Mental Illness Stats Skyrocket
The majority of health experts say mental illness is becoming more prevalent in society due to social awareness programs, which encourage more people to seek help while at the same time de-stigmatizing society so that help is more readily available.
What this means is mental illness didn't just suddenly crop up out of nowhere, or only within one generation, or even just recently. It means mental illness has been steadily impacting more and more Australians, while much of society has 'looked the other way'.
Where else do we see this 'look-the-other-way' pattern emerging of late? It is the catch-phrase of both the Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse and the Royal Commission into Youth Detention.
Of course, one doesn't need to be a scholar of anything in particular to understand child abuse greatly impacts mental health. How much abuse are we talking about here?
Estimating The Numbers
The last numbers released by the Child Sex Abuse commission were staggering, so staggering in fact, it would come as no surprise if they refuse to release any more stats. Up to that point they had identified 4,444 historical child sex abuse victims - by identified they mean corroborated and accepted into evidence.
It is estimated that 4 in 5 cases reported to police are unable to be corroborated and somewhere between 4 to 8 in 100 reports are fabricated. So, for argument's sake, let's just say an average of half (a modest fraction at best) of genuine complaints fail to be identified.
That would bump the commission's numbers up to approx. 66,666 victims of child sex abuse.
It is further estimated only 1 in 10 victims come forward, but let's be even more conservative and say 1 in 7 victims come forward, since these numbers have reportedly declined a little over the years.
That would mean approx. 466,662 of Australia's children have been historically abused.
Psychiatrists and practitioners have long held that, once abused, a child is more vulnerable to further abuse by other perpetrators. This is reflected in the inquiry where an overwhelming number of victims identified numerous perpetrators, some up to a dozen. For argument's sake, let's say the average victim was abused by only 3 perpetrators.
This would result in approx. 1,399,986 adult perpetrators.
Of the 466,662 abused victims, at least one adult around them must have known something was going on and looked the other way. But let's give half of them the benefit of doubt, resulting in approx. 233,331 adults who, more or less, condoned the abuse.
Added to those doing the abusing, that's 1,633,317 adult Australians completely disregarding the mental health of nearly half a million children.
This equates to approx. 10% of the Australian population so far, and that's only involving the towns/cities investigated by the commission up to the release of the original data that we started with.
More Numbers Today
Again, these numbers are all based on "historical" abuse, that is, people who are now adults and are able to come forward. Let's look at children who are, today, trapped in this abuse cycle and are unable to come forward.
There is no reason to imagine these systemic and social failures of the past might have become less frequent in modern times since they have been left unchecked and ignored right up to the present public inquiry. As such, any slight decline noted in the reporting of incidents is more likely to be due to lack of satisfaction in the system, being the whole point of the current inquiry.
However, let's give society in general the benefit of doubt and say this type of abuse only happens half as often these days.
That would bump the victim count up to approx. 699,993 and the number of adults/abusers involved to approx. 2,464,796.
Many mental health professionals have long held that, within the abuse cycle, the abused often becomes an abuser. So let's presume around half will go on to commit similar crimes against at least 1 child each.
This would bump the number of victims up to approx. 1,049,990 and the number of adults/abusers involved to approx. 2,814,793.
This equates to nearly 20% of the Australian population involved the abuse cycle up to present times.
Other Numbers To Mull Over
In the context of mental health, there is absolutely no reason to set sexual abuse aside from any other type of abuse children are subjected to in institutional settings. However, the Youth Detention commission is not forthcoming with these numbers, so we had to moderately esitmate those too.
Since we already know that around 78% of children in other institutional settings (largely populated by departments of Families and Justice) have been freely abused by adults, we assumed that fraction also applies to youth detention settings.
In summary, we estimate some 25% of the adult population are facilitating and/or perpetrating crimes against more than 20% of the child population.
Of course, these are extremely rough and, at best, moderate estimations but there is more than enough cause for concern.
Mental Health Crisis
It is only through social awareness that we are coming to understand the prevalence of mental illness resulting from this inter-generational child abuse and are now able to recognise it as the largest social crisis in modern history.
Sexual abuse and youth detention are the just the tips of the ice-burg. As a society, we've become more intolerant of the young than ever before in history; we've shut down their community spaces, we've banned them from congregating even at home, we've pitched the council and police against their noisy social habits and so on.
In the school system we tell them to embrace individuality, follow their dreams and forge their own career paths, but then they leave school to quickly discover there are no jobs and their dreams are promptly crushed in the dole-queue where individuality is unacceptable.
The government then pitches those trapped in the cycle of abuse to the tax-payers as tax-cheats, criminals, dole-bludgers, drug-addicts and alcohol abusers, without one iota of regard for the mental welfare of those it is attacking, meanwhile it shamelessly uses child incarceration, deprivation of child liberties and child torture as political tools to win votes.
Australia's mental health crisis isn't going to go away by itself. It will live on through the next generation and the next and will gradually consume more and more victims, until society finally sheds its addiction to shamelessly abusing its young.