Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on a topic that many might find difficult to discuss: the sexual assault of older women in their homes and in aged-care facilities. Last week, I hosted a roundtable on preventing the sexual assault of older women. We were fortunate enough to hear from experts who have been advocating on this issue for some time, including Professor Joseph Ibrahim and Dr Catherine Barrett. The idea of older women as victims of sexual assault has until relatively recently not been generally discussed and is little understood. Despite the silence around this topic, sexual assault of older women has always occurred but has long been ignored. It is hidden in the community and no-one wants to believe it occurs. The lack of community awareness can be partly attributed to commonly held assumptions that older women are asexual. Sexual assault occurs in older women's own homes, perpetrated by intimate partners, family members and also by service providers and aged-care service providers. Unfortunately, we don't know the prevalence of these incidents of older women being sexually assaulted in their own homes.

Research also shows that sexual assault occurs in residential aged-care facilities. In 2018-19, there were 739 notifications of unlawful sexual contact, which is an increase from 547 notifications in the previous year. However, this data doesn't cover people living in private and community settings, people living in aged-care services that don't receive government funding, acts committed by a co-resident with a cognitive impairment or incidents not regarded as sexual assaults when contact occurs. It is highly likely the incidence of sexual assault of older women is in fact much higher. The fact that providers don't have to report assaults that are perpetrated by residents with cognitive or mental impairment means there is a serious gap in reporting requirements. It does not make sense to exclude reporting of sexual abuse by people with dementia, given that two-thirds of residents will have some form of cognitive impairment. There is also a significant gap in how the Department of Health uses the limited data that is currently collected. The department doesn't use this information to identify patterns or to shape policy or education initiatives. It's not clear who is responsible for following up on reports of sexual assaults. Is it the provider or the department? This is clearly a missed opportunity and contributes to a culture where service providers are not held to account for prevention.

There is evidence that perpetrators are not being held to account—for example, staff may be moved around to other facilities—and provider strategies for managing sexual assault by other residents are not well established. In both home care and residential care settings, aged-care service providers have a pivotal role to play in preventing sexual assault, but many do not have the skills, confidence or guidelines to enable this to occur. And it's not as simple as pointing the finger at residential care facilities. We haven't provided aged-care providers with education or information in a systematic way, nor have we asked providers to do anything other than report on statistics.

At the roundtable, we heard that there is a clear gap in who families and advocates can turn to for help and support. There are known instances of older women seeking help for sexual assault being advised by elder abuse services that they cannot provide assistance. In the absence of any national strategy or evidence based approach, services are implementing ad hoc approaches that are not based on evidence. For example, some elder abuse services are creating new definitions of sexual assault that reflect stranger rape rather than sexual assault by a known person. In the absence of help, family members turn to the media to share their harrowing experiences because they feel they are not being heard and cannot achieve accountability in any other way. Family members are often distressed and frustrated by the defensiveness and inaction of service providers. We are clearly failing older women and their family members through our inadequate response to their reports of sexual assault. There is a need for urgent action to ensure that older women are not at risk of sexual assault in aged-care services or in their own homes. Inaction at this point makes us all complicit.

Today I am seeking to help break the silence and start conversations about this important issue in this place. I hope we can move towards a culture of listening and preventing the sexual assault of older women. There are many tangible actions that we can take to go from here. Firstly, I urge the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety to investigate the issue of sexual assault of older women in care and at home. The royal commission has received at least six submissions about the sexual assault of older women. I urge more people and stakeholders to ask the royal commission to look at this important topic.

Secondly, we also need to develop strategies for prevention and intervention, and the government has a leadership role here as well. These involve education and training strategies and sector-wide responses including strategies for aged-care services, police and judicial services. Service providers are in a powerful position to understand and prevent sexual assault of older women but they cannot do this alone and they need a national approach informed by best practice based on evidence.

Finally, there is a clear lack of access to meaningful support for older women who experience sexual assault and their families. This includes ensuring that older women have access to family violence and sexual assault services. These support services must be required to provide culturally safe and inclusive services for vulnerable older people who are particularly at risk, including people with cognitive impairment, First Nations peoples and people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities. But this is just the beginning. Preventing the sexual assault of older women requires a multilevel approach, and we will need to do significant work together across many levels of government and the different sectors involved.

I want to finish by urging everyone to listen. Listening may appear to be a small act but it makes a huge difference. Too often women's accounts are shut down. We heard examples of that in the roundtable that we held last week. If an older woman tells us she has been sexually assaulted we need to listen, we need to believe and we need to act. I urge everybody involved in the sectors to take action to ensure that we address sexual assault of older women and no longer pretend that it doesn't happen.