Australia knows more than ever about child sexual abuse. Why is prevention still falling short?

UNSW Sydney Media Release 

Key facts:

For decades, public inquiries have exposed strikingly similar patterns of child sexual abuse. Yet each new crime is treated as though nobody could have seen it coming.

In recent months, allegations and investigations into child sex abuse have again emerged across schools, childcare and residential care, while authorities are also confronting new forms of exploitation online.

How could this happen? Why didn’t anyone know? How were the warning signs missed?

“The issue isn’t that we don’t know,” Professor Michael Salter says.

“It’s that we’ve built ways of not knowing.”

The UNSW Sydney criminologist and Director of the East Asia and Pacific Hub of Childlight has spent years studying child sexual abuse, online exploitation and institutional responses to violence. His work has shifted from studying offenders, to studying systems, to studying the very social and psychological conditions that allow abuse to remain hidden – even when the evidence exists.

He calls this the ‘anti-epistemology of violation’ – the ways societies organise themselves to allow abuse to be both visible and ignored at the same time. Rather than lacking knowledge, he says, we have developed “motivated forms of not knowing.”

While we often think of the precursor to that violence – grooming – as something predators do to children, it’s something that also happens in staff rooms, sporting clubs, churches and living rooms. In these spaces, offenders shape how adults see a child – undermining their credibility and making disbelief feel reasonable.

“We are not, as a community, literate around how we get manipulated by offenders in order to turn away from children,” Prof. Salter says.

In NSW, former childcare worker Hamish Tait faces 329 charges relating to the alleged abuse of 136 children over 16 years, including offences involving the production of child abuse material. In Queensland, an ABC investigation has exposed the alleged organised sexual exploitation of vulnerable teenagers living in residential care.

But Prof. Salter says these are not crises that emerged suddenly.

“It is an accumulation of unresolved harms.”

Risk upon risk

Prof. Salter says in the past 50 years Australia has repeatedly followed the same pattern. When a form of abuse is exposed or a new threat emerges, the response falls short and public attention moves on – but significant vulnerabilities remain.

Each new form of abuse emerges before Australia fully addresses the last – from familial and institutional abuse to organised exploitation, online networks and now, AI-enabled offending. And risk piles upon risk.

Prof. Salter says safeguarding systems still haven’t fully adapted to the reality of highly motivated offenders – those deliberately seeking positions that give them access to children, including children too young to speak and disclose abuse.

“For child protection to work, it must be designed around the possibility of premeditated offending,” Prof. Salter says.

Disbelief as self-protection

Often, when people hear about sexual abuse, their instinct is to question the victim’s account rather than scrutinise the alleged perpetrator’s behaviour.

“It’s the burden of believing the victim,” Prof. Salter says. “If you believe the victim, then you, as an individual, have a massive amount of responsibility.

“We find the vulnerability of children very challenging because it also reminds us of our own vulnerability.

“We understand that for the first five or ten years of our lives, anything could have happened to us – and we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.”

He says child sexual abuse is a fundamental reminder of the human condition.

“It’s an existential issue. Acknowledging that we’re all born at the mercy of the adults around us is something that I think most people spend their whole lives running away from.”

What we don’t want to see

Prof. Salter’s research has increasingly focused not on individual offenders but on organised abuse – cases that involve multiple offenders, multiple victims and, often, the production of child sexual abuse material.

His research means he must go to the places most people never see – closed forums, dark-web communities and other spaces where offenders trade abuse material, encourage one another and compete in acts of escalating cruelty.

He says when people are confronted with the reality of what some offenders do and desire, the mind instinctively recoils.

“There are guys aroused by the idea of killing babies. We’re seeing really, really scary, sociopathic stuff,” he says.

Online, offenders are learning from one another, sharing techniques, building communities and abusing platforms where the design can make exploitation easier.

Prof. Salter says each technological advance introduces new opportunities for offending, without resolving the old ones.

“When we say ‘we actually can’t have end-to-end encrypted technology because that facilitates these guys getting together’, the reaction from the public is ‘Why is this so urgent?’”

The answers can be almost impossible to contemplate.

“If I told you, you probably wouldn’t be able to believe me about why this is so bad.”

Rethinking prevention

Prof. Salter says governments in Australia have often treated gender-based violence primarily as violence against adult women.

“Children make up the majority of sexual assault victims,” he says.

For decades, violence against women and violence against children were largely addressed through different strategies, services and bureaucracies, he says, but that distinction doesn’t reflect victims’ lives.

“Violence does not begin at 18,” he says.

“And the men who sexually abuse children are very controlling, they’re very manipulative.”

Domestic violence and child sexual abuse can occur within the same family and be perpetrated by the same person, he says, while coercive control and grooming can operate through similar patterns of isolation, manipulation and the undermining of protective relationships.

“Perpetrators isolate children, they characterise them in ways that mean that their disclosures are not believable,” Prof. Salter says.

Abuse can also begin before perpetrators reach adulthood. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study found adolescents are more commonly responsible for child sexual abuse than adults in Australia.

When sexual abuse is alleged between students, consent education can better equip students to recognise sexual violence, Prof. Salter says. But police investigations, child protection, mandatory reporting and school disciplinary processes all need to coordinate to protect the safety, welfare and education of all children involved.

Prof. Salter’s recent submissions were made as the federal government develops the next action plans under both the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse and National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children.

The submissions call for children to be recognised as victim-survivors of gender-based violence in their own right, alongside a national grooming prevention strategy and greater accountability for the systems that can enable abuse. That includes technology and financial companies – where social media, messaging and gaming services can provide access to children. And payment systems and cryptocurrencies can facilitate sexual extortion, paid abuse and the sale of child sexual abuse material.

Prof. Salter says the key challenge ahead is building a child protection system that is capable not only of responding to the harms Australia already understands, but of evolving as quickly as offenders do. This requires confronting the very paradox at the centre of his work.

“How is it that we know – but we don’t know that we know – and then we don’t do anything about it?”