Half of sex offenders target children

The vast majority of sex offenders are male and half of them have committed crimes against children, according to new, shocking and sobering data.

There were 8,326 sex offenders between 2021 and 2022, a rate of 40 people per 100,000 people aged 10 years and over, according to Australia’s first report on sexual offences.

About half – just over 4,270 offenders – committed sexual crimes against children.

“These are shocking and sobering statistics. They highlight the magnitude of the problem we must address,” Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said Thursday when releasing the report.

85 percent of the victims were women and girls, 14 percent were men, and the remaining 124 people were non-binary or their gender was unknown.

Eight percent of the victims were indigenous people, which is more than the average of about four percent of the total population.

The majority of crimes occurred in residential homes and the average age of the offenders when they committed their first crime was just over 36 years.

About a third of the perpetrators knew their victims, but they were not family members, another third were either life partners (15 percent) or relatives (19 percent), and one in five was a stranger.

More than 90 percent of the perpetrators were men. The number of male perpetrators was 75 per 100,000, compared to five female perpetrators.

While most male perpetrators were between 18 and 44 years old, half of the female perpetrators were between 10 and 17 years old.

At 162, the crime rate among Aboriginal people was higher than the population; 12 percent of suspected sex offenders were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

NSW had the highest number of offenders at 2,543, with Victoria in second place at 1,692.

Queensland had the highest rate per 100,000 population at 54 and the ACT had the lowest at 25.

“Each and every one of these statistics represents harm and trauma to the individual, their families and the community as a whole,” Dreyfus said.

The Australian Institute of Criminology has compiled data from state and territory police as part of the Commonwealth Action Plan to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse.

The Government of Albania has commissioned the Australian Law Reform Commission to investigate how the justice system responds to sexual violence in order to improve the experiences of victims.

The report is expected to be available in January 2025.

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