Explanatory notes

The explanatory notes describe the scope and methodology of the Australian Sexual Offence Statistical (ASOS) collection and data presented on the Sexual offending dashboard.

Scope

The Sexual offending dashboard includes statistics for persons who the police initiated action or proceeded against on a date in the relevant financial year for one or more sexual offences in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.

Individuals were included if they had been proceeded against in the relevant financial year for any offence identified in Division 3 (Sexual assault and related offences) of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC; Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011). We also used offence coding the Australian Institute of Criminology had undertaken in a separate project to identify emerging offences not covered by the classification. Police proceedings included arrest, caution and summons against the offender.

Data collection and coding

Data collection

Data published on the dashboard were provided by selected state and territory police service to the ASOS collection. Data presented on the dashboard were provided by New South Wales Police Force, Victoria Police, Queensland Police Service, Western Australia Police Force, Northern Territory Police Force and Australian Capital Territory Policing.

Data coding

The dashboard categorises sexual offences into four types of conduct: penetrative or non-penetrative sexual conduct, persistent sexual abuse, handling of unlawful sexual material (including image-based sexual abuse and conduct pertaining to child sexual abuse material), and conduct done to enable unlawful sexual conduct (see Glossary for definitions). The categories are based on a comprehensive national review of child sexual abuse and sexual assault legislation in Australia by the Australian Institute of Criminology. We coded sexual offence data according to definitions in this national review, using the offence name or description provided by the police and, where available, the relevant section of the state, territory or Commonwealth legislation. Each offence was coded to a single category.

Counting rules

This dashboard includes statistics on 8,326 alleged offenders proceeded against for one or more sexual offences in 2021–22. Individuals proceeded against for one or more offences in the same category are counted once while individuals proceeded against for offences in different categories are counted more than once. As a result, the number of alleged offenders in each category may not add to the total number of alleged offenders. All individuals are counted only once in offender totals.

Information about offenders’ relationship with primary victims was available for 5,938 offenders in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory.