By Farid Farid

Young Australians are being abused and sexually violated at alarming rates, as governments are urged to step in and stop the violence.

University of Sydney researchers found sexual assault and family-violence-related assault involving children increased sharply between 2014 and 2024.

The rates of violence have particularly risen in the past three-to-five years.

“We are at a crisis point now in Australia,” lead author Lucy Grummitt from the University of Sydney told AAP.

“What we expected to find was children were generally safer, but that’s sort of the opposite of what we found.”

The study, published Wednesday, found sexual assault against boys aged 10 to 17 had increased by 60 per over the decade, with a near 16 per cent spike in one year alone.

Girls also in the same age group were victims of sexual violence, with a total 51 per cent rise across 10 years.
For family-violence-related assault, rates for boys aged zero to nine grew by 57 per cent over the decade.

Dr Grummitt explained older children had more exposure to violence than the younger cohort because of who they could be coming in contact with in the community.

The same 10-year period saw no significant change in hospitalisations for assault-related injuries among children, and no rise in substantiated child maltreatment cases through the child protection system.

Dr Grummitt said the scope of the study did not delve into who the perpetrators were but pinpointed some of the possible causes.

These include the lingering impacts of the pandemic, cost-of-living pressures, changing online gender norms and increased reporting of violence.

The paper used child protection, morbidity and victims data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare to extrapolate the results.

The study comes after Save the Children launched an open letter with 200 experts calling for greater action to protect Australian children from harm.

The researchers are urgently calling on federal and state governments to invest in prevention and child protection systems.

“We need greater investment … so we don’t see so many children suffering at the very extreme end of the spectrum,” said Dr Grummitt.

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