If ever there was cause for a cultural reckoning, the Hurt Locker of female student trauma compiled by Chanel Contos is it. It is Exhibit A in our collective failure to cultivate the social conditions conducive to the flourishing of healthy young human beings. The horror archive now contains more than 5,000 accounts of sexual assault, unwanted sex, and coercion shared by female students and former students in response to a question posed by the 23-year-old former Kambala student on Instagram.

Now studying in London, Contos asked if other young women had experienced sexual assault by their peers from all-boys schools in Sydney. (The net has now been extended Australia-wide.) The query grew out of a conversation among friends who each realised they had “unlimited rape stories” to share. “It happened to so many of us”, Contos says. “We talk about a guy who forced us to give them head like what we had for breakfast yesterday.”

Some young women describe waking up naked at parties or in a young man’s house, after passing out due to intoxication, with male peers penetrating them. Some said they had only met the alleged perpetrators that same night; others they had considered friends. Some said they only realised something had happened to them when they woke up in pain and found their underwear soaked in blood. Some who were forced to provide oral sex say they were filmed in the act.

Every day more girls come forward to add to the trauma tome, offering their testimony of being violated by teenage boys. Some of the girls are as young as thirteen or fourteen years of age.