As Child Protection Week looms, it’s hard to resist feeling cynical. Safeguarding children should be a basic tenet of society — a permanent fixture — but it’s clearly not.
The numbers don’t lie. One in four Australians is sexually abused before age 18. Children make up around 20% of the Australian population, but they are the majority of recorded sexual assault victims. Half of all people charged with a sex offence in Australia are charged with an offence against a child. Still, it’s nearly impossible to engage the public on this topic without it being hijacked by adjacent adult interests.
Maybe this week it’ll be different. Maybe this week, the testimonies of children will get the attention they deserve, in their own right, not as an aside or a footnote. Maybe, just maybe, we can finally accept that the trauma caused by grooming, child sexual abuse and incest is unique and should be treated as such.
In the broader discussion of sexual violence that has surged in recent years, this message seems to have been lost.
Australia needs a standalone Grooming Prevention Education Framework to close the knowledge gap between the general public, who just don’t understand offender strategies, and adult perpetrators of child sexual abuse, who benefit from our ignorance and confusion.
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An epidemic of industrial proportions
Child sexual abuse has always been a complex, murky, widespread problem. Thanks to the unbridled technological evolution, the nature and scale are worsening by the minute. In 2024, global reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material increased by 1,325% from the previous year.
App stores are brimming with AI tools that enable instantaneous, prolific creation and distribution of increasingly realistic material. So-called “fake” content isn’t victimless; it is trained on images of real children — not to mention it also extends the limits of violence.
Offenders are prompting software to automate grooming and advise them on how to avoid detection, and innovators are prioritising profit over protection as they rush to establish market dominance in a lawless, borderless domain.
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There is no ceiling for depravity. Child sexual abuse has transcended cultural normalisation: it has become a commercial enterprise.
Law enforcement and legislators are struggling to keep pace. Meanwhile, governments and regulators worldwide continue to languish in a digitally dependent economy that demands buy-in.
The need for specialised, multidisciplinary child sexual abuse prevention, intervention and response methods has never been more urgent. We’re in a tech arms race with offenders that we can’t afford to lose.
This is a global crisis of public health, but before we can even hope to address it, we must first understand it.
Who are we up against?
In late 2023, a groundbreaking study led by the UNSW revealed that a staggering 1 in 10 Australian men has a history of child sexual offending either off or online.
Statistically, most of these men are Caucasian, middle-aged, married, well-educated, socially supportive, frequent and adept internet users. Only half say they are actually attracted to children. The other half are most likely motivated by factors such as power, control and entitlement, and don’t believe their actions are harmful or that they need help. That is to say, roughly 5% of all Australian men have deliberately hurt a child with no intention of stopping.
In Australia we have world-leading support services for people with sexual feelings towards children who recognise they need help. We have education programs that empower students to navigate social and sexual relationships with their peers. We even have basic mandatory child sexual abuse prevention training for childcare workers that aims to stop contact offending.
Yet, what specific resources do we have in place for parents, teachers, children and the community at large to identify the behaviour patterns of treatment-resistant child sex offenders before abuse even starts?
While peer-on-peer abuse is a growing concern, the worst offences against children are typically committed by studied, evasive recidivists. We therefore need specialised frameworks to counter them.
There is no respect or consent in child sexual abuse
Respectful relationships education and consent education are laudable milestones, but they are not the same as grooming prevention. These distinct issues have become dangerously entangled in the broader public discussion of sexual violence and, indeed, government policy measures.
Both Respectful Relationships Education and Consent Education programs are designed for school-age students with a view to improving the quality of interpersonal relationships and reducing the potential for conflict and violence between peers into adulthood. They address situations where all parties have equal rights and capacity to opt in and out.
Abuse scenarios are radically divergent when adults target children. There is a distinct, inherent, irreconcilable power imbalance between adults and children that is recognised in both the law and science, and it has to be recognised in our prevention strategies.
Respectful relationships and consent education both emphasise the importance of respect, equality, intuition and agency. However, these concepts impact very differently in the context of child sexual abuse and grooming.
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One of the primary purposes of grooming is to instil in child victims a false sense of control, consent and love using methods that have the appearance of respect and care. These methods often present over six phases: targeting, gaining trust, filling personalised needs, isolating, sexualising and maintaining control.
Similar to the misuse of therapy speak, abusers knowingly repurpose resources intended for the development of consensual interactions and warp them in malicious, insidious ways. They weaponise the very language of respectful relationships and consent to draw a false equivalence between healthy peer-to-peer relationships and the harm they cause.
It is therefore critical that respectful relationships and consent are taught separately from grooming prevention.
There are many fantastic programs in Australia designed to teach children about their bodily autonomy. But the point at which an adult offender violates a child’s bodily boundaries is at the end of a long process of making the child feel complicit in their own abuse, and often neutralising the protective instincts of the adults around that child.
The unique attachment vulnerabilities of children
A child’s attachment system is much more primal and easily activated than an adult’s. The attachment system is a biological drive in children to bond with their caregivers, particularly when they are distressed or frightened. This is what adult perpetrators prey on.
They also prey on children’s reduced capacity to discern between genuine and feigned care, as well as their reduced capacity to understand and explain their complex physiological responses to attention and arousal. This confusion is reinforced by a perverted reward-and-punishment system. Offenders may reward compliance with praise, gifts and affection, while punishing disobedience with threats, insults, sulking or violence. This subconsciously motivates the victim to please their perpetrator for fear of letting them down.
It is natural for a child who is being or has been groomed to believe they are in love with their perpetrator, actively resist interventions, and act out and be blamed by society as a result. Groomers find the hidden vulnerabilities and unmet needs of children. They speak a language that only their victim understands, while weaving in other inappropriate elements such as alcohol, drugs and pornography, knowing that should their offending be discovered the victim is likely to be discredited.
Society’s failure to understand these tendencies is a major cause of stigma and inaction on child sexual abuse and incest. Blame is wrongly apportioned to victims, who in turn internalise shame and carry the damaging misperception that they are responsible for the harm. Ergo, survivors of child sexual abuse and incest take an average of 23.9 years to disclose their experiences.
Child sexual abuse is indeed a crime in a class of its own. Grooming is a subtype and also a criminal offence under Commonwealth law. It is distinct from other forms of non-contact sexual violence, such as coercive control and sexual harassment, because it applies exclusively to cases involving adult offenders whose victims are children. Each of these forms of interpersonal violence is prosecuted differently and has unique impacts necessitating specialised methods of prevention, intervention and response.
There are ways in which comparisons between child and adult experiences of sexual violence can be helpful. But conflation is not.
Children are still developing socially, physically and neurologically. They do not have the same capacity as adults for comprehension, communication, impulse control, judgement or self-defence. Adult perpetrators who target children seek to exploit this very incapacity and heightened attachment vulnerability.
Because of their immature immune systems, children are also at a greater risk of the lasting harms of chronic stress, such as that caused by sustained periods of psychological manipulation and/or physical assault.
Grooming prevention is urgent
Over the past 10 years, Australia has taken a broad approach to sexual violence prevention, looking for public awareness and reach across education and social campaigns. But now is the time to go deep and address the true complexity and darkest side of this problem.
There has been a tendency in recent prevention discussions to foreground the problem of children who harm their peers or other children. This is a critically important area for us to address. However, it also seems adults are more comfortable talking about peer-to-peer abuse among children and adults than admitting there is a cohort of adult offenders who are dedicated to harming children.
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Whereas children who harm their peers lack the wherewithal to engage in more subtle, sophisticated, prolonged abuse and evade justice, adults who harm children — especially prolifically — often take great care to conceal their offending and intentions.
Grooming is interpersonal but also institutional and structural, as adult offenders manipulate the peripheral networks around the child to cut them off from help and make other adults unwittingly complicit. And when abuse does come to light, adults within those networks fear reflected guilt for their inaction and support of the offender.
Without a sharp focus on their specialised methodology, adults who deliberately harm children can continue to hide behind a shield of confusion that sanitises and erroneously conflates their harm with a lack of respect and/or a lack of consent.
As well as dissecting perpetrator tactics, grooming prevention should cover the often counterintuitive ways children react to grooming, which deviate from typical response patterns displayed by victims of peer-on-peer abuse. This is largely because of how the developing brain attaches to others.
Grooming prevention also has to acknowledge how vulnerable parents, child-focused institutions and workforces, and systems and services are to the manipulation of cunning offenders. The UNSW’s perpetrator prevalence survey found that men who abuse children are two to three times more likely to work with them.
At the Grace Tame Foundation, we are at the forefront of developing a multi-sector framework for grooming prevention. But too often we hear from public servants and others in government that respectful relationships and consent education are sufficient.
Child sexual abuse by adults does not happen because of a lack of respect. It does not happen because of a lack of consent. It happens because adults weaponise their power over children. Until Australia is prepared to acknowledge this reality, all of our efforts to prevent sexual violence are being undermined every day, and children remain at risk.
