‘We are at a crisis point’: sharp rise in violence and sexual assaults involving kids

A new University of Sydney study has found that from 2014, rates of sexual violence against girls aged 0–17 rose steadily. For boys, rates rose sharply from 2021, with more than a 50 per cent increase in just three years.

For family violence-related assault, particularly sharp increases were seen from around 2020 among both boys and girls, with increases ranging from 8 to 20 per cent per year through to 2024.

“We are at a crisis point,” lead author from the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre, Dr Lucy Grummitt said.

“Sexual assault and family and domestic violence have increased over the decade, but what’s particularly concerning is that the steepest increases were in the last 3 to 5 years.”

The study, published on Wednesday, found sexual assault against boys aged 10 to 17 had increased by 60 per over the decade, with a near 16 per cent spike in one year alone.

Girls also in the same age group were victims of sexual violence, with a 51 per cent rise across 10 years.

For family-violence-related assault, rates for boys aged zero to nine grew by 57 per cent over the decade.

Grummitt said older children had more exposure to violence than the younger cohort because of who they could be coming in contact with in the community.

She said the scope of the study does not delve into who the perpetrators were but pinpointed some of the possible causes.

The increases may reflect a combination of factors, including rising income inequality, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living pressures, gaps in support services, and increased reporting of violence, the academic shared.

“We need greater investment in prevention and early intervention so that we don’t see so many children suffering at the very extreme end of the spectrum,” Dr Lucy Grummitt suggests.

The impact of the ‘manosphere’ was also referenced, with shifts in gender norms and online cultures also likely to be playing a role, the report suggests.

“Recent global evidence indicates that traditional gender attitudes that favour male authority within households are resurging among young men,” it read.

“Traditional gender hierarchies, beliefs in male dominance, and male entitlement to women’s bodies are well-established drivers of violence and sexual assault against women and children.

“Furthermore, the expansion of misogynistic online communities and broader toxic masculinity narratives are associated with hostility toward women and girls and have been linked to rising rates of gender-based violence.”

The paper used child protection, morbidity and victims data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare to extrapolate the results and comes as, just last month, children’s safety advocacy group Save the Children launched an open letter with 200 experts calling for greater action to protect Australian children.

The researchers are now urgently calling on federal and state governments for greater investment in prevention and early detection, including implementing the recommendations of the Rapid Review of Prevention Approaches, which outlined a raft of measures to prevent gender-based violence, including greater investment in national and state-based child protection systems.

They are also calling for greater integrated surveillance across police, health and child protection systems, as well as nationally consistent legislation on corporal punishment, evidence-based parenting programs, school-based respectful relationships initiatives, and economic support for families.

There are no repeated national surveys that collect data from children about their exposure to violence, the research shared.

Administrative datasets, such as police reports, hospitalisations, and child protection records, consider different forms of violence with distinct thresholds of harm, are published separately, and do not report on children specifically, it said.

“We need greater investment in prevention and early intervention so that we don’t see so many children suffering at the very extreme end of the spectrum,” Grummitt suggested.

The same 10-year period saw no significant change in hospitalisations for assault-related injuries among children, and no rise in substantiated child maltreatment cases through the child protection system – a divergence the researchers say raises important questions about what is driving the recorded increase.

“These differences in trends across administrative systems underscore the need for better data and cross-sector integration to understand what is happening with these different indicators of children’s exposure to violence, and to direct support and intervention to the right places,” the report reads.

“Our child maltreatment rates describe substantiated cases, meaning they have undergone an investigation by child protective services. One concern is that the declines we found reflect an issue with system capacity rather than a true decline in exposure.

“Data from the Australian Productivity Commission suggest that state and territory child protection agencies may not have the capacity to investigate all reports of abuse they receive, with the proportion of cases investigated over the past decade declining from half to one third.”

Violence against children is a human rights issue, Grummitt told The Guardian.

“… it shouldn’t be falling to one government department to be monitoring this … it really is a whole-of-government issue and currently our data and our monitoring really doesn’t reflect that.”

Grummitt also said in The Guardian that her research team were frustrated to discover that in some cases entire datasets they’d hoped to use were missing, including 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.

Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare CEO Jamie Crosby told ABC News that he believed governments have a “desperate and immediate” need to act.

“There is much that governments can do, and that communities can get behind, if we choose to act on this data and prioritise the safety and wellbeing of our children,” he said.

Former national children’s commissioner Anne Hollonds also told ABC News now is the time for action, rather than more inquiries or reviews.

“Childhood is the most powerful prevention opportunity within our reach. We need to make child safety, rights and wellbeing a national priority,” she said.