Prevalence of child sexual abuse

Survey studies

Maltreatment was most prevalent for participants in the youth cohort with diverse gender identities (90.5% experiencing some form of child maltreatment; 77% multi-type maltreatment) or diverse sexualities (85.3% reporting any child maltreatment; 64.3% multi-type maltreatment) (Higgins et.al., 2024).

Of the survey population, 90.5% identified as heterosexual or straight, and 9.5% as sexuality diverse (includes those who refused to answer or didn’t know; n = 124; 1.9%). Significantly more women than men had diverse sexuality identities (Higgins et.al., 2024).

The prevalence of child maltreatment experienced by sexuality diverse Australians was significantly higher compared to heterosexuals for each type of child maltreatment, but particularly so for sexual abuse (51.9% cf. 20.1%). Overall, the trends for any type of child maltreatment followed a similar pattern, with lower prevalence for heterosexuals (61.0%), compared to diverse sexuality identities (83.9%) (Higgins et.al., 2024).

The Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS), the first nationally representative study of child maltreatment rates, found that 28.5% of Australians experienced child sexual abuse. Girls experience double the rate of child sexual abuse (37.3% c.f. 18.8% of boys; Mathews, Pacella, Scott, et al., 2023).

The ACMS found that almost 1 in 4 Australians experienced one or more types of contact child sexual abuse (23.7%), while almost 1 in 5 experienced non-contact child sexual abuse (18.1%). Almost 1 in 10 Australians experienced forced sex in childhood (8.7%; Mathews, Pacella, Scott, et al., 2023).

Among the more than 57,000 women participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, the prevalence of sexual violence during childhood was 12-15% of women, depending on the age cohort (Townsend, Loxton, Egan, Barnes, Byrnes, & Forder, 2022).

According to the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey (ABS, 2022), 11% of women (1.1 million) and 5% of men (343,000) in Australia report having been sexually abused before the age of 15 years.

In a recent study of Adverse Childhood Experiences among almost 250,000 participants across 23 US states, 16.3% of females and 6.7% of males reported experiencing sexual abuse before the age of 18 years (Merrick, Ford, Ports & Guinn, 2018).

A review of child sexual abuse studies in Japan found a range of contact abuse for females of 10.4 – 60.7%, while the prevalence of contact abuse for males (from just one study) was 4.1%. Further, the rate of penetrative sexual abuse for females was found to range from 1.3 – 8.3%, and for males from 0.5 – 1.3% (Tanaka, Suzuki, Aoyama, Takaoka, & MacMillan, 2017).

Administrative data

In 2021-22, there were approximately 471,000 notifications to child protection involving around 275,000 children, a rate of 49 per 1,000 children in Australia. Of the notifications, 38% (approx. 178,000) were investigated, with approximately 61,900 substantiations relating to around 45,500 children—a rate of 8.0 per 1,000 children. Sexual abuse was the primary type of abuse or neglect substantiated for 9% of children (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2023).

Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, the rate of children who were subjects of notifications increased from 44 to 49 per 1,000, while the rate of children with substantiations remained relatively stable at around 8.0 per 1,000 (AIHW, 2023).

During 2021, the number of Australian victims aged under 18 years for the following crime categories were as follows:

• Homicide and related offences = 49
• Blackmail/extortion = 81
• Kidnapping/abduction = 114
• Total Robbery = 2,261
•  Sexual assault = 15,242 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022).

During 2021 there were 31,118 victims of sexual assault recorded by police in Australia, which was an increase of 13% from the previous year. Since 1993, the rate of victimisation for sexual assault has increased from 69 to 121 victims per 100,000 persons in 2021. Of these 31,118 victims, 49% were aged under 18 years, with 7.5% aged 0-9 years, and a further 41.5% aged 10-17 years. The majority of all sexual assault victims were female (86%). Female victims of sexual assault aged 10-17 years had the highest victimisation rate of any age group, at a rate greater than eight times the overall rate for sexual assault. The national victimisation rate for sexual assault for 2021 was 121 victims per 100,000 population, while the rate for females aged 10-17 years was 926.3 per 100,000 population (ABS, 2022).

Police data from six Australian states in 2018 showed there were around 3,900 assaults against children aged 0-14 that were considered family violence (approximately 11 per day) and around 3,100 sexual assaults against children perpetrated by a family member (approximately 8.5 per day) (Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, 2019a).

A retrospective cohort study using linked administrative data to report the cumulative incidence of child protection services involvement from birth to age 18 years in South Australia, has shown that across childhood, substantiated maltreatment was experienced by 3.2-3.6% of non-Aboriginal and 19-25% of Aboriginal children, which is 7 times the reported annual substantiation rates (Segal, Nguyen, Mansor, et al., 2019).

In 2017, there were 7,397 children aged 0-14 years who were recorded by police as being victims of sexual assault (159.4 per 100,000 children). The rate of sexual assault victimisation (recorded in 2017 police data) for male children aged 0-14 was 73.0 per 100,000, and for female children aged 0-14 was 329.4 per 100,000 (AIHW, 2019b).

Using data from a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1980 and 2008, and from administrative sources including Canadian child protection services and police, Alaggia and colleagues (2017) report that rates of child sexual abuse are 30 times greater in studies relying on self-reports (127 in 1,000) than in those based on administrative data sources (4 in 1,000).

A study of trends in reports of child sexual abuse over a 20 year period in Victoria, Australia, showed that there was a statistically significant increase in reporting rates, from 372.25 in 1993 to 692.15 per 100,000 in 2012. Also from 1993 – 2012, the rate of reporting among boys increased by 2.6-fold, whereas there was a 1.5-fold increase among girls. In 1993, the sex ratio for reporting of girls to boys was 2:1; by 2012 this ratio changed to 1.14:1, meaning that a boy in Victoria was almost as likely as a girl to be the subject of a report of suspected child sexual abuse (Mathews, Bromfield, Walsh, Cheng & Norman, 2017).

Data from the Queensland Police Service Annual Statistical Review 2016-17 showed that of all sexual offence matters dealt with, 57% involved victims under the age of 18, 48% under the age of 16 and 38% between the ages of 0 – 14 years. This same data also showed that 80% of sexual offence victims under the age of 18 were female (QPS, 2017).

Indigenous Australians

Across jurisdictions with published data (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and the Northern Territory) in 2023, First Nations victims of sexual assault were predominantly female, ranging from 77% in New South Wales to 91% in South Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024).

Except for South Australia, the rate of sexual assault was higher for First Nations people aged under 18 than those aged 18 and over (based on age at report), ranging from 1.3 times as high in the Northern Territory to 2.5 times as high in New South Wales. This is consistent with the pattern for all people in these jurisdictions, but with higher rate ratios, where the rate of sexual assault was 1.5 to 3.4 times as high for people aged under 18 than those aged 18 and over (based on age at report) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024)

In 2021-22, 13,600 (40 per 1,000) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were the subject of a child protection substantiation – approximately 7 times the rate of non-Indigenous children (5.7 per 1,000). Indigenous children had a lower percentage of substantiations for sexual abuse than non-Indigenous children nationally (AIHW, 2023).

Between 2016-17 and 2020-21, the number of Indigenous children who were the subject of a child protection substantiation increased by 6.2%; from approximately 13,700 to 14,600 children (AIHW, 2022).

In 2019, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were 5.3 times more likely to be reported to child protection, 9.4 times more likely to be subject to a protection order, and 9.7 times more likely to be living in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous children (Family Matters, 2020).

A study of reporting rates in Australian Indigenous communities showed that the reporting rate for child sexual abuse of Indigenous children was between two and four times that of non-Indigenous children. Further, this study showed that reporting rates differed by jurisdiction, which may be caused by higher levels of under-reporting in particular communities rather than actual rates of child sexual abuse (Bailey, Powell & Brubacher, 2017).

References

Alaggia, R., Collin-Vézina, D., & Lateef, R. (2017). Facilitators and barriers to child sexual abuse (CSA) disclosures: A research update (2000-2016). Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 1-24.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2021). Recorded crime – Victims, Australia 2020. Cat. No 4510.0. Canberra: ABS.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022). Personal Safety Survey, Australia, 2021-2022. Canberra: ABS.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2022). Child protection Australia 2020-21. Child welfare series no. 70. Cat. no. CWS 65. Canberra: AIHW.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2019a). Australia’s children – in brief. Cat. no. CWS 72. Canberra: AIHW.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2019b). Family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia: Continuing the National Story 2019. Cat. no. FDV 3. Canberra: AIHW.

Bailey, C., Powell, M., & Brubacher, S. (2017). Reporting rates of child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities in two Australian jurisdictions. Child Abuse & Neglect, 68, 74-80.

Family Matters (2020). The Family Matters Report 2020: Measuring trends to turn the tide on the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care in Australia. Melbourne: Family Matters.

Higgins, D. J., Lawrence, D., Haslam, D. M., Mathews, B., Malacova, E., Erskine, H. E., Finkelhor, D., Pacella, R., Meinck, F., Thomas, H. J., & Scott, J. G. (2024). Prevalence of Diverse Genders and Sexualities in Australia and Associations with Five Forms of Child Maltreatment and Multi-type Maltreatment. Child Maltreatment. doi:10.1177/10775595231226331

Ma, Y. (2018). Prevalence of childhood sexual abuse in China: A meta-analysis. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 27(2), 107-21.

Mathews, B., Pacella, R.E., Scott, J.G., Finkelhor, D., Meinck, F., Higgins, D.J., Erskine, H.E., Thomas, H.J., Lawrence, D., Haslam, D.M., Malacova, E., Dunne, M.P. (2023). The prevalence of child maltreatment in Australia: Findings from a national survey. Medical Journal of Australia, 218 (6 Suppl.), S13-S18. doi: 10.5694.mja2.51873.

Mathews, B., Bromfield, L., Walsh, K., Cheng, Q., & Norman, R.E. (2017). Reports of child sexual abuse of boys and girls: Longitudinal trends over a 20-year period in Victoria, Australia. Child Abuse & Neglect, 66, 9-22.

Merrick, M.T., Ford, D.C., Ports, K.A., & Guinn, A.S. (2018). Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences from the 2011-2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 23 States. JAMA Pediatrics, 172(11),1038-1044.

Queensland Police Service (2017). Annual Statistical Review 2016/17. Brisbane: QPS.

Segal, L., Nguyen, H., Mansor, M.M., Gnanamanickam, E., Doidge, J.C., Preen, D.B., et al. (2019). Lifetime risk of child protection system involvement in South Australia for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children, 1968-2017 using linked administrative data. Child Abuse & Neglect, 97, 104145.

Tanaka, M., Suzuki, Y.E., Aoyama, I., Takaoka, K., & MacMillan, H.L. (2017). Child sexual abuse in Japan: A systematic review and future directions. Child Abuse & Neglect, 66, 31-40.

Townsend, N., Loxton, D., Egan, N., Barnes, E., & Forder, P. (2022). A life course approach to determining the prevalence of sexual violence in Australia: Findings from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health. ANROWS Research Report, Issue 14. Sydney: ANROWS.