ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to report research on post-pubertal children’s high-level harmful sexual behaviour, which often finds them criminalised, through to the types of sexual behaviour displayed by young children and pre-adolescents in education settings. It also discusses international small-scale studies that report on children’s harmful sexual behaviour. The chapter begins by presenting data on children’s harmful sexual behaviour that has resulted in children being criminally charged with a sexual offence that is recorded permanently and then discusses a series of studies that have explored children’s harmful sexual behaviour within particular contexts; however, these are commonly small-scale studies that can only provide a snapshot of the experiences by the participants. In Australia, data on children with problematic or harmful sexualised behaviours are not collected uniformly, and issues such as nondisclosure, a general lack of knowledge of healthy and harmful sexual behaviour, and denial or minimisation of incidents mean that the prevalence of children displaying harmful sexual behaviours is difficult to determine.
