A child who speaks about violence at home may be asking adults to disturb a life they have worked hard to keep intact. There are relationships, loyalties, perhaps someone everybody likes. Taking the child seriously can mean accepting that the familiar world is less safe than it appeared. That is a difficult admission. The child should not have to make it easier for us.
The Guardian reports a sharp increase in sexual assaults against Australian children since the pandemic, including a 15.7% rise in attacks on boys. Researchers had expected a decline. The report also describes rising family violence and warnings about the “manosphere”, while making clear that the study’s authors do not attribute the increase to any single cause. Income inequality and growing awareness are among the other possible explanations they identify.
That uncertainty matters. An increase in recorded violence cannot, on the supplied evidence, tell us precisely how much reflects more violence and how much reflects greater recognition or reporting. Nor does identifying a troubling online culture establish that it explains every case. Turning a complex finding into a convenient villain would give us an argument to win while leaving much of the problem untouched.
But uncertainty about causes does not require uncertainty about our responsibilities.
Within ordinary family life, there is a temptation to treat keeping things together as an unquestionable good. Usually there is something worth preserving. Yet togetherness becomes a dangerous ambition when its price is someone’s silence. A family’s account of itself must remain open to correction, including correction from its youngest members.
Taking a child seriously need not mean pretending that every detail is already established. It means refusing to make adult comfort the test of whether a concern deserves attention. It means being willing to seek appropriate safeguarding help rather than settling something privately because public knowledge would be painful.
Researchers need room to investigate why these reported figures have risen. The rest of us have a more immediate task: to examine what we would be prepared to hear about the people closest to us. It is easy to condemn violence in an unfamiliar household. The harder responsibility begins when listening might change our own.