Safer Community offers advice, support, intervention and risk management for students who have experienced or witnessed inappropriate, concerning or threatening behaviour to minimise risk that would impact the Swinburne Community
Inappropriate, concerning or threatening behaviour includes any behaviour that:
- makes you feel threatened or unsafe
- cause you concern about a person harming themselves or someone else
- makes you feel uneasy or get the sense that something is not quite right
Some specific types of behaviour you should report to Safer Community include:
What is bullying?
Bullying is repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed at an individual or group that creates a risk to their health and safety. The behaviour can include actions of an individual or a group, and often involves the bully or bullies inappropriately asserting power.
While bullying is often a repeated behaviour, one-off instances can be considered bullying too.
Examples of bullying:
Examples of bullying can include many things, such as:
- Verbal or written abuse. This includes abusive, insulting, belittling, intimidating or offensive language, spreading of rumours, teasing, and displaying offensive posters or graffiti.
- Threatening physical behaviour including physical gestures and unwelcomed physical contact.
- Excluding someone from a group (e.g. study group) either online or offline where it is unreasonable to do so.
- Offensive or intimidating initiation practices.
- Non-constructive criticism about academic performance including derogatory, demeaning and insulting remarks.
- Cyberbullying such as abusive and inappropriate emails or social media posts.
- Unwelcomed interference with an individual’s belongings.
- Sextortion- A form of blackmail where a perpetrator threatens to reveal intimate images or videos of you online unless you give in to their demands. These demands are typically for money, further intimate images or sexual favours.
What is discrimination?
Discrimination occurs when a person, or a group of people, is treated less favourably than another person or group because of their background or certain personal characteristics protected by law.
What is harassment?
Harassment is a form of discrimination; it includes behaviour that causes offence, based on a characteristic. This includes sexual harassment.
While bullying is often a repeated behaviour, one-off instances can be considered bullying too.
Examples of harassment:
- Sending of explicit or sexually suggestive emails or text messages.
- Making offensive comments or jokes about a person’s race.
- Asking intrusive questions about a person’s private life.
- Displaying racially offensive or pornographic posters or screen savers.
- Making derogatory comments or taunts about a person’s disability.
What is sexual assault?
The term can refer to a broad range of sexual behaviours that make an individual feel uncomfortable, frightened or threatened. Sexual assault is a crime and includes rape, sexual touching and child sexual abuse.
Consent must be given and it should be informed and free from intimidation. A person who is asleep or under the influence of drugs or alcohol cannot give informed consent.
Examples of sexual assault:
- Unwanted touching, hugging, fondling, or kissing
- Being made to look at, or pose for, pornographic photos
- Public exposure
- Voyeurism (e.g. being watched doing intimate things without permission)
- Incest
- Rape
What is sexual harassment?
Sexual harassment is when a person makes an unwelcome sexual advance, or an unwelcome request for sexual favours to another person, and/or engages in any other unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature in relation to another person, including through digital or online means, that is offensive, humiliating or intimidating.
While bullying is often a repeated behaviour, one-off instances can be considered bullying too.
Examples of sexual harassment:
- Intrusive questions or statements about a person’s private life
- Repeatedly asking a person for sex or dates
- Offensive sexual comments or jokes
- Sexually suggestive behaviour such as leering or staring
What is self-harm?
Self-harm is when you hurt yourself as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, painful memories or overwhelming situations and experiences. Some people have described self-harm as a way to:
- express something that is hard to put into words.
- turn invisible thoughts or feelings into something visible.
- change emotional pain into physical pain.
- reduce overwhelming emotional feelings or thoughts.
- have a sense of being in control
- escape traumatic memories
- have something in life that they can rely on
- punish themselves for their feelings and experiences
- stop feeling numb, disconnected or dissociated
- create a reason to physically care for themselves
- express suicidal feelings and thoughts without taking their own life.
What is suicidal behavior?
Suicidal behavior includes suicidal ideation (frequent thoughts of ending one's life), suicide attempts (the actual event of trying to kill one's self), and completed suicide (death occurs). Suicidal behavior is most often accompanied by intense feelings of hopelessness, depression, or self‐destructive behavior (parasuicidal behavior).
What is stalking?
Stalking occurs when someone repeatedly imposes unwanted communication and/or contact on a person that causes them to feel fear or distress. If you feel unsafe on campus or are experiencing stalking activity outside of university, we can provide support for you.
Stalking can be perpetrated physically as well as through technology (cyberstalking). Most stalking reports are from victims being pursued by someone they know.
Stalkers often want to exert power and control over the victim in order to punish them. This may be a result of a relationship breakdown or rejection.
Examples of physical stalking:
- Showing up uninvited at your home or other places you regularly visit in your daily life.
- Approaching or following you.
- Vandalising or damaging your personal property.
- Physically and/or verbally threatening you or your loved ones.
- Sending or leaving unwanted letters or gifts.
- Ordering unwanted goods and services on your behalf.
- Arranging to meet you under false pretences.
- Starting false legal action against you.
Examples of cyberstalking:
- Repeatedly sending you unwanted emails, text messages, and voicemails.
- Using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) devices or tracking apps to track your location and following you without permission.
- Keeping you under surveillance via closed-circuit TV cameras.
- Harassing, humiliating or threatening you on social media sites.
- Hacking into your email or internet accounts to impersonate you
Zero tolerance
Swinburne has zero tolerance for sexual assault and harassment. We want safety and respect to be central to our university culture for all staff, students and visitors.
Respect. Now. Always. initiative
We are part of a national initiative, Respect. Now. Always, together with other Australian universities, to prevent sexual assault and harassment. It also aims to empower victims of assault or harassment to seek help and support
This is an opportunity for universities to review policies, reporting procedures and support services. We will be able to keep learning from best practice and make improvements.
