Sexual violence against Australian children has accelerated sharply since the pandemic, according to research from the University of Sydney published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Scientists had expected rates of sexual assault on Australian children to fall, but the results showed the opposite.
The study involved an analysis of data collected over decades from multiple Australian sources, including national police data on assaults, hospitalisation data, and child protection data from three national agency databases. A significant rise in violence against children was identified between 2014 and 2024.
The study recorded a steady increase in sexual assault rates for girls aged up to nine years by 2.8 per cent annually, while for girls aged 10 to 17, the increase was 4.2 per cent. The rate of sexual assault among boys aged 10 to 17 accelerated sharply after 2021, rising by 15.7 per cent. Violence linked to domestic violence showed stable to moderate increases before 2021, followed by steep rises thereafter. Hospitalisations linked to assaults and child abuse were largely stable.
Lead researcher Dr Lucy Grummitt stated that researchers had expected child abuse rates to fall, given evidence recorded in other high-income countries over the last decade regarding child protection. She said the contrary finding could not be attributed to a single factor and indicated a need for an approach that is less fragmented.
According to her, all the different departments involved in the broader picture of child abuse focus on one specific subset. She highlighted that there is no entirely clear picture of what young people are exposed to and how this has changed over the last decade. Grummitt said child abuse is a human rights issue and monitoring should not fall to just one government body. She assessed it as an issue for the whole government, which the current data and monitoring do not reflect.
The rise can be attributed to a number of factors, including income inequality and the "manosphere". Researchers found that income inequality in Australia is at its highest level in 20 years, with significant increases since 2021. Government economic assistance schemes, such as the Australian JobKeeper scheme, ended in March 2021. Shifts in gender norms and internet cultures may also play a role. Traditional gender attitudes favouring male authority in the household are returning among young men, and the spread of misogynistic online communities and broader toxic masculinity narratives is linked to hostility towards women and girls.
Increased reporting due to growing awareness may also partially explain the higher rate of violence. Grummitt said it was frustrating for researchers to discover that in some cases entire datasets they hoped to use for triangulation were missing. Data on child abuse was missing for one year for New South Wales and Queensland, and data on domestic violence-related abuse for Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia was incomplete. She added that existing data were not directly comparable among the federal states.
Grummitt said data on family and domestic violence are improving, but assessed it as "quite striking" that in 2024, when they finished extracting data, nationally consistent definitions still did not exist. Researchers warn that the findings show an urgent need to prevent suffering among children.
