Recording: Fixing our systems to stop sexual violence

Descriptive transcript

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's event.

Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge that where I am, I'm at UTS today and I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I want to pay special tribute and respect to the Gadigal people for being the first custodians of knowledge for the land upon which the university is built, but also to acknowledge that this land was never ceded and it was, is and always will be Aboriginal land. I'd also like to acknowledge that there may be many people all over Australia and we're all on the traditional lands of First Nations people. So acknowledge the Elders of the land where you all are.

My name is Verity Firth and I'm the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Social Justice and Inclusion here at UTS. It's my pleasure to be hosting today's event, "Fixing Our Systems to Stop Sexual Violence". We're joined by Karen Iles and Catherine Pruscino, who are both working on bringing systemic change to our institutions, and I'll introduce them properly in just a few moments.

I'd also like to advise that today's discussion will cover topics such as sexual violence and assault. These are upsetting topics and they may be distressing or triggering. If at any time you feel that you're becoming overwhelmed or distressed, just take a break from the webinar. If you feel like it, you can rejoin when you feel better. You don't need to sit here listening if it's making you upset. If you do feel overwhelmed or distressed in any way, speak to someone you can trust or contact 1800RESPECT. We're posting those contact details in the chat box, which you can find in your Zoom control panel.

So now onto today's discussion. Sexual violence is a national crisis in Australia. Government data shows that one in five women, that's 22%, and one in sixteen men, 6%, have experienced sexual violence after the age of 15. Survivors often experience barriers to reporting, backlash from speaking out, and a loss of trust in the systems that are supposed to protect them. In recent times, preventing and responding to sexual violence has been discussed in parliament, schools and universities, in workplaces and many other institutions. We've seen the development of strategic action plans, prevention plans, training, policies and codes of conduct to try and address this issue. But how far have we come?

Today I'm joined by Karen Iles and Catherine Pruscino, who are working to bring about systemic change in our institutions and applying pressure from both outside and within. We'll discuss what's needed to improve our laws, policies and systems to combat sexual violence in our institutions, and it's a real honour to welcome them both here today.

Karen Iles is a lawyer, consultant, board director, sexual assault survivor and Darug Aboriginal woman. Karen is the founder and principal solicitor of Violet Co Legal and Consulting, whose purpose is to create radical solutions and just outcomes for women and First Nations people. She leads the Make the Police Investigate campaign and was recently appointed a Board Director of Our Watch, a national leader in the primary prevention of violence against women and their children in Australia. We're also very proud that Karen is a UTS alumna. Welcome, Karen.

Catherine Pruscino leads the award-winning UTS Respect.Now.Always. program, an initiative that seeks to prevent sexual harm on university campuses. Catherine has more than 20 years' experience working across the public and private sectors, including not-for-profit think tanks and community organisations. She is also the contributing author to the academic paper "Violence Against Women", together with the Universities of Newcastle, Monash and Otago, outlining UTS's whole-of-university approach in preventing gender-based violence. Welcome, Catherine.

So, my first question is to both of you. I might start with Karen because she's our guest and Catherine's one of us, though I suppose, Karen, as an alumna, you're also one of us. The question to both of you is: there's been a growing awareness and push to address the deeply entrenched issues of sexual and gender-based violence in our society. Are we at a moment in time where important changes can be enacted?

Karen Iles: Absolutely, Verity, and thank you for having me here. It's lovely also to be a UTS alumni and be on this webinar. Look, absolutely, we're at a point in time where I think we are on the precipice of making some real inroads into eliminating violence against women and particularly eliminating sexual violence. It's a bold thing to say, but we've got our governments who are willing to look at these issues. We've got a new national plan in this area that we will eliminate violence against women in a generation. That's a really bold, ambitious plan, but is also being backed in by a lot of resources through government. I think as well, the community and social debate and the discussions that are taking place, coupled with some high-profile cases, media reporting on the topic has really generated this as an issue that isn't going away. It's practically every day in the news you hear about, unfortunately, cases of women and men, but predominantly women, being sexually assaulted or abused by their partners. That is practically a daily occurrence in the news. These issues aren't going anywhere. I think that we've got governments around Australia that are quite interested in taking action at the moment, so a real flashpoint, I think, for us. If we look at the 200 years of Australia in the colonised state that it's been in, I think this is a bit of a flashpoint.

Catherine Pruscino: I absolutely agree. I know that perhaps I have a bit of a skewed view, but I feel like we've been at this moment for a little while now. If we look at the work that the Albanese government is attempting at the moment, they're actively seeking to take a whole-of-community approach to addressing this kind of violence. While these issues have perhaps maybe historically not been considered to be the main work of government, they are now being considered seriously across the broad remit of government, including the industrial and educational portfolios, which is the stuff that we're seeing with respect to work changes and a lot of the dialogue that's going on publicly when we look at Universities Accord and keeping students safe, things like that. What I think is absolutely heartening is this whole consideration about how all the different levers and mechanisms can be brought to bring together the kind of long-term, holistic, sustainable change that we're after.

Verity Firth: Well, that's good. All right. So my next question—Karen, only 10% of victims and survivors of sexual assault report to the police. That is really low, and only a handful of perpetrators—so of that 10%, then only a handful of perpetrators are convicted of their crimes. Can you tell us all a bit about the Make the Police Investigate campaign that you are leading, because you're leading it to reform the law so that police must investigate sexual assault cases? Can you tell us a bit about that and also about what you hope to change?

Karen Iles: Yeah, look, the campaign has come about through my experience as a lawyer and having clients of mine have this common pattern of experience of, if they are one of that approximate 10% of victim survivors who feel comfortable to report to police and have confidence that the police will do something, of that 10% only a handful ever have police actually actively investigate. And to me, I was getting quite frustrated with it, and it also mirrors my own experience with having been sexually assaulted as a child and having basically followed up police in two states, in Queensland and New South Wales, where the offences occurred, for almost 20 years. Next March is 20 years of me following up the police to do something.

And I won't go into all the details in terms of myself. It's been reported widely. I think there should be a link in the chat to some news reporting on that. But really, it's about how do we instil confidence in our justice system? We saw Chris Minns on the news this week talking about, in relation to the protests around Gaza and what's happening to Palestinian people and also the atrocities committed against Jewish people in Israel as well, the claims by government and Chris Minns in particular of saying, "Look, hate speech, you've got to have the enforcement, otherwise the laws are really toothless and not worth the paper they're written on. We need the Commonwealth to step in and fund law enforcement in this area." For sexual assault, it's exactly the same.

You have only a handful of victim survivors reporting to police, and of them, only a fraction have the perpetrators charged with an offence. And even where there's a charge, only a fraction go on to be prosecuted by the Department of Public Prosecutions. And then if that perpetrator makes it into a courtroom, if there's not a plea deal done, then in a courtroom only about 30% of perpetrators are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury. And then some of them will not even have custodial sentences.

So it all ends up in less than 1% of perpetrators of rape and sexual violence ever facing any legal consequences in Australia. And that, to me, as a lawyer, I just think, gosh, we need to change this system because why on earth would you bother reporting crimes when this is the trajectory? If you think the crimes that happened against me carry in Queensland a life sentence and in New South Wales a maximum sentence of 25 years—the other crime that carries that is murder—and if we thought that that was the trajectory of family members reporting murders of their loved ones, we as a community would be horrified. And in fact, that's exactly what's happened with many Aboriginal families and the families of gay men in Sydney that have also been murdered, and there's an inquiry.

But on the whole, we expect that when we report very serious crimes to police, that they will do something. But unfortunately, the police doing something is the missing link in our criminal justice system. So this campaign is really about compelling police to do three things.

One is that they have a duty of care to victim survivors so that when they go and report, they are connected with counselling and mental health services so that they don't take their own lives, which we have seen many, many victims do after reporting to police.

The second call is for a duty to investigate and a set of minimum standards—very minimum standards—such as interview a victim, interview witnesses, where there are named perpetrators at the appropriate time, interview them, and collect and store evidence. That's it. Very basic. And I think that all of us that watch, you know, NCIS or anything like that would probably think it could probably go a bit further in what we'd expect, but just some basic bare minimums to make sure that all victims are treated the same in our justice system.

And then the third ask is around having an independent police conduct and complaints mechanism so that if you have reported to police and you haven't had your reports dealt with in a very basic and compassionate, respectful way, that there is a complaints mechanism that is not this same old system of police investigating police.

So that's the campaign. I think we've got a link to it there in the chat if you want to check it out and jump on board and support it.

But I think, to bring it back to a university and an institution context, there is this real crossover with universities absolutely doing what they can to support victim-survivors in coming forward and speaking out. And the universities have their own mechanisms—civil mechanisms—for responding and dealing with these criminal acts. But at the end of the day, that victim-survivor, if they choose to report to police, statistically will have a very poor experience. So that's what I'm trying to change in this campaign.

Verity Firth: It seems so unbelievably reasonable what you're proposing, especially around the duty to investigate—interview the victim-survivor. It's so basic. It's sort of embarrassing that you even have to run the campaign in the first place, but it's really good that you're doing it. And yes, there is a link in the chat, so if people are interested in getting involved or just registering their support, click on that link.

Catherine, can you tell us a bit about the Respect.Now.Always. program? Because that's what we do at UTS. Tell us how it came about and a bit more information around the focus of your work within the university sector.

Catherine Pruscino: Sure. In 2016, Universities Australia, which is the peak body for Australian universities, launched the Respect.Now.Always. campaign, which is a national campaign. At the time, it was a global first. What they sought to do was understand, as reported by students, the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault of university students within university settings. So that was actually quite a specific qualification, I guess. In August of 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission released their report with the survey findings from that very first national survey, and it was called "Change the Course". In 2022, the National Student Safety Survey, which was the second national prevalence survey, released its results, and we are now in the midst of planning for a third national survey, which will probably be conducted in 2025. So that's what the national campaign looks like as a global first in Australia.

Here at UTS, I have a very small but mighty—I call them the Power Team—and I lead the team, and we exist solely to prevent and address the elimination of sexual violence within the UTS community, so campus, in our physical campus and also in the online affiliated spaces of our campus. What we know is that we can't meaningfully deliver sustainable culture change to address and eliminate sexual violence for students without actually working across our whole system, our whole ecosystem, and this means also understanding and meeting the needs of our staff and our other stakeholders. So change of this nature and scale actually requires everybody's involvement—different involvement at different times, in different ways—but make no mistake, whole-of-community change requires whole-of-community involvement.

Last week here at UTS, we released our community voice and our theory of change, and I think Leah is going to add a link to our theory of change in the chat. Our theory of change and the report, which was actually done by the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS, is a community-driven, asset-based, participatory research project that outlines the critical steps for UTS to deliver a whole-of-community, whole-of-institution shift—sustainable culture change that seeks to eliminate sexual assault.

So that's what I do, and I hand out lots and lots of ice cream.

Verity Firth: It's true, very delicious ice cream. So I'm now going to ask a question, and I understand that this may end up forming a bit of a conversation between the two of you, because we're really talking about both of you working to bring about change in our institutions, but you work in different ways, right? Karen's working on the outside and Catherine's working on the inside.

So we thought a good question to have you sort of almost riff off each other with is around: Karen, can you tell us about the benefits and challenges of being independent or outside the institutions that you're trying to change? And Catherine, can you give us your insights into the benefits and challenges of working from inside the institutions you are trying to change? And I think first to you, Karen, as the outsider.

Karen Iles: Yeah, I think it gives you the—I don't know—privilege, power, voice to just be very open and you don't need to mince words. You can call a spade a spade because you're not—sometimes, let's be realistic, when you work for someone, you don't necessarily want to put your foot in it all the time. So I think that just having that fearless and frank advice from an external perspective coming in, but also you get to, as an external person, you sometimes also get to see themes and patterns and what's happening in other institutions and other jurisdictions as well. So it brings that, I suppose, collation of knowledge to your perspective.

I think it is, however, very important, while being very bold in what you're calling for, to also understand what's possible and pragmatic in the system or the institution that you're trying to change. Because I think change is always a negotiation, no matter what change we're talking about in our lives, and the outcomes where they're reached are often compromise outcomes that are best for everyone involved. So it's important to have people on the inside at the table, but also those on the outside putting that really brave, bold kind of vision forward.

I think the challenge from being on the outside is you have to get in and be at the decision-making table, because change can happen really quickly if you have the right decision-makers, the right external influences, the right time—it can just snap and all fall into place. So it's also about having that influence at the table as well, and knowing the levers, having good relationships, and really pick your timing. I think they're some of the things that are important for me, especially as an outsider and independent.

Catherine Pruscino: Yeah, I would completely agree with all of those points. So, I mean, Karen's first one was about being really open, and from the perspective of an insider, I entirely endorse that. I think we need to be both open and to be quite authentic. So I think it's really important that our behaviour actually reflects the commitment to addressing and eliminating sexual violence in ways that build institutional trust.

I mean, we talk about institutions as these giant faceless organisms, but in fact, each of us is wearing that face while we're at work, and it is incumbent on me in my role and everybody else within the institution to actually make sure that the behaviour—how we conduct ourselves, the behaviour that we manifest in our capacity at work and ideally in our capacity outside of work—actually reflects the commitment we have to this cause. Because both in the moments where we're on stage talking out loud and we are speaking as agents of the machine, but also in the private moments when nobody is watching, where your boss doesn't see you, or there is no media, or you don't recognise anybody in your sphere, it is important that we are consistent and committed to those changes and that our behaviour reflects that commitment.

Again, Karen was speaking about how all change is negotiated, and again, I completely agree. It's always a negotiation. It's a negotiation regarding timing, it's a negotiation regarding resourcing, it's a negotiation regarding capacity, and then there are a whole host of external factors that frequently will come into play. Some things are really obvious, like we might be running a campaign around orientation about setting and managing expectations of behaviour with our incoming students. Meanwhile, there is media breaking around the experience of what's going on in parliament with Brittany Higgins, or a national inquiry is going into abuse in some other way. We would be foolish to assume that what plays out in the broader ecosystem doesn't have a direct effect on the work that we do within our own organisational community.

So change is negotiated, and I think the point to hold there is to not be blown off course by temporary delays, but to stay focused on the long-term goal. For the purpose of this moment, I will call it the new world order—so stay focused on the new world order and understand that sometimes it's a step back, but actually it is the ongoing and consistent commitment to go forward.

Karen spoke about making sure that you have a seat at the decision-making table, and ultimately leadership is key. So I would say bold and authentic leadership is critical, and how that flows into senior institutional support and the alignment of commitment with practice and implementation and resourcing is essential, and it has to flow that way. So it isn't just having the CEO or the Vice-Chancellor or the Commissioner stand up and give platitudes around the new world order, but it is making sure that all of the other people moving through the hierarchy understand how they embody that in ways so that their behaviour serves the change process that is in play, even in those small moments.

And then Karen spoke quite a bit about the components of effective campaigns for change, and that's something we do a lot of here in RNA at UTS. So the sorts of things I wanted to add to that—understanding the levers and things like that—is for us, we do a lot of grassroots work. So it is meet your people where they're at and be curious, listen to their views, understand their stories of failure and frustration, and recognise them as actual, genuine, generous gifts of loyalty.

Make time to listen to the dissenters because it's here that we learn the most about what's actually going on. If all we do is speak to people who tell us we're doing a great job, change is very limited, right? So actually, hold your humility and go and chat with the people who think that you've gotten it wrong and understand why they think you've gotten it wrong and why that experience for them was unsatisfactory. I think that by making time to listen to the dissenters, this is where we learn the most about where intention and reality actually meet.

Be clear about the vision that you're working towards—new world order—and grow your community, work across the boundaries, the teams, the faculties, the division—recruit as you go because there is work for everybody in this space.

Verity Firth: That was great. I really liked what you had to say about the private moments and about how culture is more than just the CEO standing up and saying everything in front of a whole lot of people; it's actually what happens when the cameras are off and when you're just alone. So I think that's a really important point to make.

I'm going to go to some audience questions now because they're really good and people are being very engaged and bringing a whole lot of questions up here. The one at the moment that's got the most upvotes, but it's a really interesting one, is around the change to the definition of consent, which of course has happened in New South Wales, but across a number of jurisdictions, hasn't it, Karen? And the question from Michael Soo is: has this change to the definition of consent helped to swing the burden of proof back towards the victim-survivor? Maybe, Karen, as a lawyer, you may have a view on that.

Karen Iles: I think the changes in many jurisdictions, and at the moment the federal government—the Albanese government, with Mark Dreyfus as Attorney-General—are going through a process of harmonising and trying to work with the states and territories to harmonise the definition of consent in Australia. For my personal circumstances, having been assaulted in two states, it would be weird for the same perpetrators and the same victim to be under two different definitions. I think that's all really important. I think the increased discussion within schools, the community, universities about consent is really important.

However, I think as well, it can take us down a bit of a very narrow conversation. The vast majority of women and men that are raped and sexually assaulted in our society do not report to police, so they don't have confidence that police will take action. So I think we have to fix those front ends because otherwise the tinkering with court processes and very nuanced definitions that will play out in a courtroom setting—they are important, absolutely, and they do build confidence in the system. However, it really is some slight adjustments. I think the position that I've kind of landed at with all of this is the system is so broken that the tinkering of wording here and there isn't solving the problem.

It's now looking like one in four women experience sexual violence in their lifetime, and of young women, disturbingly, one in two. So this problem—sexual violence—is the only crime in Australia that is increasing, not decreasing. I mean, we have got to do some really bold stuff here, and thinking outside of the box is really needed at a really big scale. Of course, there's lots of little changes that add up to a big change, and improving the conversation around consent, improving the definition, is important.

I would also say, though, that for every other crime we expect that ignorance of the law is no excuse. The age-old defence of "yes means no and no means yes and I'm all very confused" has been a defence that accused have used in courtrooms for decades and decades and decades, and I suspect that even after these changes to consent, this still—"confusion" or "I wasn't taught well enough at school" or what have you. But we don't see those kinds of defences coming through in crimes like murder or aggravated assault or robbery. So I think as a society we also need to—especially for adults, adults who are capable themselves of consenting—it's also on them to understand what the law is and comply respectfully, as we do with all other laws.

Verity Firth: Mmm, I think that's really important. Catherine, do you want to add anything around the definition of consent?

Catherine Pruscino: With regard to the sort of changes around the definition, the work that we did for that here at UTS was about awareness raising with our students and our community. So we did quite a lot of public-facing work, and while there's quite a lot of discussion about it, I think the full effect is going to take a really long time to see it play out. But I agree with Karen that actually the kind of change that we're after needs wholesale and significant, bold and brave changes. While that's important, and harmonising the kind of definitions across the country is critical to that, it is a small but important step in the face of a tsunami of work that needs to get done.

Verity Firth: So the next question I want to put to you is from Jack Kitchin. He talks about research—Private Lives 3 found 34% of gay men, 45% of lesbian women and upwards of 60% of people with other sexual identities who responded have experienced sexual violence, but very few queer people will report to police and national and state level strategies tend to be silent on the issue. What policy and/or legal changes need to be made to address sexual violence against people with queer identities? Karen.

Karen Iles: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think you've also got women and people with intellectual disability, those with dementia are particularly vulnerable, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and those with English as a second, third, fourth language all show up in the stats. But certainly trans women are particularly vulnerable to being victims of sexual assault and rape. I would also just like to try and swing the view to the perpetrators as well, because we focus so much on the victims, but I think it's really important to talk about perpetrators and why they are picking on and overly perpetrating predominantly against, disproportionately against specific groups in our community, and the LGBTQIA+ community is one of those.

When you couple it with the gay hate crimes inquiry that's happening at the moment in New South Wales, where police over decades failed in their duties and are still failing in their duties, as we saw in the investigation or lack thereof of the death of Crispin Dye, when we have police forces that are using their discretion and their unconscious bias or very overt biases are coming into how they perform their job, then I think it's incumbent on our society to say, well, that's not really cool, that's not good enough, we actually need some better regulation.

In Queensland late last year, there was a big judicial inquiry into the conduct of police and how they responded to domestic and family violence. Judge Richards in Queensland in November 2022 in her findings found that the Queensland Police Force is systemically misogynist, racist and sexist. I have no reason to think that any inquiry into any other police force in this country would be any different, and I think that that misogyny and colonialism absolutely impacts the LGBTQIA+ community, and they deserve better and predictability and the same response that a very well-to-do white woman from the eastern suburbs would expect when she reports to police.

Verity Firth: Catherine, what do universities do in this space in terms of addressing violence against queer people, or at least encouraging the reporting of such sexual violence?

Catherine Pruscino: So there are a number of strategies and they vary across universities with regard to how they look to create trauma-informed safe spaces that are particularly welcoming and supportive of our queer students and our queer staff members. But I think one of the things that more broadly we need to think about adding to all of the issues that Karen's identified is that when we are looking at the statistics that are collected that reflect the experiences of queer people within our society, I think an audit of how the statistics are collected and reported is probably worthwhile, because for gender binary people it is often identified as forms of sexual violence, but for queer people it isn't—they don't necessarily flow into the same categories and are captured based on their gender identity and sexuality. So what we have are these sort of fractured content around trying to understand exactly what the experiences are of people in our community generally, and until we can be really clear and absolute about whether or not we're talking about the forms of violence or whether we're talking about the identity of the people reporting it, we don't have a solid base against which to actually even map and understand the nature and size and scope of the problem to begin with.

Separate from that, how we individually within our institutions go about creating safe spaces, I think, is of critical importance. What I would say is from our perspective, we do a lot of that work with the service providers on campus and with the custodians of those areas. So, whether we're working with our project officers who are our queer project officers on campus, the student leaders in that space, the queer reps, the students association, the clubs and societies, making sure that we bring in the voices of all of those people and collaborating with them on their own initiatives is part of demonstrating the behaviour that we want to build trust and authenticity in our institutions.

Karen Iles: What we are clear about, though, is the perpetrators—more than 95% are men. And I think that while we have certain groups in society as victim-survivors overrepresented, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of perpetrators are men, and that concepts around male privilege and entitlement and misogyny really feed into that. I'd encourage people to check out a great resource that Our Watch has called "Change the Story" that talks about that continuum of how attitudes and beliefs shape actions, and that those actions tend to escalate, as we saw quite tragically in Sydney only a few weeks ago.

Verity Firth: Mmm, mmm. So Jelena Rosic has asked a question around police attitudes, which probably harks back a bit to what you were talking, Karen, about in the inquiry in Queensland. She says, do you think that police attitudes—i.e. unconscious bias, whatever you want to call it, misogyny, racism, sexism, what you've just described—do you think it's part of the underlying problem, i.e. how victims are treated, and noting that this workforce has the same problem of sexual violence?

Karen Iles: Absolutely. The recent New South Wales study into the LECC, which is the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, they received complaints about police and they recently looked at reports of sexual assault and they looked at reports where p