Australia’s fastest growing form of child sexual abuse is between children. This fact is deeply troubling and a call to action to tackle this scourge and its underlying drivers.
Contemplating child sexual abuse is sickening. When we think of who perpetrates it, images of particular, awful adults and how they should be dealt with come to mind.
Here in South Australia, we rightly have the nation’s toughest laws to protect the community from child sex offenders.
We are and will always act against child sex offenders.
But what do we do when child sexual abuse is being perpetrated by children?
How do we as a community identify it, how do we together respond to it, and what do we do to prevent harmful sexual behaviours and ultimately keep our children and young people safe from this insidious form of abuse?
An all-important forum on how to prevent and respond to harmful sexual behaviours between children and young people will take place in Adelaide tonight.
Hosted by Healthy Development Adelaide, the forum will hear from experts in the field including 2025 Australian of the Year for SA and Director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection, Professor Leah Bromfield on ways to tackle this complex and confronting issue impacting our precious children and young people.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was pivotal in highlighting the significant role that harmful sexual behaviours have in contributing to child sexual abuse.
Outdated gender norms, harmful, misogynist attitudes toward girls and women being spread online and a prevalence of violent pornography targeted toward children are drivers of this alarming form of sexual abuse – which now constitutes almost half of all child sexual abuse – and it is incumbent on all of us to do what we can to address them.
Children and young people are confronting this daily with deep impact on what they see as normal and appropriate. They do so in an environment where our child protection and family support system, built decades ago, was established with responses to single incidents of physical or in person sexual violence in mind, before this new frontier for abuse was even contemplated.
The State Government is determined to transform the child protection and family support system and is deep in the process of doing so.
As part of our significant reform efforts, it is crucial that we help prevent and respond to this form of child sexual abuse. Harmful sexual behaviours in children and young people must be recognised and urgently treated as a specific area of concern through co-ordinated efforts that shift children’s understanding of what is respectful and appropriate and grow broader community awareness of this issue.
Tonight’s conversation is an important part of this. This conversation is hard, confronting and uncomfortable but one we must engage in.
Our funding for vital research, in partnership with the WA Government, being undertaken by the Australian Centre for Child Protection on this issue, is another important step forward.
As well as raising broader community awareness and understanding, a vital part of our effort is to give our generous foster and kinship carers educational tools to grow their understanding of harmful sexual behaviours and their causes, help them have the confidence to respond and know where to seek help.
New resources will be available from tonight and will make a significant difference with 3000 South Australian foster and kinship carers set to be supported to help create safer and more nurturing environments for our children and young people who have experienced trauma.
We all want our children and young people to be safe, to be empowered to be kids, to thrive now and well into the future. Helping them do so requires all of us to understand and help them confront some of the most challenging issues they confront.
Read more about the forum here.
If you or someone you know needs support, contact 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) or you can contact Brave Hearts on 1800 272 831.