Why children impacted by harmful sexual behaviour need more than one door to justice
The Continuum Project's Stage One Report was clear: when harmful sexual behaviour happens between children, the criminal justice system — even at its best — resolves only a fraction of it, and reaches even fewer of the children involved in a way that feels like justice. This page sets out the evidence behind that finding, why so many children can't or don't want to engage with the criminal process, and why we also need to address what's shaping the behaviour of boys before harm happens at all.
The system we have wasn't built for this
The Continuum Project's Stage One Report (April 2025) — whose restorative justice findings shaped this project — examined how schools and systems in Australia respond when one student displays harmful sexual behaviour toward another. It found that a criminal justice response, on its own, does little to address why the behaviour happened in the first place, and is limited in its capacity to deliver a meaningful sense of justice to the child who was harmed.
It also found something we think matters just as much: no established restorative justice scheme existed anywhere in Australia specifically for harmful sexual behaviour occurring in schools. Children harmed in this context, and children responsible for the harm, had one real pathway on offer — a criminal justice system that, the evidence below shows, very rarely delivers what either of them needs.
A system built to prove a case — not to deliver justice to a child
Criminal proceedings are brought by the state against the accused — not by, or for, the child who was harmed. In law, a child harmed is a witness in their own case, not a party to it: no lawyer acts for them, they have no say over what's charged or whether a plea deal resolves it, and a criminal standard means the trial centres on whether their account survives being challenged, not on what they actually need.
"The person who says they have suffered the harm is not a party to the proceeding. They are a witness."Victorian Law Reform Commission, on sexual offence trials
And for the small share of cases that do reach this system, the odds are stark: just 15% of reported sexual assaults in NSW result in charges, and only 7–8% end in a guilty outcome in court (BOCSAR, 2024). Nationally, fewer than 1 in 10 incidents of sexual violence are ever reported to police at all (ALRC, 2025). Being cross-examined and waiting months or years for an uncertain outcome takes a real toll — the ALRC's national inquiry found the process is widely experienced by survivors as retraumatising in itself, a second harm layered on the first.
None of this is about children not caring about accountability
It's about a process that asks a lot of a child, at the moment they're least equipped to give it, for a chance at an outcome the evidence above shows is unlikely.
They know the person responsible
Around a third of child sexual abuse, by some estimates, is perpetrated by other children — most often someone the child already knows. A criminal process can mean a classmate or friend facing formal charges, which many children harmed don't want, especially when they'll still share a school community afterwards.
Fear of not being believed
Shame, self-blame and fear of disbelief are consistently identified as major reasons children hesitate to speak up at all — and once they do, that's only the first of many moments they can be met with doubt instead of belief.
Wanting repair, not just punishment
Many children harmed want to be heard, to have what happened acknowledged, and to know it won't happen again — not necessarily to see another child punished. A system with only one lever, prosecution or nothing, can't reliably offer that.
We're not asking for a harsher system. Detention makes this worse, not better.
None of this is an argument against the criminal justice system, or against police involvement where it's needed — safety reporting obligations always come first, and restorative justice through this project is only ever offered alongside them, not instead of them. It's an argument that one door cannot be the only door.
But just as strongly, it's not an argument for locking up more children. If the goal is genuinely fewer children harmed, the evidence on youth detention in Australia points the other way entirely.
Detention doesn't change behaviour. It compounds harm.
The large majority of children in detention already carry multiple experiences of trauma before they ever arrive there — and detention adds to that, rather than addressing it. The Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory found children at Don Dale had been hooded, shackled, tear-gassed and strapped to a restraint chair, isolated for long periods, and physically assaulted by staff who knew, or should have known, it was wrong. It recommended the facility close. That's not a description of a system that rehabilitates — it's a description of one that harms.
First Nations children bear the sharpest edge of this: they're detained at around 26 times the rate of non-Indigenous children, deepening exactly the intergenerational trauma this project already commits to reckoning with. None of it makes anyone safer. As the figures above show, children who go through detention are more likely to reoffend, not less — while children who get treatment for harmful sexual behaviour, without detention, very rarely do it again.
What we're asking for instead
A children's rights approach — the same approach behind the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — asks for something different: that the child harmed's voice, safety and needs sit at the centre of the response, and that the child responsible is held genuinely accountable in a way that's developmentally appropriate, addresses what's underneath the behaviour, and gives them a real path to change — not a system with a proven track record of making reoffending more likely.
Both the 2022 National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children and, in 2025, the Australian Law Reform Commission have recommended restorative justice be made genuinely available — funded, resourced and accessible — to people who've experienced sexual violence. The Olive Tree Project exists to build exactly that: a rights-centred, real, safe second option for children in schools who currently have only one.
Boys are absorbing a script that normalises harm — before any of this ever happens
Justice options matter after harm has occurred. But The Continuum Project's findings, and our own work with schools, point to something further upstream: much of the harmful sexual behaviour we're responding to is shaped by attitudes boys are absorbing online, often years before they act on them.
1 in 3 boys, "gone too far"
A 2026 University of Melbourne study of 1,122 Australian 13–17 year olds found one in three teenage boys believe gender equality has already "gone too far," and one in four believe feminism should be resisted with violence. Teachers surveyed for the same study reported students as young as six quoting male influencers and using "manosphere" language in the classroom.
"Rampant" in Australian classrooms
Monash University researchers surveying women teachers across Australian schools found male-supremacist attitudes, modelled on influencers like Andrew Tate, had become widespread — boys invoking his name deliberately to provoke female staff and peers, and echoing claims that women have gained unfair advantages since #MeToo.
Rigid masculinity, real-world risk
The NSW Man Box 2025 report found men and boys who endorse rigid, narrow ideas of masculinity are significantly more likely to report perpetrating intimate partner violence, to consume violent pornography, and to hold anti-feminist attitudes — a cluster of risk factors, not an isolated one.
Punishment alone doesn't reach this
A suspension, a caution, or even a conviction can hold a boy responsible for one incident without ever touching the attitudes that made the behaviour feel normal, or even justified, to him in the first place. Left unaddressed, those attitudes travel with him.
Helping boys transition out of the factors driving this behaviour
If harmful sexual behaviour is partly shaped by rigid masculine norms, online misogyny and a sense of entitlement absorbed from influencers, then a genuine response has to do more than remove or punish the boy involved — it has to help him understand what shaped his behaviour, and give him a real, supported path to act differently.
That's the thinking behind programs like Jesuit Social Services' Man Cave and The Men's Project, which work directly with boys and young men on healthy masculinity, emotional literacy and respectful relationships — and it's central to how this project treats the student responsible for harm.
Helping a young person see the gap between what they did and who they want to be
Genuine behaviour change rarely starts with punishment — it starts with a young person building an honest picture of their own values, and being supported to see, in their own words, how what they did sits apart from that. That's a different skill set to policing or sentencing, and it takes people trained specifically to do it.
Starting with values, not deficits
Approaches like the Good Lives Model, widely used in treatment for adolescents who've displayed sexual harm, begin by mapping what a young person actually cares about and wants for their life — then work with them to meet those same needs through safe, respectful means instead of harmful ones. It's a different starting point to a system built only to manage risk or hand down punishment.
"That's not who I want to be"
Research on desistance from harmful behaviour consistently finds that lasting change happens when someone comes to see the behaviour as separate from their identity — not who they are — rather than as confirmation of a fixed, bad self. Facilitators trained in this work help a young person reach that recognition honestly, without ever minimising the harm caused.
Guilt that motivates repair, not shame that entrenches
Psychological research on offending finds guilt about a specific act — tension, remorse, a wish to make it right — predicts lower reoffending, while shame that gets externalised as blame onto others predicts higher reoffending. Skilled, values-based facilitation is built to open the door to the first and close the door on the second.
None of this happens through a single conversation, or without training. Every restorative engagement in this project is led by independent, trauma-informed practitioners with specific expertise in harmful sexual behaviour and adolescent accountability work — never the young people's own school staff — drawing on the same body of specialist practice behind services like NSW's New Street Services.
Meet the practitioners behind this project →A punitive system can hold a child responsible for one moment. It was never built to change what made that moment feel possible to him, or to give the child he harmed a way back to feeling safe. That's the gap this project exists to close.
Help build the justice options children harmed deserve.
Every school that refers into this pathway, and every family it reaches, is evidence that one door was never enough — and that boys can be helped onto a different path before more children are harmed.
Sources: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Attrition of sexual assaults from the NSW criminal justice system (2024); Australian Law Reform Commission, Justice Responses to Sexual Violence, Final Report (2025); Victorian Law Reform Commission, Sexual offence trials: key issues; Dr Anna Cody, Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Survivors need agency, choice and voice in sexual violence justice (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2026); Bravehearts, Harmful sexual behaviours (incl. peer-instigated abuse); Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Young people returning to sentenced youth justice supervision 2023–24; Justice Reform Initiative, Australia now spends $1 billion a year locking up children; Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory (2017); University of Melbourne, Misogyny, Online Radicalisation and Youth Extremism in Australia (2026), reported via AAP; Monash University, research on 'manfluencer' culture in Australian schools; NSW Department of Communities and Justice, The NSW Man Box 2025; Lucy Faithfull Foundation, The Good Lives Model; Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives, on desistance and identity; Association for Psychological Science, After committing a crime, guilt and shame predict re-offense; The Continuum Project, Stage One Report (April 2025).