Just over one-fifth of Australians aged 18 to 45 have perpetrated a form of sexual violence since turning 18, and one in 14 have done so in the past year, a survey of more than 5,000 Australians has found.
The Australian Institute of Criminology report released on Tuesday also found men were significantly more likely than women to have perpetrated sexual violence, with 26.4% doing so in adulthood, and 13.2% doing so in the past 12 months. That compared with 17.7% of women perpetrating sexual violence since turning 18, and 6.6% doing so in the past 12 months.
The report asked respondents about a range of sexual violence, including sexual harassment and coercion, sexual assault and image-based sexual abuse. The report’s authors found men were significantly more likely than women to have perpetrated any of kind of sexual violence, and to have perpetrated multiple forms of sexual violence.
“The results suggest that not only were men more likely to perpetrate sexual violence than women, but also that they perpetrated more serious forms of violence when they did, and possibly more frequently,” the authors wrote.
The most common form of sexual harassment or coercion was pressuring someone for a date or for sexual activity, with 10.2% of respondents reporting doing so in adulthood, and 3.8% reporting doing so in the past 12 months. The study also found 6% of respondents had emotionally or psychologically manipulated someone to participate in sexual activity.
The report found the most common form of sexual assault was nonconsensual kissing, with 6.6% reporting perpetrating that during adulthood, followed by nonconsensual touching, at 6.4%. About 2.7% of respondents said they had perpetrated nonconsensual sexual intercourse in adulthood, and 2.4% said they had perpetrated stealthing – removing a condom during sex without a partner’s knowledge or consent.
In total, 3.3% of respondents had perpetrated image-based sexual abuse, with 2.6% saying they had recorded intimate images or videos of another person without their consent, and 2.1% saying they had shared or threatened to share intimate images or videos of another person without their consent.
According to the AIC deputy director, Dr Rick Brown, only a “small proportion of perpetrators” have contact with the criminal justice system. He said the majority of offences were never reported, and few cases were prosecuted or led to a conviction.
The report’s authors said rates of sexual violence may be higher than reported because a large proportion (11.1%) of respondents were unable or unwilling to disclose perpetration of sexual violence for one or more items. They noted that this may be because respondents “chose not to report, or to underreport behaviours perceived as socially undesirable”.
The authors said understanding the drivers of perpetration would allow for prevention efforts to be focused on perpetrators rather than victims.
In 2023, there was an 11% increase in the number of victim-survivors of sexual assault recorded by police, according to an Australian Bureau of Statistics report released in June this year. That was the highest rate of sexual assault victim-survivors recorded in the 31-year dataset.
The executive director of the Women’s National Safety Alliance, Katherine Berney, said she was hopeful the data would inform a more nuanced response to sexual violence.
She described the findings as “horrifying … but consistent with what we’re hearing from our specialist sexual violence services”.
Berney said the data overturned Australia’s “pervasive narrative” that women lie about sexual assault to ruin men’s lives.
“We’ve known it’s not true … but now perpetrators have told us it’s not true.
“Why do we expect it to be different when we constantly hear the experience of victim survivors going to police saying, ‘I’ve been raped’, and hearing: ‘No, you haven’t’ … That’s the beginning and end of their justice journey.”
Phillip Ripper, the chief executive of No To Violence, an organisation that specialises in changing the behaviour of men who use violence and abuse, said the research was “alarming” and showed that current approaches “aren’t working”.
“Each man using violence will have walked a different path into using violence and yet another [path] towards ending their use of violence, and we need targeted interventions to end it.”