UNIVERSITIES have been urged to make changes to better support students who have experienced gender based violence, including providing additional training for their counselling and support services, improving campus safety and introducing scholarships to help survivors.
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The University of Newcastle's Centre of Excellence for Higher Education Equity has released a new research report based on a questionnaire and in-depth interviews with 24 student survivors.
Lead researcher and centre director Professor Penny Jane Burke said participants' experiences of gender based violence across their lifetimes included psychological and emotional abuse, verbal and sexual harassment, intimate partner violence and domestic and family violence.
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She said survivors experienced ongoing and often invisible impacts - including persistent stress and anxiety, isolation, profound loss of self-esteem, shame and undermined sense of confidence and capability - which reflected the invisibility of gender based violence in the community, despite its prevalence.
The United Nations describes it as a shadow pandemic.
"The reverberations and long term impacts and effects [are significant] and the way this works is not necessarily linear... experiences of gender based violence can be deeply disorienting and can keep emerging and reemerging," she said.
"A lot of the student victim survivors had experienced multiple experiences of gender based violence, some of them from childhood."
The report made 16 recommendations, including that universities act as leaders in challenging gender based violence; collaborate with external agencies to generate support that includes prevention, crisis support and enables pathways to education; and implement practical measures including education programs for staff and students and more training for counselling and student support services.
"A lot of these recommendations not only came from our analysis of the student accounts but from the students explicitly," she said.
"It's not that people should wear a badge and they shouldn't be forced to disclose, but [about] recognising and valuing the experiences student victim survivors can bring if they want to."
The report found alternative entry programs were particularly significant for survivors accessing education.
It found survivors felt a broader sense of purpose at university beyond employability and job readiness.
Some spoke about study being a central part of their identity, plus struggles associated with feeling like an outsider or different.
Some felt a strong connection with peer groups on campus, others were searching for belonging.
She said it was important to create places of connection and support. It also found some participants found it difficult to fulfil university norms and expectations and there were uneven experiences of support.
The centre is planning a "whole of institution" student survey.
"What we want to form is a best-practice hub, which is a space where we develop some of the practical strategies with other agencies."
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