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.
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.
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.
“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.”
So voluminous is their workload, both the child abuse and sex crimes squads’ resources are constantly bolstered by detectives from other areas.
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.
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.
“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.”
Source: NSW Police says child sexual abuse has become an epidemic