End Rape on Campus Red Zone Report puts Australian university hazing in spotlight, seeks criminalisation

“I thought it was so beautiful and I fell in love,” Ms Lynch said. “It has such a sense of history. But I had no idea about the reputation of the University of Sydney colleges.” 

Ms Lynch is one of several case studies in the Red Zone Report, a publication released by End Rape on Campus on Monday.

The document recommends universities take a tighter rein over student residences, offer counselling and engage in a transparent and open dialogue around the cultures dissected in the report. 

The Red Zone report also urged the state government to criminalise hazing, review its legislation governing the colleges and frame sexual violence as a health and housing matter. The federal government is urged to set up a taskforce into sexual assault and harassment. 

In her case study within the report, Ms Lynch details waking to find three men in her room. 

“It was terrifying,” she said. “I felt so unsafe in my own room, it was a real intrusion.”

She also underwent initiation hazing include being doused in buckets of dead rotting fish, and a hierarchy embedded throughout the college, and argues the St Johns College, where she lived, had a deeply embedded “hypermasculine” feel. 

That included daily sexism, including a tradition where men treated female students as if they did not exist. 

Ms Lynch said that although the living quarters became co-educational in 2001, a power imbalance lived on. 

 “The reality is that even if 50% of the residents are female, the student leadership positions go to the men.

“All the portraits around the college are of male faces, and the guys will say things to you like ‘I’m a fourth-generation Johnsman’.

“Going to St John’s was the first time in my life where I felt I couldn’t do something because of my gender.”

Ms Lynch left St John’s at the end of 2017 to finish her degree living elsewhere. 

The University of Sydney’s student representative council said the report lifted the lid on an enduring “entitled culture of bullying that colleges foster”. 

“The colleges at the University of Sydney have proven themselves time and time again to be islands of impunity that operate under different laws and standards than the university on which they stand and the broader community,” they said in a statement. 

“For too long these colleges and their councils have protected acts of misogyny, racism and homophobia by their residents. At the end of the day, this is a structural problem that is entrenched in the college acts. It’s not going to just be changed in a shakeup of council and consent training.”

The report follows End Rape on Campus collating video of hazing of University of Newcastle students, including footage of students drinking alcohol off each others’ genitals, last week. 

That video led to condemnation from the faculty of the behaviour it depicted, which is also listed in the red zone report as examples of the problematic culture in student residences.  

In its recommendations, the report calls for government intervention. 

“We believe that university administrations, as well as state and federal governments, have critical roles to play in shaping residential colleges’ responses to sexual violence,” it states. 

“This is not to absolve the colleges of responsibility for addressing these issues, but rather to make clear that self-led internal reforms, in isolation, will rarely be effective in transforming the problematic cultures that are embedded within many residential colleges.”