NCJ Number
198257
Date Published
November 2001
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This document discusses the number and nature of family violence incidents recorded by the police during the year 2000 in South Australia.
Abstract
The two key sources of information were victimization surveys and official crime statistics. Of the 14,730 physical and sexual assaults recorded by police in 2000 where the victim/offender relationship was known, 36.6 percent involved an offender that was in a family relationship with the victim. It was found that a higher proportion of “minor” rather than “major” assaults involved a family relationship. Of the 1,743 sexual assaults recorded by police where the victim/offender relationship was known, 32.6 percent involved a family relationship. Gender differences were more pronounced in those instances where the perpetrator was a non-intimate family member rather than an intimate. Only 11.6 percent of non-intimate incidents involving a male victim were classified as a sexual assault, compared with 26.1 percent of incidents involving female victims. Current partners/defactos and current spouses accounted for the highest proportion of offenders. There was a clear relationship between the victim’s age and the likelihood of being assaulted by an intimate. The majority of the victims that had been assaulted by an intimate were concentrated in the middle age range of 25 to 34 years. According to police records, the majority of victims that were assaulted by a non-intimate family member were relatively young, with almost one in five aged less than 10 and a further 26.9 percent aged 10 to 17 years. While these data provide some insight into the types of family assault offenses dealt with by the criminal justice system, it is acknowledged that they do not necessarily reflect the actual prevalence and nature of victimization experienced in the community. 2 footnotes, 10 figures, 25 tables, 4 references