Last week’s report from the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner delivers an uncomfortable verdict: nearly four years into a national plan built to end gender-based violence ‘in a generation’, sexual assault sits at a record high: 39,758 recorded victims last year, barely moved from the year before, with Commissioner Micaela Cronin noting that even these figures vastly understate the problem, because so few victim-survivors ever report to police.
Buried in that data is a fact the national conversation keeps sidestepping: this is not primarily a story about adults. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show well over half of recorded sexual assault victims are under 18. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study found girls are abused at roughly twice the rate of boys. And when researchers ask adults about their childhoods, the picture is stark: most were abused by someone they knew, and in more than half of those cases, by a relative. This is consistent with what we, at the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse, hear from many victim-survivors of child sexual abuse, that they feel unseen and unheard in these conversations.
While this is a gendered harm, child sexual abuse affects boys too. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study found that nearly one in five boys have experienced child sexual abuse, while gender-diverse young people experience even higher rates of harm.
We need to start treating child sexual abuse, harmful sexual behaviours in adolescence, and adult intimate partner and sexual violence as one continuum, rather than three unrelated portfolios competing for attention. It’s the only version of prevention with any chance of working.
Yet our policy architecture treats child sexual abuse and sexual violence against women as separate portfolios, plans, commissions, funding lines and conversations. While important work is occurring through the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children and other related initiatives, child sexual abuse is often considered separately from broader discussions about sexual violence, gender-based violence and prevention.
This can make it harder to see the connections between childhood experiences of abuse, later experiences of violence, and the prevention opportunities that exist across the lifespan. Child sexual abuse is often discussed in the context of institutions, churches, schools and sport, yet many children are harmed in family settings. If we are serious about prevention, we need a more connected understanding of where sexual violence begins and how it evolves across people’s lives.
For victim-survivors of child sexual abuse, the impacts of abuse are complex and lifelong. Australian longitudinal research tracking child sexual abuse victims into adulthood has found they face significantly higher odds of further experiences of abuse and violence, and in some cases, going on to offend themselves. While the vast majority of victim-survivors of child sexual abuse won’t go on to abuse others, there is a need to respond to emerging harmful sexual behaviours among young people in this wider context.
Increasingly, public discussion is grappling with incidents of sexual violence involving young people themselves. These conversations often become polarised between concern for victims and concern about the futures of children who cause harm. Yet both concerns can be valid at the same time. Both parties involved are children. The same age group we recognise as vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and exposure to violence is also the age group in which harmful sexual behaviours can emerge. Any serious approach to prevention must be capable of holding both realities at once.
Minister Tanya Plibersek has spoken of her alarm at the ‘explosion’ of sexual violence where both victim and perpetrator are under 18. That single sentence should reframe the entire debate. We can’t keep treating these cases as if they appear from nowhere; they are part of a distressing, complex cycle of sexual violence that can often begin in childhood.
The next iteration of the national plan has an important opportunity. It must start asking how to stop the abuse that so often starts decades earlier, in houses we call safe, done by people, sometimes children themselves, the victims already knew. We need to address sexual violence across the full lifespan, with appropriate, coordinated and accountable responses across every system involved. We must not let children down.
