The institutions, which have been accused of a culture of cover-up, would do well to look to the Australian Defence Force Academy for a road map to follow.

The Canberra-based officer training college, which is an annex of the University of NSW, went from being the epicenter of the "Skype scandal" in 2011 to receiving "White Ribbon" accreditation as a centre of excellence in preventing workplace violence against women in late 2015.

The journey was both painful and expensive. It had been driven by a raft of inquiries into ADFA specifically and the ADF in general that cost the tax payer well in excess of $10 million.

With community attention now turning to the high number of sexual assaults at universities and colleges across the country it would seem timely to revisit ADFA's experience.

It stands to reason some of the lessons learned there, and documented by former sex discrimination commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick in her extensive and highly detailed review, would be applicable elsewhere.

Ms Broderick, who said senior leaders must be committed to cultural change and stressed the need to destigmatise the act of reporting incidents which sometimes led to victims being ostracised by their peers if they spoke out, was called in by the University of Sydney to clean up the culture at its residential colleges last year.

While that process is ongoing, at least one college is still reluctant to play ball, Ms Broderick has an excellent track record of driving culture change.

If even half the allegations contained within an explosive submission to the Human Rights Commission by End Rape on Campus Australia are true such changes can't come fast enough.

Drawing on five years worth of data and freedom-of-information request responses, ERCA alleged that while there have been more than 500 complaints of sexual assaults at Australian universities and colleges over the past five years only six students have been expelled as a result.

It reported derogatory language targeting women, including "slut juice" as a term for cask wine and "slut alley" as a term for residential quarters, as examples of a misogynistic culture.

ERCA also detailed incidents in which female students had allegedly been publicly humiliated and shamed and accused universities of trying to cover up the scope of the problem.

Of particular concern is the allegation that after reporting she had been raped to the head of her college, a Melbourne University student was told rape was "too inflammatory" a word to use, taking the matter to the police would be "extreme" and telling her parents would weaken her case.

Such claims warrant immediate investigation. This not the way these matters are meant to be handled in Australia in the 21st century.