Respect Week Is Here. But Are We Respecting Everyone?
Each year, universities across Australia pause to mark Respect at Uni Week, a sector-wide initiative that brings staff and students together to deepen understanding, foster connection, and take meaningful action to prevent harm. This year, as the first cohort of institutions begin implementing their obligations under the new National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence, the week carries particular weight.
At Elevate, we’ve worked alongside universities for many years to build cultures where people can study, teach, and work without fear of harm. The National Code represents a genuine shift in how the sector is expected to approach gender-based violence, moving from goodwill and policy statements toward enforceable standards, whole-of-organisation planning, and genuine accountability. That shift is overdue and we welcome it.
But Respect Week itself is broader than its primary focus on gender-based violence. Many universities deliberately run it alongside Harmony Week, pairing conversations about consent and safety with conversations about cultural inclusion and belonging. That connection is not incidental. It reflects something important: the conditions that enable gender-based violence, including silence, power imbalance, inadequate reporting systems, and cultures that protect institutions over people, are the same conditions that enable racism, bullying, and other harmful behaviours. You cannot meaningfully address one while ignoring the others.
What the Evidence Tells Us About Racism at University
The recently released Racism@Uni study, the first national-scale examination of racism in Australian higher education, makes this case with uncomfortable clarity. Drawing on the experiences of over 76,000 students and staff, the findings show that racism in the sector is not isolated or incidental. It is systemic, persistent, and shaped by institutional structures that have, for too long, been allowed to look the other way.
Nearly 70 per cent of survey respondents reported witnessing racist behaviour directed at the racial, ethnic, cultural or religious group with which they identify. International students face the highest rates of direct racism, compounded by structural vulnerabilities including precarious visa status, financial dependence, and social isolation, that make reporting feel risky and institutional recourse feel remote. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff report that their cultures and knowledges are undervalued in curricula, workload allocation, and institutional decision-making. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism in clinical placements and assessment practices all feature prominently in the data.
What is equally striking is what happens when people do try to raise concerns. Of academic staff who made a formal complaint about direct racism, 80 per cent reported being dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with how their institution responded. For students, the rates were similarly high. The most commonly cited reason? Making a complaint made no difference. For many, the complaint process itself caused additional distress.
This is not a complaints-handling problem. It is a culture problem, and it is one that universities need to own.
Key Gaps We Are Seeing: Embedding Respect Across the Institution
Safe, accessible reporting pathways - and the awareness to use them. Across every form of harm, gender-based violence, racism, and bullying, the data consistently shows that most incidents go unreported. This is not because people don't want things to change. It is because they don't believe reporting will make a difference, and they fear the personal cost of trying.
But in our work with universities, something else stands out: many staff and students simply don't know what options exist. Anonymous reporting channels, third-party platforms, informal disclosure pathways - these are often buried in policy documents or mentioned once at induction and never again. Awareness is not a minor implementation detail. It is a precondition for any reporting system to function. A channel that people don't know about cannot give them a choice.
Institutions need reporting systems that are genuinely independent, trauma-informed, and culturally safe. They also need to invest in making those systems visible and understood across their communities, consistently, in plain language, and in ways that reach staff and students who may have most reason to distrust formal processes.
This is precisely what we designed SafeSpace@elevate to address. As an independent, web-based platform built by experts in workplace harm prevention, SafeSpace gives staff and students a confidential, trauma-informed, and culturally safe way to report concerns, separate from internal processes and available any time. For universities, it provides real-time visibility over patterns of harm, allowing institutions to intervene early rather than manage crises after the fact.
Intersectional education that reflects real complexity. The Racism@Uni findings show clearly that women of colour, international students, First Nations staff, and people with disability face compounding forms of harm that a single-issue approach will not reach. Effective education needs to be grounded in the actual experiences of the communities being served, not generic scenarios and awareness messages, but facilitated learning that builds genuine racial literacy, bystander capability, and an understanding of how power operates in institutional settings.
Addressing racism at a systems level, not just an individual one. One of the most significant findings in the Racism@Uni study is that university responses to racism have been, in the words of the report, "uneven, fragmented and often reactive." Many policies are broad in scope but limited in depth, and responses frequently rely on individual complaints rather than systemic prevention. This approach does not work, and staff and students know it.
Systemic action looks different. It means developing standalone anti-racism strategies with measurable targets, not folding racism into generic diversity and inclusion frameworks that lack the specificity to drive change. It means collecting and publishing race-disaggregated workforce data so that racial inequities in hiring, promotion, and retention become visible and accountable. It means reviewing the systems, including student evaluations of teaching, performance management processes, and casualisation practices, that can embed racial bias in ways that are rarely examined. And it means diversifying university leadership, because the Racism@Uni study found that while diversity is visible in classrooms, it is largely absent from the decision-making roles that shape institutional culture. As the study notes, leadership lacks the representation and cultural understanding needed to drive real change. That is not a pipeline problem. It is a structural one, and it requires a structural response.
Monitoring, evaluation, and honest accountability. Institutions tend to measure inputs, training hours, policy updates, events held, rather than outcomes. Did people's experience of safety improve? Did reporting rates change? Did those who reported feel heard and supported? The National Code's requirements for data collection and biannual reporting to governing bodies are a step in the right direction. But institutions need to go further, building genuine feedback loops that capture the lived experience of those most affected, including communities that have historically had least reason to trust institutional processes. Data should drive decisions, not sit in a report that validates the status quo.
What Respect Week Can Be
Respect Week is a genuine opportunity to create space for conversations that often don't happen, to connect students and staff to support services, and to reinforce that building a culture of respect is a shared responsibility. At its best, it is a moment that catalyses year-round commitment rather than substituting for it.
This year, we would encourage university leaders to use the week to ask some harder questions. Who in our community is not yet included in our definition of respect? Where are the gaps between what we say we stand for and what people actually experience? And what would it take to build systems that people, all people, can genuinely trust?
The Racism@Uni report closes with a challenge to government and university leaders to treat the evidence as an opportunity to lead with integrity. The infrastructure for change, regulatory frameworks, reporting tools, evidence-based education, exists. The question is whether institutions are willing to use it.
