GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING
A 12-year-old boy was repeatedly raped by a classmate in the toilets at their primary school in Victoria, and shocking statistics show child-on-child sexual abuse occurs almost daily across the state.
The pre-teen predator, given the pseudonym Jack, was only caught when he tried to rape Alex (also not his real name) after showing other children pornography at a gathering at another classmate’s home, but remains at the school and has not been prosecuted by police, ABC News reported.
Alex’s parents said police told them that Jack was watching a large volume of pornography which they believe fuelled his behaviour.
Documents obtained by the ABC under Freedom of Information laws show that 240 child-on-child sex abuse incidents were reported to police by public primary schools in Victoria in 2022 and 2023, three for every week of term, half involving children under 10. Another 242 were reported in state government high schools.
University of Melbourne researcher Gemma McKibbin said pornography was a key factor in rising rates of child-on-child sex abuse, with a recent University of Queensland survey showing that 5% of young people had seen porn by the time they were 10 years old.
“The pornography industry is culpable and is basically grooming our children to be abusers,” she said.
“I think with the younger cohort, when you’re thinking about under 10s [who have been sexually harmful], you need to really be looking out for their own sexual abuse or their own trauma.
“But in early adolescence, you know, 12, 13, there can be other reasons that they come to be sexually harmful, and one of them of course is access to pornography.
“What’s particularly problematic at the moment is that adolescent boys seem to be doing the most damage at the greatest rates in peer-on-peer situations, so against … classmates or neighbourhood kids or cousins … and/or in intimate partner relationships.”
Alex’s parents say they are shattered by what happened to their son, and feel like they let him down and failed to protect him.
“We didn’t even think that sort of thing could happen at primary school,” his distraught dad said.
They also feel let down by the school and police, revealing that Alex, who has a moderate intellectual disability, had to change schools since his rapist could not be expelled and was not even suspended.
And after a four-month investigation police told them they believed Alex was abused but determined that prosecution was not in the interests of the state.
Alex parents only found out about the abuse after Jack tried to rape Alex in front of other children, one of whom took him to a teacher when they were next at school and encouraged him to report the attack.
Jack first showed his classmates a porn video before grabbing Alex, pulling his pants down and trying to penetrate him, but several other boys pulled him off.
The school sent Alex back to class, where Jack was present, and did not report the incident to Alex’s parents, but when Alex came home he told his mother about the incident and that the same thing had been happening in the school toilets.
During his police interview he said that Jack would follow him into the toilet at school and push his private parts into his bottom, causing him pain.
Alex’s parents said he was now too afraid to go to the toilet at school, and did not want to get changed in front of other children for physical education classes.
“Obviously it’s hard to trust anyone with your kids anymore. It’s very hard,” Alex’s mother said.
