NEARLY three million adult Australians have experienced sexual violence during their lifetime, including sexual assault or child sexual abuse.
Yet only 13 per cent of survivors report these crimes to police. The disturbing finding is contained in a new report on sexual violence and victimisation released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this week. The report coincides with evidence that child abuse cases have spiked during COVID-19 lockdown, with more than 486,000 reports made to authorities throughout 2019-2020.
“Children are still being sexually abused behind closed doors and remain more at-risk during lockdowns,” Act for Kids chief executive officer Dr Katrina Lines said. “We must start educating children earlier about the issues surrounding consent and how to identify unsafe and safe situations and how to seek help, if we are to stop sexual abuse in Australia.” Act for Kids, a charity providing free therapy and support services to children and families, has experienced a 30 per cent increase in demand for its services since lockdowns lifted last year. Counselling agencies across the country have reported similar spikes in demand for domestic violence services.
The ABS’s latest report revealed the majority of sexual violence survivors are women, at 2.2 million, or 23 per cent of Australian women over 18, compared with 718,000 men (8 per cent of men aged over 18). “Women who experienced childhood sexual abuse were three times more likely to experience sexual assault later in life, compared with women who had not been sexually abused as children (43 per cent compared with 13 per cent),” ABS Director of the National Centre for Crime and Justice Statistics, Will Milne said.
“For men, the risk was five times greater (18 per cent compared with 3.4 per cent).” The report found less than half of recorded sexual assault victims reported the incident to police within a week of the attack. “By the one-year mark, this proportion had increased to 76 per cent for female victims and 63 per cent for male victims,’’ Mr Milne said. “Nearly one in five male victims of sexual assault (19 per cent) and one in 17 female victims of sexual assault (5.9 per cent) who reported the incident to police said it occurred 20 years or more ago.”
Dr Lines said because child sexual abuse went unreported and often was not investigated by authorities, many survivors suffered in silence without any support long into adulthood. She said early education was key to stopping sexual abuse. “Evidence-based protective behaviours programs in schools play an important and crucial role in empowering children to seek help when they feel unsafe,” she said.
Act for Kids has been lobbying to all levels of government to mandate a minimum standard for protective behaviours programs in the National Curriculum, after research found current programs in schools are ad hoc and remain inconsistent across the country. “As a country and community we must do better to protect children, so they have lifelong skills to protect themselves as adults,” Dr Lines said.
