Overwhelming Response Agrees Stealthing Should Be Criminalised

Eighty-one per cent of Australian want stealthing to be criminalised, a new report reveals.

The Australia Institute on Friday released its Stealthing: Legislating for change found that while an overwhelming majority of Australians support criminalisation, many Australians do not know the legal status of stealthing in their own state.

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“It is encouraging to see a strong majority of Australians support criminalising stealthing, a legal reform led by the ACT and adopted in several other states,” Director of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Sex & Gender Equality Chanel Contos said. 

“Uniform legislation around the country to raise awareness of the act could prevent mass amounts of sexual violence in our society. 

“Stealthing is a particularly intricate type of sexual violence because the definition, by default, means that you have consented to having protected sex with the perpetrator, meaning that you probably had positive feelings towards that person.

“We don’t have a nationally representative study of the prevalence of stealthing, in part because stealthing is often committed without the victim’s knowledge.”

Stealthing is already explicitly criminalised in the ACT, NSW, Tasmania and Victoria, while in SA and WA, sexual assault legislation reviews are in progress and a private members’ bill criminalising stealthing has been introduced in SA.

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