AUSTRALIA: Mum’s boyfriend – the worst sexual risk to children. But the official statistics down under hide this.
We are regularly exposed to sad news stories of children battered by men passing through the lives of sole mothers. What we rarely hear about is the increased risk of sexual abuse by men who lack the constraints that protect most children from incest. That risk is spelt out in great detail in a new research report by the Centre for Independent Studies. Research fellow Jeremy Sammut cites reviews of more than 70 research reports providing overwhelming evidence that girls living in non-traditional families are sexually abused by ”stepfathers” – partners of their single, remarried or repartnered mothers – at many times the rate of abuse by biological fathers.
One such study, the 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect, found that children whose single parent had a partner in the home were 20 times more likely to be sexually abused than those in a two-biological-parent family.
Step and single-parent families accounted for only one-third of all children in the US, but more than two-thirds of all children who experienced child sexual abuse. There is research from Britain and many other countries showing similar results. Sammut is rightly critical of the fact that in Australia we are denied the statistics likely to show comparable patterns.
Data on child abuse published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare fail to distinguish between fathers and ”stepfathers”.
Sammut argues this reluctance to publish relevant statistics is because of politically correct attitudes towards family diversity – ”namely the fiction that the traditional family is just one amongst many equally worthy family forms”.