Guide to Improving Safety and Security Incident Response in Australian Colleges and Universities

Data confirms safety and security risk to college and university students in Australia

Multiple datapoints indicate that college and university settings aren’t immune to the prevalence of sexual violence experienced by young adults in the wider community. Put out by the Social Research Centre, the most recent National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) report on the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault among university students (2021) points in the same direction.

What does it say? For starters, it confirms pre-pandemic research. That research shined a light on incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment among university students, including incidents that took place on-campus and/or in other university-related events and space (See working definitions below)ⁱ.

Those incidents persist, suggesting that university settings aren’t always physically or psychologically safe for matriculants.

Indeed, one in six university students now report that they have been victims of sexual harassment since they started universityⁱⁱ. When it comes to incidents of sexual assault, one in 20 report that they have been victims.

What’s more, the incidents are taking place in university settings; 43 per cent of students surveyed state that the most impactful incident of sexual harassment happened in the general campus area.

The data also suggests that perpetrators are likely to be co-habitants. One in two students say they knew the perpetrator of sexual harassment. As for sexual assault: two thirds of students polled acknowledge that they knew the perpetrator. 

Working definitions of sexual harassment and sex assault

• Sexual harassment. Any unwelcome sexual advance, request for sexual favours or conduct of a sexual nature in relation to the person harassed in circumstances where a reasonable person would have anticipated the possibility that the person harassed would be offended, humiliated or intimidated. This includes behaviours such as unwelcome touching, staring, following, sexually explicit communications (whether inperson or via technologies), as well as nude or sexual images taken or shared with others without permission. 
• Sexual assault. Any unwanted sexual acts or sexual contact that happened in circumstances where a person was either forced, threatened, pressured, tricked, or no effort was made to check whether there was agreement to the act, including in circumstances where a person was asleep or affected by drugs or alcohol.

Source: Social Research Centre and Sex Discrimination Act 1984

The survey also indicates that reporting channels have broken down – if they ever worked as intended. One in two students knew nothing or very little about the formal reporting process for harassment; similarly, one in two knew nothing or very little about the formal reporting process for assault.

That’s not all. Too few students are aware that support and assistance are available, either.

One in two know nothing or very little about where to seek support or assistance for harassment. Similarly, 40 per cent know nothing or every little about where to seek support or assistance for assault.

Proposed policy actions to improve safety

The numbers are troubling, painting a grim picture that Australian college and university students are being forced to bear the harmful impacts of safety and security incidents on their own. Meanwhile, the incidents themselves are having predictably, deleterious effects on wellbeing, academic performance, and continuation of university studies. 

The question, then, for college and university administrators and their security leaders is, what to do to make the campus setting safer and more secure for matriculants?

The NSSS, for its part, offers potential policy interventions. Suggested avenues for action include:

• Acknowledging the role of gender as well as intersecting discrimination and marginalisation in driving sexual harassment and sexual assault 
• Taking proactive measures to improve inclusivity and safe learning environments for gender and sexuality diverse students and those with a disability 
• Promoting safety and respect within residential student accommodation settings
• Preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault from university staff including in the context of postgraduate supervision 
• Raising awareness among students and staff of the reporting processes within the university and the avenues of support available
• Improving reporting and support pathways for students who have both university context and other experiences of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault
• Addressing attitudes that minimise, excuse, or blame the victim/survivors of sexual harassment and sexual assault, particularly in higher-risk settings
• Adequately resourcing sexual harassment and sexual assault response and prevention strategies.

The Clery Act template for improve safety and security incident reporting

To some, the proposed interventions might not sound sufficient; stricter measures should be considered. These stakeholders should look to colleges and universities in other jurisdictions that have struggled with similar issues.

After all, institutions across the world have come up with different frameworks for mitigating safety and security risk and improving response. And so, understanding what those jurisdictions require of their colleges and universities might help local institutions in Australia bolster processes.

In the U.S., for instance, colleges and universities that receive federal funding are monitored by the Department of Education’s Clery Act regime. 

Passed in 1990, the Clery Act enshrines the principle that students and employees have the right to know about crimes on campuses across the country. Institutions, under the law, have an obligation to compile statistics for incidents of dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking, as well as list out policies, procedures, and programmes pertaining to these incidentsⁱⁱⁱ.

The relevant data is usually compiled and published in a comprehensive, annual security report (ASR) to employees and students. That report is due every year on 1 October. 

The report itself must provide four general categories of crime statistics, including criminal offenses, hate crimes, Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) offenses, and arrests and referrals for disciplinary action for weapons^iv. The statistics go on to furnish the following information:

• Where a crime occurred
• To whom the crime was reported
• The type of crime reported
• The year in which a crime was reported^v

Local law enforcement will often have jurisdiction within school campuses, as well. The Clery Act, therefore, requires institutions to make a “reasonable, good-faith effort” to procure relevant crime statistics from local agencies. 

Not all knowledge of crime is passed on to local law enforcement or campus police, though. In the university setting, it’s often transmitted to campus health physicians, resident advisors, faculty advisors, etc. The Clery Act, therefore, compels institutions to collect crime reports from those individuals, as well. The following actors are defined for purposes of the law as campus security authorities:

• Professional staff in a Dean of Students office, including leaders in student affairs and housing
• Staff in the student centre or student union building
• Staff in the Student Activities office (handling extracurricular activities)
• Faculty or staff advisors to student organizations
• Resident assistants/advisors; resident and/or community directors
• Students who monitor access to dormitories or other facilities
• Coordinator of Greek Affairs (or related positions)
• Athletic directors (ADs) and coaches (including assistant ADs and assistant coaches)
• Contract security officers
• Event security staff
• Administrators at branch campuses
• A physician in a campus health centre, a counsellor in a campus counselling centre, or a victim advocate in a campus rape crisis centre if identified by the school as someone to whom crimes should be reported^vi

Per the Clery Act, colleges and universities must also provide timely alerts of certain crimes to the wider campus community. These notifications, which go out with information about the type of criminal incident that has occurred, are meant to prevent similar crimes from occurring in the future.

How digital technology can help improve incident reporting

 Australian colleges and universities looking to work off a Clery Act-like template to enhance their incident reporting processes might be curious how to get started quickly. After all, the Act requires institutions to compile numerous data points. For institutions used to incident reporting in notepads and spreadsheets, this might seem like quite they departure.

Fortunately, digital technology can help. While improving processes, integrated safety and security management platforms will also cut down on costs and man hours expended (See more below). 

How, exactly?

Well, solution vendors in the space provide cloud-based software that helps colleges and universities create forms that easily capture crimes, provision dashboards for statistical analysis of reported crimes, and produce annual reports for viewing. 

These platforms also allow for easy crime information entry (wherever guards and other professionals are), using reporting categories and guidelines which can be modelled after the DOE’s Handbook for Campus Safety and Security Reporting – or any other official template. 

Information that can be captured into the system as well as other relevant functionality include: 

• Location of the offence
• Nature of the offence, including whether the crime was a hate crime, and if so, the reported bias
• Ability to track and report the disposition of a crime as unfounded
• Easy-to-interpret, exportable dashboards of crimes (by year), segmented by reporting categories 

That’s not all. 

Keeping staff and students safe on campus, as well as a managing a wide array of campus operations, events, and incidents entail more than just crime reporting. That means the responsibility of Campus Security has expanded to include emergency and risk management as well as procedure disclosures.

The same integrated digital technology platforms can help here, too, though. While eliminating redundancies, these platforms manage all campus incidents and emergencies, as well, with the following capabilities:

• Centralised information management with tasking and checklists
• Spatially enabled, pre-integrated with mapping software for better situational awareness
• Integrates communication plans and templates to ensure everyone stays on the same page
• Pragmatic business continuity management to ensures business processes are managed efficiently
• Quick and easy coordination and dispatch of assets and resources to manage events and incidents
• Comprehensive compliance reporting to ensure you stay ahead of regulatory obligations
• Robust hazard and risk management to keep your team ahead of the curve
• Automated business procedures with fully configurable, “fit-for-purpose” workflows

Further benefits of an integrated approach to safety and security management for colleges and universities 

Why integrated safety and security management? Well, integrated safety and security management broadens the spectrum of threats that safety and security teams tackle under the same portfolio to all threats and hazards classified as probable (based on risk-based planning) to cause injury, illness, property damage, business disruption, or environmental impact.

Integrated safety and security management technology itself enables those different teams (be they Safety and Security, or others) to conduct varied activities in a uniform, consistent manner, an approach that continually protects all elements of the institution from internal and external threats. 

The benefits of such an integrated approach include:

• Comprehensive coverage. Disparate safety and security management systems (often locked apart from each other) aren’t set up to share relevant information. That’s even though security threats cascade into safety incidents (and vice versa), and information flow gets lost in the cracks. 
  
  An integrated approach, on the other hand, allows universities to create a log trail across safety and security teams that increases accountability and limits liability in the case of an incident. It also enables streamlined compliance across relevant regulations with overlapping mandates.
• Improved efficiency. An integrated approach allows teams to avoid duplicating data collection and incident reporting procedures, as well as lowers training costs. Universities can give the same system to their planning teams as their security teams, streamlining coordination for everything from managing construction projects to planning for special events like concerts or controversial speakers. Not only does this efficiency eliminate redundancies but also improves response efficiency in the critical situations where speed is most necessary. 
• Controlled costs. An integrated approach views safety and security holistically, limiting the potential for cost overruns brought on by one-off investments. Too often, the lack of coordination between departments creates expensive blind-spots, as when key-card systems intended to bolster student security come with a surprise software licensing cost to integrate visitor management capabilities
  
  What’s more, an integrated platform cuts down on the overhead of ensuring that separate point solutions keep communicating with each other. They often don’t; data connectors break down, leaving response teams in the lurch.

Finally, the post-COVID return to campus has meant the return to incidents of sexual harassment and assault on Australian colleges and universities. Administrators at these institutions must act proactively to stanch the rising wave and ensure the safety and security of staff and students.

The example of the Clery Act in the U.S. provides one template for stricter policy intervention and more rigorous data collection. But for local campus security programs with manual tools and processes following such a template (or coming up with your own) might seem too hard.

Integrated safety and security management technology, such as Noggin’s industry solution for Higher Education, can help. Not only with digitising plans, processes, and capabilities, these integrated solutions also work to manage every aspect of campus safety and security, including risk and emergency management, ensuring comprehensive coverage, controlled costs, and improved efficiency in response.

Sources

^i. Additional sources include Australian Human Rights Commission, 2017; National Union of Students, 2016; University of Sydney, 2016

^ii. Social Research Centre, National Student Safety Survey: Report on the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault among university students in 2021. Available at https://assets.website files.com/61c2583e4730c0d5b054b8ab/623ba530bc6676dfcdb1d5dc_2021%20NSSS%20National%20 Report.pdf

^iii. Federal Register: The Daily Journal of the United States Government. Violence Against Women Act. Available at https://www.federalregister.gov/ documents/2014/10/20/2014-24284/violence-against women-act. 

^iv. All institutions must use the definitions of crimes in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program when compiling crime statistics for Clery Act purposes

^v. United States Department of Education: Office of Postsecondary Education: The Handbook for Campus Safety and Security Report. Available at https:// ifap.ed.gov/eannouncements/attachments/HandbookforCampusSafetyandSecurityReporting.pdf

^vi. CS Staff, Campus Safety Magazine: Who Is and Isn’t a Campus Security Authority. Available at https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/university/ who-is-and-isn-t-a-campus-security-authority/.