Recently, the UNSW Center for Ideas held a panel called 'Consent Laid Bare' with author and activist Chanel Contos, UNSW student activist and gendered violence researcher Angela Griffin, First Nations lead of the First National LGBT+ Sistergirls and Brotherboys experiences with sexual violence survey Vanessa Lee-Ah Mat, and Chair of national violence prevention foundation Our Watch Moo Baulch, to explore how we can utilise holistic approaches to community care when it comes to gendered violence and discussing what steps are those in positions of power taking to ensure the safety of women within university spaces and beyond?
We got the opportunity to talk with Angela Griffin separately about her experiences and learnings.
Date- Wednesday, March 6 2024
Location- Phone Call
You’ve put a lot of effort into researching gendered violence. If you don’t mind sharing, what’s the moment you consider most pivotal in allowing you to choose to invest all this effort?
In my first year at UNSW as an undergraduate student, I got really involved with the women’s collective on campus. As part of that experience, I just spoke to so many of my fellow women students and heard many stories of sexual violence in various contexts. I just felt that things needed to be done, so I had the energy to get more involved and to do something.
In 2021 you completed your Bachelor of Social Research and Policy. For this, you had to write a thesis exploring student activist experiences. When writing your thesis what was the most memorable or meaningful experience you’ve had?
Ooh, big question. You know, as part of that thesis I put a call out to student activists asking them to reach out to me and tell me about their experiences trying to make change in universities. And I think I was just really touched by the amount of students that did end up reaching out to me. I think it's a really tough space to be working in and while a lot of the stories were negative, I think there was still quite a lot of hope amongst students that had been engaged in activism- that change was on the horizon, and that things were going to improve. I think while change has not been as swift as I would like it to be and there’s still a really, really long way to go, I do think there has been some change and more is on the horizon.
You’ve been UNSW’s women’s officer in 2018 and SRC president in 2019. During your tenure in these positions, what have you learned about Australia’s stance on gendered violence, and how do you want them to improve? In what ways are we currently lacking, particularly the student body?
I think right now I would say transparency. UNSW actually does release data every year about the reports that they're receiving related to gender violence and that's really great. Most universities don't produce that data, but I don't think it's communicated as widely as it could be. I think most students still remain unaware of the supports that are available to them. More transparency and more opportunities for students to do the decision-making is needed- there aren’t many opportunities for the student body to be involved in decision-making. In the past there were committees that were established surrounding gendered violence, to make decisions about the support available. But those committees don’t seem to be in existence anymore, and if they are I’m unaware of them. I think our university processes could really benefit from student input because students are really are experts of their own experiences and with the input from students we can create much better reporting and support processes.
You’ve just started your PhD last year, so congratulations are in order. You are currently exploring alternative, non-punitive pathways for universities to facilitate justice for victims and survivors of sexual violence. If you’re willing to share, how is that going?
Yes. It's going well, I actually just started it, so I'm about 3 weeks in. So far it's going really great. An area that I’m passionate about is the university complaint process. It is not really providing victim-survivors with satisfactory outcomes and the data really backs me up on that I think that there are alternate pathways that can achieve better outcomes for both victim survivors, but also for perpetrators. We need to provide environments where perpetrators are encouraged to own up to what they have done and environments where we can say that there is an opportunity for you to change your behaviour and to become better. So I think that yeah, I'm really excited to get into my PhD and learn a little bit more about what those alternate pathways might look like.
In the beginning, what did you wish to change with all your efforts? Do you feel like you’re closer to achieving this change than when you first became an activist?
Yeah, I think that we are closer to achieving change. I think for me, the thing that I would really like to see is consistent improvement. I was the Women's Officer immediately following the release of a really significant report called ‘Change the Course’, which was released in 2017, and that was the first national piece of research that looked into student experiences of sexual violence on campuses.
In the aftermath of that report’s release, I saw some really important changes. So at UNSW, we set up the gendered violence reporting portal. Before that, there was no single place where students could report gendered violence. Then, we set up the sexual misconduct prevention and response policy, which did not exist before, and a number of really important community reactions influenced UNSW’s response to sexual violence.
After that report was released and following a lot of the implementation of these new changes, I felt like there was a stall with how much work was being done. I felt like the university kind of started resting on laurels with a ‘we've done enough we don’t need to keep improving’ approach and I think that's a huge problem because we need to be constantly improving as gendered violence and the forms it can take constantly change.
It is becoming more technological, for example, as the pandemic came into fruition, the nature of sexual violence and the nature of domestic or family violence has been constantly evolving. And I don’t know if the universities responded well, so I was a little concerned in those interim periods that not enough was being done.
The government recently released universities accord document and they also released an action plan to address gender based violence in higher education. These two documents are really groundbreaking in pushing universities to again make change. These documents established a national student Ombudsman, which would be able to hear complaints of any kind from students about their university experience. So not just related to gender violence, all kinds of complaints. But notably, gender violence will be covered by that Ombudsman and that really provides such an important oversight into making sure that universities are doing the right thing. The other thing it establishes is a national code, which would really set the standard for what universities must do to ensure that students are experiencing a safe environment and can enjoy campus life. So those are really positive, important changes that are coming and I feel like this year we're finally seeing momentum after a period of inaction.
Last question. You’ve mentioned that you felt that UNSW’s efforts have stalled recently. Then, what do you wish UNSW could improve on?
Hm. There are so many things. I think transparency, as I spoke about before, and opportunities for students to influence decision-making. Unfortunately, there's not a tonne of evidence currently that shows what works when it comes to prevention programmes in university contexts. So I think UNSW really needs to invest in research and evaluation of programmes related to preventing gender violence at universities so that we can really understand and invest in the things that actually work rather than just the things that we think will work.
