position” she would have been in. “I think the idea was that I would be the friendly face of feminism. When I spoke to my colleagues, there was a real apathy around the whole thing. It was an inadequate response to what was unlawful behaviour.”
In October last year, the University of Sydney and New South Wales Liberal Party were forced to investigate an incident in which students were filmed tearing up the 2018 Red Zone report, an EROC study that uncovered instances of sexual violence in the university’s colleges.
The deputy vice-chancellor of education, Professor Joanne Wright, tells The Saturday Paper “a number of students received a finding of misconduct and an appropriate penalty in accordance with our student discipline process”.
She says “the new code puts responsibilities on us in relation to our affiliated colleges and we’ll continue to work closely with them to ensure that we all meet our obligations”. The University of Sydney has “significantly invested in continually improving and streamlining our reporting and support options over the last several years and are now considering any additional steps we may need to take to meet and exceed the requirements of the code”.
The national code provides a 10-year blueprint for all tertiary institutions and student accommodation providers to follow. The inclusion of commercial operators in the legislation was advised by Schloeffel.
Her submission followed reports by the ANU student-run newspaper Woroni of an alleged sexual assault by a member of the UniLodge community in Canberra five years ago. Email correspondence indicates the victim–survivor believed a formal complaint had been made during an in-person discussion with UniLodge management, but UniLodge suggested no such complaint was filed.
UNSW Sydney student representative council women’s officer Ellena Cheers-Flavell tells The Saturday Paper that at UNSW Sydney, similarly, there is a “misconception that as soon as you report something, it’s getting sent to the police or formally lodged”. Cheers-Flavell wants to advocate a “more streamlined approach” to reporting instances of gendered violence.
UNSW Sydney law and criminology student Brooke Wallis says the university had fallen short in relation to her two separate disclosures. In the first case, Wallis decided not to proceed with a formal report. But in 2024, she says she was sexually harassed and coerced by another UNSW Sydney law student who “terrified” her. She formally reported the assault through UNSW Sydney’s Gendered Violence Portal and received confirmation that her disclosure would be responded to within 24 to 48 hours. “I didn’t hear from anybody for two weeks and the only reason that I eventually did is because I followed it up,” she tells The Saturday Paper.
As was the case for Grace Binns, Wallis was told there was nothing the university could do. She, too, was advised to alert the police and told that if a guilty verdict was reached, the student would likely be “removed from her class”. By this stage, she says, she was aware that her alleged perpetrator had access to firearms and on one occasion had knocked on the door of her residence, asking if she was home. Eventually, Wallis was offered an “equitable learning plan”, which meant she was permitted to arrive to class 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early. UNSW Sydney said they were unable to adjust her assigned class, as all others were full.
A spokesperson for UNSW Sydney admits “UNSW’s ability to formally investigate incidents is limited to those that occur on campus or at university-affiliated events”.
Camille Schloeffel is hopeful that the national code will prevent universities from engaging in box-ticking exercises and will instead offer proper protections, as “they can’t simply say ‘we spoke to students’. They have to provide evidence of having done so.” As Carr says, “universities are supposed to be bastions of evidence-based work and we just haven’t seen that too often in their approach to preventing and responding to violence.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "Cracking the safety code".
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