Sydney study finds sharp rise in child violence in Australia, warns of inequality and manosphere

Researchers had expected rates to fall in line with evidence from other high-income countries, but instead found a significant increase in violence against children between 2014 and 2024. Sexual assault rates rose steadily for girls aged up to nine, at 2.8 percent a year, and for girls aged 10 to 17, at 4.2 percent a year. Among boys aged 10 to 17, the rate accelerated sharply after 2021, rising 15.7 percent. Family violence-related assault showed a similar pattern, with stable to modest increases before 2021 followed by steep increases. Assault-related hospitalisations and child maltreatment were generally stable.

The study said the increase could be attributed to a range of factors. It noted that income inequality in Australia is at its highest point in 20 years, with substantial increases from 2021 coinciding with the acceleration in violence rates. Researchers said economic stress may have been especially salient after 2020, when pandemic-related financial disruptions intensified for many families, while government benefits such as the JobKeeper payment scheme ended in March 2021. Shifts in gender norms and online cultures may also play a role, they said, pointing to traditional gender attitudes favoring male authority within households resurging among young men and to the expansion of misogynistic online communities and broader toxic masculinity narratives associated with hostility toward women and girls. An increase in reporting due to growing awareness could also partially explain the higher rate of violence, the study found.

Lead author Dr Lucy Grummitt said researchers expected the rate of violence against children to have fallen, given child protection evidence recorded in other high-income countries over the past decade. She said the opposite finding was impossible to attribute to any one factor but showed the need for a less siloed approach. “All these different departments that are involved in the bigger picture of violence against children are just focused on one particular subset, and we don't actually have a very clear picture of what young people are being exposed to, and how has that changed over the last decade,” Grummitt said. “Violence against children is a human rights issue, it shouldn't be falling to one government department to be monitoring this ... it really is a whole-of-government issue and currently our data and our monitoring really doesn't reflect that.”

The study, based on an analysis of decades-worth of Australian data from multiple sources, drew on national police-recorded assaults, hospitalisations and child protection data from three Australian national agency databases. Grummitt said researchers were frustrated that some datasets they hoped to use were missing. One year of child maltreatment data was missing for New South Wales and Queensland, while family violence-related assault data for Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia was incomplete. The data that did exist was also not directly comparable across states, she said. “Family domestic violence data is improving, but it's pretty striking that in 2024 when we finished extracting the data that there weren't already these nationally consistent definitions,” Grummitt said.