Child sex abuse risk ‘greatest at home’

Police received almost 5000 reports of children being sexually abused by family members last year, but experts say this is only a fraction of the abuse occurring in homes.

About 1.4 million Australians, or about one in 13 adults, are estimated to have been sexually ­abused before the age of 15.

Police received almost 5000 reports of children being sexually abused by family members last year, but experts say this is only a fraction of the abuse occurring in homes across the nation and much more focus is needed on prevention.

The warning comes after The Weekend Australian revealed the devastating impact on two women of sexual abuse perpetrated by their step-grandfather.

One of the sisters, also raped by another male relative, committed suicide in June.

While there has been a strong focus on institutional abuse in recent years, experts believe child sexual abuse is far more prevalent in domestic settings.

University of the Sunshine Coast’s Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit co-leader Nadine McKillop said homes were the most “risky place” for child sexual abuse; her research suggested 70 to 80 per cent of child sexual abuse occurred in domestic settings.

“It’s the most common place and it is the most difficult to prevent because of the complexity of the relationships and the trust, dependency and emotional connections between everybody in a household,” Dr McKillop said.

There were 4897 victims of family or domestic violence-­related sexual assaults aged 0 to 19 reported to police in 2019, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This was down from 5010 in 2017 but up from 4508 recorded in 2014.

Separately, about 4700 children aged 0 to 17 were the subject of substantiations of sexual abuse by welfare authorities in 2018-19, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This was down from about 5470 in 2014-15.

This included abuse perpetrated by parents, step-parents, siblings, grandparents and other relatives.

Queensland University of Technology professor Ben ­Mathews said those figures, while shocking, should “by no means be taken to reflect the true ­extent” of the problem.

“Only a small proportion of these cases of sexual abuse are the subject of a formal complaint or approach to police,” he said, adding this was especially the case for domestic or familial abuse.

Professor Mathews is leading the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, which he said would for the first time provide reliable data on the prevalence of child abuse, including sexual abuse, and neglect in Australia, and its impact on mental and physical health. A survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 65 will take place next year.

About 1.4 million Australians, or about one in 13 adults, are estimated to have been sexually ­abused before the age of 15 — about 70 per cent of those female — according to the ABS’s Personal Safety Survey conducted in 2016.

About 45 per cent of those sexually abused before the age of 15 said their abuse had been perpetrated by a relative — about 13.6 per cent by a parent or step-parent, 6.5 per cent by a sibling and 25 per cent by another relative. Of those, about 65 per cent had experienced sexual abuse only, while the rest had experienced a combination of sexual and physical violence.

The most common age for the abuse to have started was five to nine years.

Professor Mathews said based on overseas data, he did not believe the Personal Safety Survey over-estimated child sexual abuse — rather it more likely underestimated it because a lot of abuse involved 15 to 17-year-olds, who were not captured.

He said many people did not understand how prevalent child sexual abuse was in society. “It’s something people don’t tend to want to talk about. There’s still a taboo about sexual abuse,” he said. “It’s still one of the great undiscussed adversities and traumatic experiences and it’s something that we really do need to pay more attention to.”

Dr McKillop said she was an “absolute advocate” of early intervention in schools, communities and families — it increased communication, reduced the shame or guilt for young people of coming forward and provided “an armoury” so people could respond appropriately. However, programs occurred ad hoc and varied in quality.

“Australia needs to come forward to the same level as the rest of the world in terms of primary and secondary intervention,” she said.

“That is where we need to be putting our money and our focus … we all need to be armed with the same information to have a really comprehensive response.”

She said Australia was good at responding with support for victims once abuse had been reported but it needed to be better at trying to prevent it and to give children the tools to disclose abuse if it did take place.

Dr McKillop said it was difficult to detect trends from current data because abuse reported to police in the past five years might have occurred years earlier.

“This delayed disclosure causes fluctuations in the statistics that might not necessarily reflect what is currently happening,” she said.

However, programs that already existed in Australia showed “promise”, she said.

Research by a leading US academic David Finkelhor suggests that the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the US has declined since the early 1990s.

One of his studies showed a 62 per cent decline in substantiated sexual abuse from 1992 to 2018.

However, Professor Mathews cautioned that there were limit­ations to this research.

Swinburne University’s Nina Papalia said the lack of reliable data and agreed definitions — for example, whether sexual abuse also included non-contact forms of abuse (such as flashing or masturbating in front of a person) — made it very difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of prevention programs.

“When it is inside the family, it’s often not an isolated incident — it can often mean that the abuse is experienced over a longer period of time,” Dr Papalia said.

A sizeable minority of perpetrators were under the age of 18.

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