Forty years after the crisis centre first opened in Canberra, its chief executive Chrystina Stanford said society's culture of victim blaming remained the same.

This was despite "tremendous gains" in the relationships between police, forensic services and other support services, which have lead to increased reporting rates, she said.

"When we see terrible things happen in our community [blaming the victim] can still be the first response that people have, you know 'why was she out, why was she drinking, why did she walk home alone', all of those questions still surround sexual assault," Ms Stanford said.

"If somebody tells you they've been sexually assaulted, it's not so hard to tell them that it's not their fault. That seems like the biggest challenge we have as a society, to give the simplest messages to people, but if we're all able to respond like that a lot of the shame and stigma attached to sexual assault would dissipate."

Part of the reason why victim blaming persisted was due to the intimate, violent nature of the attacks, Ms Stanford said.

"Sexual assault still is one of those things that people are really uncomfortable with. There can be this reaction that this person we know and love couldn't possibly have done something so terrible, so often it's a mechanism that we react with to almost protect ourselves from what is so awful."

The centre has received more than 10,000 calls for help in the past six months, and demand for its services has spiked 20 per cent in the past year.

Prominent rape cases often triggered a stark increase in requests for help, she said.

But while demand has consistently risen for the past eight years, Ms Stanford said sexual assault was still "the most under-reported crime in our community".

She said while one in five women and one in 20 men were sexually assaulted in their lifetime, only about 15 to 20 per cent of assaults were reported.

"When you look at how prevalent it is as a crime in our community versus how many people actually report to police and then how many of those convictions go through it gets smaller and smaller," she said.

Canberra Rape Crisis Centre opened as part of a global movement to address sexual assaults in the 1970s.

It is the last surviving rape crisis centre in Australia and the second-oldest continuously operating service for victims of sexual abuse.

"We get a lot of feedback that [Canberra Rape Crisis Centre] is a really confronting title for a service," Mr Stanford said.

"It's really important that the name is confronting, we say here that there is no way that rape can't be confronting and it should confront us as a society but it's an important link to our history as well."