There is increasing recognition across Australia and internationally of the significant harms and impacts of domestic and family violence, including child abuse, upon children and young people (see, for example, Haslam et al., 2023). Findings from the recently released Australian Child Maltreatment Study highlights the gendered nature of maltreatment, affecting girls at higher rates. This study lends further evidence to the detrimental effects on long-term outcomes for children, including an increased risk of poor physical and mental health outcomes, self-harming behaviours and suicide attempts (Haslam et al., 2023). These results reiterate the need to act now, with urgency and holistic, trauma-informed responses (Meyer & Fitz-Gibbon, 2022; Meyer, Fitz-Gibbon & Moore, 2022). Simultaneously, and as a result of recent inquiries conducted at the state and national level (see, for example, Fitz-Gibbon et al, 2022c, 2022d; RCFV, 2016; Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence in Queensland, 2015; Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce, 2021; House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, 2021), there has been unprecedented policy and practice reform directly focused on the intersecting areas of children and young people, domestic and family violence, sexual assault services, and institutional response to child sexual abuse. The findings from these successive national and state-based inquiries have consistently concluded that system responses to children and young people have to date failed to meet the needs of young people, and that transformative reform is required. For example, in 2016 the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence (2016) recognised children as the ‘silent victims’ of family violence (see further O’Brien & Fitz-Gibbon, 2016). Fast forward five years and the consultations to inform the National Plan to end Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 (DSS, 2022, see Fitz-Gibbon et al., 2022c, 2022d) documented the ongoing need for whole of system responses to children and young people as victim-survivors in their own right to form a central focus of the forthcoming plan. That Plan, released in late 2022, does included an acknowledgement of children and young people as victim-survivors in their own right. This project joins a growing chorus of work that is calling on the Australian Government to ensure that commitment, to truly listen to children’s voices and deliver child-centric responses to meet the needs of young victim-survivors, is realised within the lifespan of the National Plan.

While research in this area has developed significantly in recent years, particularly following the Australian Childhood Maltreatment Study (Haslam et al., 2023), there remains a relative paucity of evidence on the range of abusive behaviours experienced by girls during childhood. Importantly, in the context of increasing awareness of the importance of learning from lived experience there is limited research in this field which draws directly upon the experiences of children and young people with lived and living experience of domestic and family, including child abuse. Released to coincide with the 2023 United Nations International Day of the Girl, this Summary Report seeks to contribute to that gap in current research.