Allegations of child sexual abuse pose agonisingly difficult issues for families, family law professionals and the courts. We present data from the population (N=521) of Family Court of Australia judgements containing allegations of child sexual abuse published in the Australasian Legal Information Institute's Australian database. Our data cover all in-scope judgements published between mid-2012 and mid-2019, of which 71 dealt with cases that were uncontested. A further 70 were contested but the allegations were abandoned before the end of the trial. We classified the remaining 380 cases as “fully contested”. Of this group: (a) in 14% of cases, judicial officers expressed a direct or clearly implied belief that the allegations of child sexual abuse were true; (b) risk of sexual harm to a child was found in 12% of judgements; (c) when no risk of sexual harm was found, judges were more than twice as likely to regard the allegations as genuine but mistaken rather than to have been deliberately misleading; (d) just under two-thirds of allegedly unsafe parents had the time they spent with their child(ren) increased by the court; and (e) in 17% of judgements, children's living arrangements were changed to the allegedly unsafe parent.

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儿童性虐待指控：对澳大利亚家庭法院 2012-2019 年已发表判决的实证分析

对儿童性虐待的指控给家庭、家庭法专业人士和法院带来了令人痛苦的难题。我们提供了来自澳大利亚家庭法院判决的总体数据 (N=521)，其中包含澳大利亚法律信息研究所澳大利亚数据库中公布的儿童性虐待指控。我们的数据涵盖了 2012 年年中至 2019 年年中发布的所有范围内判决，其中 71 份涉及无争议案件。另有 70 人受到质疑，但这些指控在审判结束前被放弃。我们将剩余的 380 个案例归类为“完全有争议的”。在这一群体中： (a) 在 14% 的案件中，司法官员表示直接或明确暗示相信儿童性虐待指控属实；(b) 在 12% 的判决中发现对儿童有性伤害的风险；(c) 在未发现性伤害风险的情况下，法官将指控视为真实但错误而非故意误导的可能性是其两倍以上；(d) 不到三分之二的据称不安全的父母与孩子相处的时间被法院增加；(e) 在 17% 的判断中，孩子的生活安排被更改为据称不安全的父母。