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.
“In Australia, income inequality is at its highest point in 20 years, with substantial increases from 2021, coinciding with the acceleration of rates found in the current study,” researchers found.
“Economic stress may be especially salient in the post-2020 period, when pandemic-related financial disruptions intensified for many families, while government benefits providing economic relief, such as the JobKeeper payment scheme in Australia, ended in March 2021.
“Shifts in gender norms and online cultures may also play a role … traditional gender attitudes that favor male authority within households are resurging among young men [and] the expansion of misogynistic online communities and broader toxic masculinity narratives are associated with hostility toward women and girls.”
The research, published in the media journal JAMA Network Open, was based on an analysis of a decades-worth of Australian data from multiple sources.
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.
“All these different departments that are involved in the bigger picture of violence against children are just focused on one particular subset, and we don’t actually have a very clear picture of what young people are being exposed to, and how has that changed over the last decade,” Grummitt said.
“So that was kind of the rationale … I expected to see that things were kind of improving, I suppose. But that’s not really what we found.
“Violence against children is a human rights issue, 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 said that it was frustrating for researchers to discover that in some cases entire datasets they hoped to use in the triangulation were missing.
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.
“Family domestic violence data is improving, but it’s pretty striking that in 2024 when we finished extracting the data that there weren’t already these nationally consistent definitions.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
