The sexual assault of Australian children has accelerated sharply since the pandemic, surprising researchers who expected rates to have fallen but instead found attacks on boys had risen 15.7%. Researchers expected rates to have dropped in line with other countries around the world and warn the troubling findings show an urgent need to prevent the suffering of children. The University of Sydney research published on Wednesday found a significant increase in violence against children between 2014 and 2024 that could be attributed to a range of factors, including income inequality and the manosphere.
An increase in reporting due to growing awareness could also partially explain the higher rate of violence, it found. The study found a steady increase in rates of sexual assaults against girls aged up to nine (2.8% per year) and aged 10 to 17 (4.2%), with rates among boys aged 10 to 17 accelerating sharply after 2021 (15.7%). Family violence-related assault showed a similar trend, with stable to modest increases before 2021 followed by steep increases thereafter.
Assault-related hospitalisations and child maltreatment were generally stable. These sources included national police-recorded assaults, hospitalisations, and child protection data from three Australian national agency databases. The study’s lead author, Dr Lucy Grummitt, said researchers expected to find that the rate of violence against children had fallen, given evidence recorded in other high-income countries over the past decade regarding child protection.
That they found the opposite was impossible to attribute to any one factor, she said, but it did show the need for a less siloed approach to the issue. But that’s not really what we found. This data included one year of missing child maltreatment data for NSW and Queensland, and family violence-related assault data for Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia also being incomplete.
The data that did exist was also not directly comparable across states, Grummitt said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
