Sexual Assault
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Serious
Recorded Crime - Victims, Australia 2003 (Police statistics)
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) relies on information compiled by individual State and Territory police to publish a national overview of recorded crime statistics. The ABS publication Recorded Crime - Victims, Australia provides some national comparisons in relation to reporting practices across the country, as well as information about whether there is an increase or decrease in the national reporting rates for certain types of crime. In relation to sexual assault, the most recent edition of Recorded Crime - Victims, Australia 2003 (published in 2004), reports that for the period 1 January 2003 to December 31 2003:

There were a total of 18,237 sexual assaults reported to the police in Australia in 2003, a rate of 91.7 per 100,000 people in the population, an increase of 1.5% over 2002.
Women comprised the majority of victims (82%), with females in the 10-19 year age group recording the highest victimisation rate (497 per 100,000 population).
Victims of sexual assault were four times more likely to know the offender than not, with the offender being a family member of 29% of victims.
Two thirds of sexual assaults occurred in a residential location.
The offence categories that had the highest proportion of investigations finalised, where there was no offender proceeded against, included sexual assault (53%).
A weapon was least likely to be used in cases of sexual assault than any other offence category.
**Between 1993 and 2003, the sexual assault victimisation rate has increased from 69 to 92 per 100,000 people in the population and is at its highest level since the commencement of the national collection began in 1993 **.

Disclosure and reporting to police (IVAWS)
Only 1 in 7 women (14%) who experienced violence from an intimate partner, and just over 1 in 6 women who experienced violence from someone else (non-partner), indicated that they had reported the most recent incident to police (16%).
Women who experienced physical or sexual violence from their intimate partners were more likely to report the most recent incident to police if the offender was a former (24%) rather than current husband/partner/boyfriend (8%).
The degree of satisfaction women reported in terms of their contact with police tended to accord with whether the charges were laid and whether the charges resulted in convictions in court. However, overall, a majority of women indicated that they were satisfied with the way the police had responded. Higher levels of dissatisfaction were reported by women who experienced violence from an intimate partner compared with women who experienced violence by a non-partner.
Overall, the most common reason why women did not contact police (whether intimate or non-intimate violence was experienced) is because they felt the incident was too minor in nature. However almost half of the women indicated that their reason for not reporting was because they preferred to deal with it themselves, preferred to keep the matter private, or out of shame or embarrassment. Indeed a quarter of women (25%) who identified intimate partner violence through the IVAWS had never before spoken to anyone else about the incident.
Recorded sexual assault in Australia
Denise Lievore in her report Non-reporting and Hidden Recording of Sexual Assault: An International Review uses police statistics to give a detailed breakdown of rates of reported sexual assault across the various state and territorial jurisdictions using population density as an indicator of whether a region should be considered rural or urban (2003: 73-79). In summary, she reports that:

In Queensland's southeast, which is the most urbanised and densely populated area, the rate of sexual assault was generally lower than the state average, while remote Far North Queensland had by far the highest rate. Statistics from 1996- 1997 indicated that Indigenous women in the far north regions were 16-25 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than women (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) who lived in the remainder of the state. Southern, Central and Northern regions, which have lower population densities and other rural characteristics, also had elevated rates.
New South Wales had regional rates of sexual assault around four times the average of metropolitan regions.
In the Northern Territory, with only three very large police regions, the highest rate of assault was in the Northern Region, which encompasses Darwin and the most urbanised areas of the Territory.
In Victoria, there was no clear differentiation between urban and rural rates of sexual assault - two rural regions had higher, and two lower, rates than metropolitan Melbourne.
Rates of sexual assault varied across Western Australia, although the Kimberly region's rate of 380 (well over twice the state average of 170) reflects the high levels of victimisation experienced by Indigenous women living in rural and very remote regions.
A breakdown of sexual assault rates in rural and metropolitan regions was not available for South Australia.
For the Australian Capital Territory, the prevalence rate of sexual assault reported in the Crime & Safety Survey 2002 (ABS 2003: 28) is 0.3 per cent of the population, but there is no distinction made with respect to urban versus regional locations.
ACSSA surveys were distributed to three services within each state and territory. Broadly, the surveys covered issues such as: the history and philosophy underpinning service frameworks; current issues relevant to sexual assault and service delivery; and the challenges associated with providing services to victim/survivors in rural communities. Surveys were generally returned from at least two of the three services approached. These ranged from specialist sexual assault services to service providers working within community health, women's health or hospital based services. ACSSA is enormously indebted to those services who participated in the research - our sincere thanks to them for their efforts in so thoughtfully reflecting on the diverse range of service issues they currently face. [back]
ACSSA provided assurances of confidentiality in relation to attributing individual comments to services that participated. In broad terms, the services included four regional centres with population sizes in excess of 40,000 people; five regional service centres with populations between 18,000 and 30,000; and five towns or rural communities ranging from between 3,500 to 13,900 people. [back]
See, for example, Jodie Sloane's overview of the South Australian project "The Way It Is" (Sloane 1998). [back]
Weeks noted how employing Aboriginal workers in dedicated positions within sexual assault services usually resulted in an increase of Indigenous women accessing the service. This was also the case for women from culturally diverse backgrounds. More sustained efforts to changing the service structure tended to be multi-facetted - such as employing bi- or multi-lingual workers, developing information in a range of language groups and collaborative projects being undertaken with other community organisations that had pre-established relationships with immigrant or refugee women. [back]
Babacan cites research by Gray et al. (1991) that suggests patterns of immigration to rural areas largely fall under three categories: family reunion, refugee and humanitarian programs and employer nominations (1999: 237). [back]
Other limitations of the Women's Safety Survey are detailed in ACSSA Issues Paper 1, Just Keeping the Peace: A Reluctance to Respond to Male Partner Sexual Violence (Heenan 2004). However, it is particularly important to note how the survey methodology was more likely to draw participation from English-speaking, non- Indigenous women who were living in a private residence. [back]
While the Crime and Safety Survey 2002 (ABS 2003) suggests little difference in sexual assault victimisation rates between capital cities and non-metropolitan areas, the broad categories limit the extent to which these figures are likely to reflect real incidence. The methodological approach of using postal surveys to collect the information might also impact on women's willingness to disclose sexual violence. [back]
It is important to note that many other services that exist in rural communities are still unable to offer victims of recent sexual assault a face-to-face crisis service after hours. [back]
Moreover, services are funded very differently across the various states and territories. In 2002, Wendy Weeks (2002: 7) identified 120 services providing specialist responses to sexual violence. Most of these were stand-alone services or auspiced by a non-government organisation. Other services were provided by individual workers within another organisaton, such as a community health centre or hospital based service. Government-operated services made up the remainder of the service types. [back]

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