AUSTRALIA
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The economic costs of child sexual abuse are very difficult to estimate. Most authors err on the side of caution and use the lowest estimate as the basis of their papers. Taylor et al. (2008) (see references below), for example, use the lowest rates of reported abuse, to arrive at a figure for an “incidence cost” (cost to the taxpayer plus cost to victims) of between $13.7 billion and $38.7 billion, in Australia.
Since this is a preliminary article, the average figure of about $25 billion will be used, even though most would agree that even the higher figure of $38.7 billion is probably far too small in reality.
Again, using the lower bounds of the statistics, about 10% of child abuse is child sexual abuse. This means that this abuse costs $2.5 billion.
Allowing, yet again, for the minimum figure, 7% of child sexual abuse comes from strangers, mainly religious sources, and others such as Scouting. This yields a final figure of $175 million, as the cost of clerical and other offenders’ child sexual abuse, to the taxpayer and the victims.
Of this, to be really conservative with the figures, it can be deduced that the minimum cost of clerical child sexual abuse is of the order of $100 million to the taxpayer and victims.
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