Family, domestic and sexual violence data in Australia

Notes

1. The PSS defines sexual assault as an act of a sexual nature carried out against a person's will through the use of physical force, intimidation or coercion, including any attempts to do this. This includes rape, attempted rape, aggravated sexual assault (assault with a weapon), indecent assault, penetration by objects, forced sexual activity that did not end in penetration and attempts to force a person into sexual activity. Incidents so defined would be an offence under State and Territory criminal law.
2. Whether police were contacted was open to the respondent’s interpretation, and may include both contact that did and did not amount to a formal report.
3. If a respondent did not contact the police, but the police ‘happened to attend’, this was recorded as someone else contacting the police. If the incident occurred in a public place such as a shopping centre, and security was contacted, this was recorded as the police not being contacted. However, if security subsequently contacted the police then it was recorded as someone else contacting the police.
4. Unless otherwise stated, most recent incident is limited to the last 10 years only. 
5. Annual estimates and proportion of persons aged 15 years and over who reported their most recent incident of sexual assault to police are included in ABS Crime Victimisation, Australia (see table 5a–5d).
6. The PSS collects information from women and men aged 18 years and over.

7. The observed value of a rate may vary due to chance even where there is no variation in the underlying value of the rate. The margin of error is the largest possible difference (due to sampling error) that could exist between the estimate and what would have been produced had all persons been included in the survey. Confidence intervals—constructed by taking the estimate plus or minus the MoE— can be used to provide an approximate indication of the true differences between rates. If the confidence intervals do not overlap, the difference can be said to be statistically significant. However, statistically significant differences are not necessarily the same as differences considered to be of practical importance. Small differences that have practical importance may be found to be not statistically significant as they are below the threshold the significance test can reliably detect.

8.  For more information see Methods, Glossary and Data sources.

Sources

ABS 2016 Personal Safety Survey  

Next expected: 2022