Police are recording more sexual assaults and family violence against Australian children than they did a decade ago. The sharpest rises have come since 2021. That is the headline finding of a national study published in JAMA Network Open on 13 October 2026. Violence against children in Australia looks very different depending on which government dataset you open. The gap between those pictures deserves far more attention than it has received.

Researchers from the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use compared police, hospital and child protection records. Their conclusion is blunt. No single system tells the full story. Without integrated surveillance, they warn, “policymakers may draw inaccurate conclusions about progress toward violence prevention goals.”

What the Study Found About Children and Violence
Lucinda Grummitt, Siobhan O’Dean and Tim Slade examined national data from 2014 to 2024. Their annual denominators ranged from 2.6 to 2.8 million girls and 2.7 to 3.0 million boys aged 0 to 17.

Police recorded sexual assault rose steadily among girls. The increase was 2.8 per cent a year for those aged 0 to 9 and 4.2 per cent a year for those aged 10 to 17. Boys aged 10 to 17 showed stable rates until 2021, then an acceleration of 15.7 per cent a year. Family and domestic violence assault followed a similar shape. Girls aged 0 to 9 recorded rises of 20.0 per cent a year after 2021.

Other systems tell a calmer story. Assault hospitalisations were generally stable, and overall child maltreatment substantiations held steady. Substantiated physical abuse fell by 3.2 per cent a year, and sexual abuse by 3.6 per cent.

Why Calmer Numbers Should Not Reassure Anyone
The authors do not take the quieter figures at face value. Over the study period, the share of child protection notifications that were investigated dropped from about 46 per cent to 32 per cent. The share of investigations ending in substantiation stayed stable. Falling substantiations, they write, “may reflect constraints on system capacity rather than true declines in exposure.”

They also say improved reporting is unlikely to explain the sharp rises after 2021 on its own. Violence against children in Australia is also likely undercounted, because many cases never reach services. Their list of possible drivers is long. Income inequality, the end of JobKeeper payments in March 2021, pandemic isolation, shifting gender norms, online misogyny and stretched family violence services all feature.

Substance use enters the discussion only once. The paper notes large delays for people seeking treatment for mental health and substance use concerns. It warns that violence may persist undetected when families cannot get early help. That appears as a service gap, never as a measured factor. The authors add that their work describes trends and cannot determine why they are happening.

The Missing Variable in Violence Against Children in Australia
None of the four indicators in the study records whether a parent was using alcohol or other drugs. That is no criticism of the researchers, who worked with what national agencies publish. It is a question about what gets published.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s Child Protection Australia 2022 to 23 report shows the scale. About 180,000 children came into contact with the system, up from about 178,000 the year before. At 30 June 2023, 45,300 children were in out of home care. The rate of children subject to notifications rose from 48 to 51 per 1,000 between 2018 to 19 and 2022 to 23. As earlier commentary on this platform pointed out, the report is an overview of statistics. It is not designed to drill into the factors behind protection orders.

Other material fills in part of that gap. At the 2022 Australia and New Zealand Addiction Conference, Odyssey House told delegates: “Every Drug Rehabilitation programme must see drug use as Family Violence. These go together.” Separate commentary cites estimates that 1 million Australian children live with at least one adult battling addiction.

Overseas research points the same way. A study from Ohio State University looked at Sacramento, California. Each additional off premises alcohol outlet in a census tract related to 13.5 per cent more substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect. It also related to 10.5 per cent more entries into foster care. Lead author Professor Bridget Freisthler said: “We have to pay more attention to how the supply and availability of alcohol has an impact on child maltreatment if we want to make a real difference.”

Causation remains contested, and some argue that substance use merely correlates with child abuse. That debate cannot be settled if the numbers are not collected and published in a form researchers can use.

Where Did the Alcohol and Drug Data Go?
Voices in the prevention sector make a further claim. They contend that since around 2016, alcohol and other drug data has been folded into mental health reporting. That would obscure what drug use contributes to harm against children. The agencies that publish the figures should test the claim. If it holds, a reader of national statistics could not tell how much harm flows from alcohol and other drugs. The category would no longer stand in its own right.

The pattern is not confined to national datasets. A recent Victorian Auditor General report on kinship care was, according to earlier commentary, “at pains to ensure” that only a “harm management” process review took place. That left the origins of harm behind out of home care outside its scope. The same report discusses finding stable homes for children. Yet the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing has not determined what a stable placement is. It has not collected baseline data either, and has not assessed its progress against intended outcomes.

Four Questions Agencies Should Answer
Transparency is a reasonable thing to ask of public health reporting. Four questions would be a good start:

1. Are alcohol and other drug indicators reported separately from mental health in national child protection and health data? When did any change in categories take place?
2. Is parental substance use recorded consistently when a child is notified or a case is substantiated? Does that information reach the public?
3. Why do national child protection reports describe system activity without setting out the factors behind it?
4. Will the integrated surveillance called for by the JAMA authors treat alcohol and other drugs as a distinct measure?

The study’s authors are right that Australia needs stronger national monitoring. Monitoring only helps if it counts the right things. Violence against children in Australia cannot be reduced at its source if that source never appears in the figures. Children’s exposure to violence in Australia will keep rising in some datasets and hiding in others until someone measures what drives it. Prevention starts with knowing where harm begins.

Sources:

• Trends in Violence Against Children in Australia
• Our Children – Shocking Casualties of a ‘Right to Get High’ Regimen Masquerading as Harm Reduction
• Child protection Australia 2022–23: How Does AOD Impact this Crisis?

(Dalgarno Institute)