NSW schools warn parents to ‘be vigilant’ as porn, child neglect and DV fuel rise in sexual incidents

Schools across the state are grappling with a rise in abnormal sexual behaviour among students, with reported incidents nearly doubling as teachers are urged to call out harm.

Melinda Tankard Reist from Collective Shout. Picture: Gary Ramage

Schools across the state are grappling with a rise in abnormal sexual behaviour among students, with reported incidents nearly doubling as teachers are urged to call out harm.

Public school teachers in NSW reported nearly 800 incidents of “problematic and/or harmful sexual behaviour” in 2023, almost double the figure from two years prior.

New figures from the NSW Department of Education reveal 799 calls were made to its incident report and support hotline in 2023, up from 467 in 2022 and 411 in 2021.

Questions from The Daily Telegraph exposed severe under-reporting of harmful sexual behaviour in the department’s previously published incident logs, from which hundreds of reports were missing.

In at least seven of the published incidents – all reported in 2023 – students had shared explicit videos, porn or nudes in the classroom or the playground.

An increasing number of incidents relate to pornography and nudes being shared by students online and in the playground. Picture: D-Keine/iStock

In one such report, at a school in Carlingford, executive staff reported that a student had “shared an inappropriate video via social media with multiple students viewing the footage on school grounds”.

Another school, in the Hills district, reported “concerns in the school grounds following an incident of students … taking an inappropriate image on a device without consent and sharing the image with others”.

Police were notified in both instances.

Teachers have been trained in recent years to identify and report specifically incidents of harmful sexual behaviour, rather than characterising such incidents more broadly as bullying or misbehaviour, the Department of Education confirmed.

Long-awaited new guidelines were finally released to school staff at the end of April, but the department declined The Daily Telegraph’s request to view them.

“The increase in incidents involving problematic and/or harmful sexualised behaviour (PHSB) is concerning, and the department takes every report … seriously and acts swiftly,” a spokeswoman said.

The Department of Education has urged parents to “be vigilant” about what their children are looking at online.

“We implore parents and carers to be vigilant in the content their children are consuming, and to work to address concerning behaviour should it arise, as external factors can strongly influence young people.”

University of South Australia researcher Lesley-Anne Ey, who specialises in the subject, said access to pornography from a very young age was “associated with the development of harmful sexual behaviour”.

She said children who committed such acts were often victims of child abuse, neglect or domestic violence themselves.

“There’s been reports of children engaging in oral sex from as young as four years of age that I’m aware of,” Dr Ey said.

Collective Shout’s Melinda Tankard Reist said the figures are “distressing”. Picture: Gary Ramage

“Engaging in oral sex is not something that a child would naturally do, so that suggests to me that that child is a victim of child sexual abuse themselves, and they’re just re-enacting what has happened to them.”

Collective Shout movement director Melinda Tankard Reist said the “distressing” and “disturbing” figures should be a wake-up call for “urgent intervention”.

“Behind each statistic is a real young person that has been harmed,” Ms Tankard Reist, who speaks in schools across Australia on issues such as harmful sexualised behaviour, said.

Body Safe Australia founder Deanne Carson said the increased reporting of harmful sexual behaviour showed “young people are demanding that adults take notice of what they’re experiencing and take action”.
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Originally published as NSW schools warn parents to ‘be vigilant’ as porn, child neglect and DV fuel rise in sexual incidents