source : the age
Warning: Graphic content
More than 300 incidents involving children, including serious sexual and physical assaults, are reported to authorities weekly, as police warn laws designed to protect children are inadvertently shielding offenders.
In the past 12 months, almost 16,000 reports were made to the state’s Joint Referral Unit, a multi-agency triage centre that assesses child protection reports, while online offending involving children has also skyrocketed in what senior police say has become an epidemic.
“This is thousands and thousands and thousands of children who are being abused,” NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Scott Cook told this masthead.
Cook, who oversees NSW Police’s child abuse and sex crimes squads, said detectives receive on average 10 to 15 reports each weekend of child abuse, ranging from sexual assault to physical assaults “bordering on death”, most of which is offending occurring within families.
“Child exploitation and neglect and child abuse occurs, quite often, in the family home. It quite often involves a relative, a person in power,” Cook said.
While in-person offending has remained steady over several years, there had been an “explosion” of online child abuse in NSW and across the country, Cook said.
The number of reports made to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, which is led by the Australian Federal Police and refers matters to state police forces for investigation, is expected to exceed 100,000 this year.
“That is an epidemic of online child abuse,” Cook said.
“The number of victims that are now being identified is enormous. Online exploitation is enormous.”
Cook said highlighting the levels of child abuse across the state – a topic senior police rarely broach publicly – was crucial ahead of a concerted push to raise awareness of the issue during National Child Protection Week in early September.
“It’s important for the prevention of this occurring, to have people aware of what’s going on – whether that’s child grooming, inappropriate touching, whether that’s inappropriate comments and conduct, bystanders need to call this stuff out. We all need to call this stuff out before it escalates, before a child becomes a victim,” Cook said.
Talking publicly about what child abuse has long been viewed as a taboo issue, and overcoming that could help police and members of the public detect and prevent offending, he said.
Raising awareness about the levels of abuse is made difficult by laws protecting the identities of child abuse victims in NSW that often prevent police and media outlets from exposing predators.
“Non-publication laws relating to the protection of young victims and witnesses are really important, and I don’t want to diminish that or understate that, but an unintended consequence of how we do that, is that this crime type, these abhorrent offences against children, often doesn’t get the attention it should,” Cook said.
“In terms of the law, really, I don’t know that any jurisdiction has struck the right balance between protecting a child and inadvertently protecting an offender at the same time. The offenders shouldn’t have protection. They should be unmasked.”
Recent cases, including that of Sydney daycare worker Hamish Tait, highlighted the challenges in exposing alleged abusers facing both police and media outlets.
Tait’s identity and the scale of his alleged offending was revealed after a year-long fight by the Herald to lift a suppression order prohibiting his identification.
“I don’t think community or people want to confront that this type of offending even occurs,” Cook said.
“That puts us in a difficult position to even talk about this publicly. We risk breaching the law, and we risk alienating communities and people because of the subject matter, but when you drill this down, it’s all about children. It’s about their safety, and about their protection.”
So voluminous is their workload, both the child abuse and sex crimes squads’ resources are constantly bolstered by detectives from other areas.
In some instances, detectives seize electronic devices containing hundreds of thousands of images of children.
In the past year, child abuse squad detectives charged more than 550 people across NSW with 3349 separate offences against children, including almost 900 charges of sexual assault, more than 330 of assault, and almost 1200 of touching, including indecent assault.
“The child abuse squad and the sex crimes squad are under immense pressure due to the sheer volume of the level of crime,” Cook said.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told this masthead the online regulator received more than 18,000 reports of illegal and restricted content allegedly involving child abuse material in the past financial year, representing a 17 per cent increase compared with the previous year; the number of reports increased 58 per cent the year before.
“Child sexual abuse and exploitation is an abhorrent crime that causes profound and lifelong harm to victims and survivors,” Inman Grant said.
Child abuse squad detectives are expected in the coming months to charge notorious Queensland paedophile Ashley Paul Griffith with almost 200 offences related to the time the former childcare worker spent working in NSW.
Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington in June confirmed the process to extradite Griffith was in its final stages. Dozens of NSW children have been identified among Griffith’s further alleged victims.
“He needs to face the allegations that are to be put on behalf of the victims in NSW. That’s why he needs to come back,” Cook said.
The assistant commissioner said combatting child abuse would remain a top priority for authorities, but police could not arrest their way out of the growing issue.
“Every police force in Australia is committed to this, and every police force in Australia works on this,” Cook said.
“But it is an epidemic, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s not.”
Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732). Anyone affected by sexual, domestic or family violence can also access 24/7, free and confidential trauma-specialist counselling through Full Stop Australia (1800 385 578).
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