Child Safety

Four other causes of Be The Change are also contributors – family and domestic violence, gender inequality, mental health and poverty and disadvantage.

Societal ignorance and stigma

Child sexual abuse thrives on disempowerment, secrecy, isolation and disbelief. 

There is a pervasive belief that children’s voices, views and feelings hold less weight than those of adults with power over them, whilst children are not considered to have inherent rights of their own. Their developmental immaturity is treated as a weakness that can be exploited, and they are often betrayed by the very adults who are supposed to care for, support and teach them.   Adult perpetrators impose secrecy to deny children their voice and create isolation to keep children hidden from view in ways that enable abuse to continue with minimal risk of discovery. 

The combination of these factors leads to the most egregious violation of what should be safe and trusting relationships.

Repeatedly, in research undertaken by the Australian Childhood Foundation, child abuse is perceived to be a problem in some other family, some other neighbourhood or in another community. There is inadequate recognition that abuse occurs at the scale that it does. It is minimised and repeatedly ignored. The effect is that children are not always believed. One in three adults would not believe a child who made a disclosure about abuse to them. Another one in three is unsure whether or not to believe a disclosure.

Perpetrators

At least nine out of ten perpetrators of child abuse are male. Most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child.

The Australian Government’s National Office for Child Safety notes that ‘there is no typical profile of a person who sexually abuses children and young people. Not all perpetrators have the same traits, behaviours or motivations, and they come from different backgrounds and circumstances. There is often very little that makes perpetrators stand out from the general population. They often have secure, well-paying jobs; have strong social networks (including partners, families, and friends); and can be considered well-respected members of communities.

A variety of complex factors may influence an adult to sexually abuse a child in any setting, including: adverse experiences in childhood, such as physical, emotional and sexual abuse and neglect; interpersonal, relationship and emotional difficulties, including difficulty connecting with other adults, intimacy problems and poor social skills, and emotional affiliation with children; distorted beliefs and ‘thinking errors’ that may facilitate child sexual abuse; indirect influences, such as contextual or ‘trigger’ factors.

Organisations

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that ‘the extent of child sexual abuse in institutional settings in Australia is significant. Child sexual abuse has occurred across a wide range of institutions and has affected tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people over many years’. Many organisations in Australia have failed to protect children from abuse, failed to listen to children who tried to disclose abuse, and failed to respond appropriately when abuse came to light.

Home 

With two in five children also exposed to domestic violence, there is no denying that home is unsafe for many Australian children. The effects of violence (for instance, pain, distress, anger, irritability, fear, reduced mobility, hospitalisation) may affect a mother's parenting capacity, as may mental illness or substance misuse problems that emerge as a consequence of domestic violence. Furthermore, domestic violence may result in mothers being emotionally distant, unavailable or unable to meet their children's needs.

Children living with domestic violence display physical, developmental, psychological and behavioural effects, as well as the impact of trauma and developmental regression, with significantly poorer outcomes on 21 childhood psycho-social, developmental and behavioural dimensions. Behavioural problems include acting out, violence and aggression towards others. Outcomes for child witnesses were similar to those where children were also directly physically abused.

Furthermore, children living in families dealing with mental illness, substance problems and economic hardship are twice as likely to be at risk of multi-type maltreatment. Children are particularly vulnerable to cumulative harm in families with multiple and complex problems in which the unremitting daily impact of multiple adverse circumstances and events has a profound and exponential impact on children and diminishes their sense of safety and wellbeing.

Online 

The increase in young people (including children and infants) accessing the internet has seen a corresponding upward trend in cases of online child sexual exploitation, including grooming, image-based abuse, and the spread of self-generated sexually explicit material.

Improvements to downloading speeds and the proliferation of smartphones have made accessing pornography easier, faster, and more anonymous than ever before. Exposure to violent pornography is especially a concern in relation to harmful coercive sexual behaviour among adolescents, which can lead to abuse.

The Australian Medical Association has voiced the concern that the internet is exposing children to sexually explicit content that teaches that sex is about “use and abuse”

There is also increasing pressure on young people (particularly young women) to take and send sexually explicit images, with potential for intentional harm by others, including cyber bullying, harassment, sexual abuse, and pornographic use of the images.

Worryingly, research by the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) found that only one in five parents and carers thought there is a likelihood that online child sexual exploitation can happen to their child; only three per cent listed online grooming as a concern; and over half did not know what they could do to keep children safe from online child sexual exploitation.

The ACCCE concluded that ‘poor knowledge, existing myths and misconceptions and lack of confidence in knowing what to do are reducing the community’s ability to respond effectively to the prevention of online child sexual exploitation, and that current social norms are hampering proactive vigilance, guidance and oversight, including: the prioritisation of preventative measures for physical safety over online safety; the desire to preserve privacy of the child/young person when online; and the tendency to assign blame to victims in instances of online sexual exploitation.

The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence is accelerating child sexual abuse by unlocking the ability for a single child predator to quickly create child sexual abuse material at scale by adapting original images and videos into new abuse material, re-victimising the child in that content, or manipulating benign material of children into sexualised content, or creating fully AI-generated material.

The result is a growing number of schoolboys exposed for creating and disseminating sexually explicit, AI-generated images of female students.

Government 

More children are being removed from their homes due to violence, abuse and neglect than ever before. The State and Territory government child protection systems are stretched to their limits, struggling to meet the demand and support children and families. There is a shortage, high turnover, and burnout of child protection workers as governments struggle with the sheer number of child protection notifications.

As The Australian Centre for Social Innovation notes ‘the current approach to resolving child protection challenges at scale is to reactively tinker with procedures and tools, roll out new pilots, adopt out-of-context programs, restructure organisations, displace blame, and continue to hope this change, this reform, will be the one that works. But even noble and novel good-intentioned initiatives operate within and reinforce our existing structure — we’re patching holes but forcing new leaks.

Australia is in the midst of a severe foster carer shortage, with the trend of more carers exiting the system than have come in due to a generational change in attitudes and the cost-of-living crisis.  This effectively means that more children need to be placed in residential care units.

As we have seen with the other causes in Be The Change, the service system is in crisis, dealing with an ever-growing, complex, interrelated need.  Without an investment in prevention and early intervention, the system will be in perpetual crisis.  A report by Social Ventures Australia showed that investing $193 million every year over a 10-year period in early intervention services to prevent situations from escalating would prevent 1,460 children from entering out-of-home care or progressing to residential care every year and deliver cumulative net savings of at least $1.8 billion to the child protection and out-of-home care system in Victoria.