Raffy Edis is an undergraduate at the Australian National University and co-founder of peer-led violence prevention initiative, connect2prevent. He is the director of connect2prevent’s education portfolio and has previously been involved with ANU’s violence prevention unit as a peer education and engagement officer, as well as a volunteer for the STOP Campaign.

Student activism has played a crucial role in driving the recent changes in preventing gender-based violence. What does the future look like now that universities will be required to take more proactive action? 

The national code is the culmination of over 10 years of advocacy from university students and staff alike, which built on a long legacy of student activism calling for action in response to patriarchal violence on Australian campuses.

My hope is that the future will look like more substantive engagement with students, especially those who are critical of tertiary education institutions’ prevention efforts. Framing student activism, resistance and critique of violence prevention initiatives as an opportunity for dialogue will be crucial for achieving the outcomes listed in the national code. Students often aren't aware of the institutional constraints that practitioners face, but equally, practitioners often don't fully appreciate the wealth of knowledge within student communities. As experts in their own communities and their own lives, students have experiential knowledge that practitioners can leverage to reflect the localised context, and integrate the nuances of lived experience that tend to get overlooked in this space. When working with people who have experienced harm, I would also stress the importance of compensating them in some way, mainly as a token of appreciation and recognition of the lived expertise they bring to these conversations, which is often tied up with a range of heavy feelings.

What are the risks to students and their university experience if universities only adopt a compliance-based, or tickbox-type approach as opposed to being creative and values-driven towards student safety and wellbeing?

It's imperative that tertiary education institutions don't see the national code as another compliance regime. I would ask institutional leadership and prevention practitioners to instead remain faithful to the driving impulse behind the legislation, 'following the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law.' This would mean, at times, privileging student interests over the institution’s interests where they are incommensurable.

In my view, this is the lesson from Title IX in the U.S. (which implicitly makes colleges’ public funding partially contingent on their compliance with legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex).  For students who have experienced patriarchal violence, this piece of legislation offered a means of legal recourse when the institution's response failed them. An unintended consequence of this has been a growing culture of fear surrounding non-compliance, leading many institutions to prioritise compliance over meaningful and innovative responses to violence on their campuses. While the National Code is different in many respects and in my view, much more promising, I am concerned that it will have little impact on rates of patriarchal violence on our campuses unless higher education providers are prepared to think beyond compliance.

It can be incredibly difficult to slow down and step back to take stock when we live and work in a fast-paced world and I am not discounting the consequences for doing so. But I often remind myself of the quote "this is too urgent to rush," in relation to this work as a reminder to check myself and ensure that I am not inadvertently replicating the cultures of domination that we are working to undo.

This is a helpful resource for identifying how this shows up in our work. It also suggests some ‘antidotes’.