Children under 10 accused of sex assaults

And more than a quarter of child sexual assaults in the NT are being committed by youths.

NT Police statistics obtained by The Australian show that of 755 cases of sexual assault involving victims 15 or younger in the past five years, almost 200 ­involved youth offenders. Alarmingly, 16 of these offenders were under 10.

The age of criminal responsibility is 10 in the NT, meaning none of the children were charged.

NT Children’s Commissioner Colleen Gwynne was shocked by the figure. “I knew of a few, to be honest, but I was really surprised by that figure,” she said.

“That’s a concern itself. We’re talking about children under 10 ­offending. Not victims, offenders.”

The data extracted from the NT Police Real-time Online Management Information System shows that over a five-year period, there were 178 youth offenders involved in 187 instances of sexual offending against children. Nine offended twice during the period.

As some incidents involved more than one offender, victims and offenders were collated by counting each victim and offender combination in each incident of sexual violence.

The data identified 784 ­incident-offender-victim combin­ations against victims aged 15 or younger during the period from October 1, 2013 to September 30, 2018.

There were 197 youth offenders. Of them, 190 were male and 138 were indigenous.

Ms Gwynne, a former NT Police commander, said she was concerned about the offenders as well as the victims. “We’d be foolish if we thought we’re dealing with young people who haven’t been victims themselves and are just mimicking the behaviours they’ve been subjected to or they witness on a daily basis,” she said.

“I’m absolutely concerned about the environments (offenders) are in and what they’re exposed to. Often we’re too reluctant to be open about this issue and be transparent about the fact we do have a problem in young people committing such serious offences against other young people.”

While authorities rarely release information surrounding sexual offences against and committed by children, a spate of incidents in the NT were exposed in the media last year.

The Australian reported in Oct­ober that NT Police and child protection authorities were ­investi­gating allegations of sexualised behaviour involving three children under 10 after a young girl was flown to Alice Springs Hospital suffering from physical and psychological trauma. The incident allegedly ­occurred in a community near Tennant Creek.

At the time, Territory Families Minister Dale Wakefield said child safety was “always the first priority”. “Territory Families is working with NT Police as part of the Child Abuse Taskforce Southern to investigate allegations of the sexualised behaviour of three children under the age of 10 in the central Australia region,” she said.

“Any incident involving the abuse of a child is ­abhorrent and will not be tolerated.”

Last March alone, News Corp journalists revealed a series of cases including one in which a 16-year-old allegedly raped a four-year-old boy at the Aboriginal community of Ali Curung, 170km southeast of Tennant Creek.

A 14-year-old boy from South Australia’s remote Aboriginal lands near the NT border was charged with the sexual assault of a child, ­believed to be a nine-year-old girl, who was transferred to Alice Springs Hospital.

A Territory youth, in his mid to late teens, was charged with five counts of sexual intercourse without consent following an incident involving a five-year-old boy at an unnamed remote community.

“Any sexual offending between children we should be concerned about,” Ms Gwynne said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/children-under-10-accused-of-sex-assaults/news-story/8bc29867462faf4723e0d88f321ff936