Brisbane: A mother has claimed that her four-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted by a nine-year-old boy who lived in their neighbourhood in Queensland, Australia.
According to a report by The Courier Mail, the boy was caught sexually assaulting the girl by his father in July.
“(The boy) admitted to trying to put his doodle in her, and said (my daughter) had wanted to go but he wouldn’t let her leave,” the mother said. She said that her daughter has been having nightmares ever since and has become clingy.
The boy received behavioural counselling as children below 10 years are not charged with criminal offences in Australia.
Meanwhile, the mother of the minor victim has planned to move to another locality.
The incident is an example of a revelation made by the Australian Bureau of Statistics is a data, which suggests school going children were responsible for at least 42.6 percent of the total sexual assault offences in Queensland.
According another report in The Courier Mail, the data revealed that 955 of the 2,244 sexual assault offenders were aged 19 and below. The data were based on police reports in 2015 till June. At least 770 young offenders last year were aged between 10 and 14.
The number of sexual offences committed by young children has increased twice in five years since 2011.
“In the last 10 years the kinds of things we are seeing is a huge increase in rape, a huge increase in object penetration, an increase in more than one person being present, and an increase in the filming or recording of those acts,” Di Macleod, Director at Gold Coast Centre Against Sexual Assault, said.
The rise in the number of young sexual offenders has been blamed on children having easy access to violent pornographic content. According to Child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, children as young as 11 are watching pornography.
