The Mirror We Refuse To Hold: Australian Culture and Male Violence

I. Introduction: A Suitcase Near a Railway Line

In the early hours of 28 June 2026, Thai police discovered the body of seventeen-year-old Tunchanok Donhomla inside a suitcase abandoned near a railway line outside the coastal city of Pattaya. Security cameras had captured a man entering a condominium with the girl in the small hours of Thursday morning and leaving alone hours later, carrying a large black bag. That man – Simon Peter Carman, a 46-year-old Australian national – was arrested at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport as he reportedly prepared to board a flight home to Perth. He faces charges of murder, concealment of a body, moving or destroying a body, and taking a minor for sexual purposes. To the victim’s family, he sent a message after his arrest: ‘I feel bad for what happened to your daughter. It was out of my control.’

He denies all charges. He is entitled, under every precept of law, to the presumption of innocence. The courts of Thailand will determine what happened. Nothing argued in this essay depends on his guilt being established.

What the Carman case does is open a question that Australian political culture reliably refuses to ask: when the accused in a serious violent crime is not a migrant or a member of a minority community but an Anglo-Australian man abroad, do we apply the same analytical framework – about culture, community, and what a society is producing – that we apply without hesitation when the profile is reversed? This essay argues we do not, and that the refusal is both analytically incoherent and practically damaging.

Making that argument rigorously requires four analytical commitments: applying consistent evidentiary standards across all groups; distinguishing universal patterns of male violence from specific cultural amplifiers; acknowledging intersecting risk factors of class, substance use, and family structure that complicate any single-cause account; and recognising what Australian institutions have already done, often seriously and at scale, to address the problem. This essay attempts to honour all four.

II. The Grammar of Selective Outrage

The rhetorical grammar structuring Australian public debate about crime is well established and heavily asymmetric. When young men from particular migrant communities are involved in gang violence or aggravated robbery, the political and media response is swift, totalising, and explicitly cultural. The crime is taken as diagnostic – evidence of something essential about the values or civilisational commitments of the community from which the offenders come. ‘What does this tell us about their culture?’ is not merely a permissible question; it is the organising question around which policy proposals, political careers, and media cycles are constructed.

The asymmetry has, at times, been built on a real evidentiary foundation. Victoria Police did document a period of elevated offending rates among a specific cohort of young men with South Sudanese backgrounds, and community organisations, researchers, and Victoria Police’s own African Advisory Group acknowledged a genuine – if contextualised – problem. Analysis by Diversity Council Australia, drawing on Crime Statistics Agency data from the same period, found that Australians born in Sudan constituted 0.1 percent of Victoria’s population and one percent of alleged offenders – a ten-fold over-representation that warranted serious, evidence-based response. Critically, the same data showed that a Victorian was twenty-five times more likely to be seriously assaulted by someone born in Australia or New Zealand than by someone of African descent. The over-representation in specific offence categories was real; the political amplification of it into a generalised ‘African crime wave’ was not. Responsible community-specific intervention and inflammatory racialised rhetoric are not the same thing, and a credible argument must distinguish between them.

What this essay contests is not the evidence-based dimension of those responses but the failure of symmetry in their application. The same analytical rigour that identified genuine over-representation in specific African-Australian youth cohorts has never been systematically applied to the far larger and more statistically consequential patterns of violence generated within the majority culture: the epidemic of intimate partner violence perpetrated overwhelmingly by Australian men, the conduct of Australian citizens abroad, and the two worst mass killings in the trans-Tasman region, both carried out by white Australian men. When violence flows from those sources, the grammar shifts. Perpetrators become individuals. Communities are not summoned to account. Culture is not invoked.

That asymmetry cannot be sustained by evidence. It can only be sustained by politics.

III. Male Violence as a Universal Pattern – and Its Specific Amplifiers

Before any culturally specific argument can be made about Australia, a baseline must be established: male perpetration of intimate partner violence and sexual violence is not a uniquely Australian phenomenon. It is a near-universal feature of patriarchal social organisation.

The World Health Organisation estimates that thirty-five percent of women globally have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. OECD comparative data finds that across member countries with available survey data, approximately twenty-three percent of women report having experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime – with rates reaching approximately one in three in Denmark, Latvia, Turkey, and the United States. The International Men and Gender Equality Survey, drawing on data from eight countries across multiple continents, found that thirty-one percent of men across the full sample reported having perpetrated physical violence against a partner in their lifetime, ranging from seventeen percent in Mexico to forty-five percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cross-country risk factors are remarkably consistent: witnessing parental violence is the strongest individual predictor; inequitable gender attitudes and male peer relationships emphasising dominance correlate reliably with higher perpetration; and alcohol use is a significant proximate risk factor in a substantial proportion of incidents.

This baseline matters analytically. It means that the question is never whether a given society has male violence – they all do – but what specific conditions amplify or attenuate the universal pattern. Research consistently identifies three categories of cultural amplifiers that drive rates above the global baseline: the rigidity of masculine norms valorising dominance, control, and emotional suppression; the institutional tolerance of male entitlement through law, religion, sport, and media; and structural power differentials that create contexts in which some men can exercise violence against vulnerable others with diminished risk of accountability. All three amplifiers are demonstrably present in Australian culture and are identifiable as targets for intervention. The cultural argument, properly made, does not rest on Australian exceptionalism in absolute terms. It rests on the specific configurations of these amplifiers in Australian contexts – at home and abroad.

IV. Intersecting Risk Factors: Gender Norms Are Necessary But Not Sufficient

A cultural analysis focused exclusively on masculine norms, however well-grounded, is incomplete without acknowledging the intersecting risk factors that the prevention and criminological literature consistently identifies. Gender inequality is the primary driver of intimate partner violence; it is not the only driver. Any account that reads as monocausal will be both analytically weaker and more easily dismissed.

The Australian Institute of Criminology’s research identifies unemployment, socioeconomic disadvantage, prior criminal history, and substance use as significant correlates of domestic violence perpetration and re-offending. Family and domestic violence incidents occur most often in areas of greatest socioeconomic disadvantage, according to the AIC’s alcohol and family violence research – twenty-six percent of incidents in New South Wales, twenty-nine percent in Tasmania, thirty-two percent in Victoria, and forty-eight percent in South Australia occurred in the most disadvantaged areas. Between twenty-four and fifty-four percent of family and domestic violence incidents reported to police across Australian states are classified as alcohol-related. Alcohol-related intimate partner violence incidents are more likely to involve physical injury than those without alcohol involvement. Australian government data confirms that men who killed female intimate partners were, in over sixty percent of cases, engaged in problematic drug and/or alcohol use in the lead-up to or at the time of the homicide.

These factors do not displace the analysis of masculine norms. They interact with it. Alcohol does not cause domestic violence – the overwhelming majority of men who drink do not abuse their partners. But for men already holding violence-supportive attitudes and operating under rigid masculine norms, alcohol reduces inhibition and escalates what are already dangerous behavioural dispositions. Socioeconomic stress does not cause domestic violence either, but it operates similarly: as a pressure that, in men whose violence-related attitudes are already elevated, increases the likelihood of behavioural expression. The Man Box 2024 research makes exactly this point – it is the interaction between masculine norms and contextual stressors, not either alone, that most powerfully predicts perpetration. An intellectually serious account acknowledges this complexity. It does not abandon the cultural analysis; it embeds it in a fuller causal picture.

V. The Domestic Record: Scale, Trend and the Limits of Self-Report

The Australian data on intimate partner violence is, by international standards, alarming in scale – but it requires careful reading, including acknowledgment of its methodological dimensions.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies’ Ten to Men longitudinal study – the largest study of male health in the world, tracking more than 16,000 men since 2013 – reported in June 2025 that more than one in three Australian men aged eighteen to sixty-five (thirty-five percent) had used intimate partner violence in their lifetime, with approximately 120,000 men nationally beginning to use it for the first time each year. When the same cohort was first surveyed in 2013–14, the figure was one in four. The study’s authors note, as the prevention literature generally does, that some portion of the measured increase from one in four to one in three may reflect greater willingness to self-disclose following sustained awareness campaigns and cultural shifts in what men understand as ‘violence’ – a broadening definitional awareness that is itself a product of prevention success. The absolute numbers are nonetheless significant: even adjusting for self-reporting effects, the scale of perpetration is far too large to be explained as individual deviance.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recorded ninety-eight domestic homicide victims in 2024–25, with sixty-seven percent of female victims killed by an intimate partner. In 2023–24, 6,751 women aged fifteen and over were hospitalised as a result of family and domestic violence – an average of eighteen per day. ABS data confirms that ninety-five percent of all victims of violence across Australia, regardless of gender, have experienced that violence from a male perpetrator. These are outcome measures – hospitalisation, death – that cannot be explained by definitional or reporting artefacts. They are the hard floor beneath the survey data.

The same complexity applies to First Nations communities. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are twenty-seven times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence–related assaults than non-Indigenous women – a disproportion so severe that it constitutes a distinct crisis. AIHW analysis of domestic homicide pathways identifies a ‘persistent and disorderly’ pattern, present in forty percent of analysed cases and more commonly associated with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander perpetrators, characterised by complex intergenerational trauma, severe socioeconomic disadvantage, co-occurring mental and physical health conditions, and extensive histories of violence. The causal structure here is different from the causal structure of violence in non-Indigenous communities, though both include masculine norms as a contributing factor. It demands separate, targeted, community-led analysis and response – not appropriation as evidence of a minority problem to deflect attention from a majority one, and equally not suppression in the service of a majority-focused argument. Both things are simultaneously true.

VI. Australia Has Begun the Conversation – Seriously and Incompletely

A significant objection to the argument being made here deserves direct and honest engagement: Australia has not ignored this problem. It has, by international standards, invested substantially in naming and addressing the cultural drivers of male violence.

Respect Victoria, established in the wake of the 2015–16 Royal Commission into Family Violence, operates as the nation’s dedicated primary prevention agency and has produced research of international significance. The Man Box 2024 study – a nationally representative survey of more than 3,500 Australian men aged eighteen to forty-five, conducted by The Men’s Project at Jesuit Social Services in partnership with Respect Victoria – found directly that the more men agreed with harmful masculine norms emphasising dominance, control, and emotional suppression, the more likely they were to hold violence-supportive attitudes and to self-report perpetrating intimate partner violence. The agency’s ‘What Kind of Man Do You Want to Be?’ campaign, its companion report Willing, Capable and Confident: Men, Masculinities and the Prevention of Violence Against Women, and its ongoing policy advocacy represent sustained, evidence-grounded engagement with exactly the cultural argument this essay makes.

Victoria has implemented all 227 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Family Violence, established thirty-six Orange Doors providing integrated crisis access, and committed legislative reforms specifically targeting perpetrator accountability. The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022–2032, at Commonwealth level, identifies gender inequality and harmful masculine norms as primary structural drivers requiring whole-of-population response. A Rapid Review of Prevention Approaches delivered to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in August 2024 recommended that ending gender-based violence be made a standing priority of National Cabinet.

These are genuine achievements. Acknowledging them is not a concession that undercuts the argument; it sharpens it. The gap this essay identifies is not between an inert system and a non-existent response. It is between a prevention sector that has done the intellectual work with rigour and seriousness, and a political culture whose electoral incentives often reward different framings than those favoured by primary prevention research. Mobilising fear about minority crime patterns is electorally productive in ways that holding a mirror to the majority culture is not. That is a political economy problem, not a problem of institutional ignorance. The knowledge is there. The question is whether the political will to apply it without exception follows.

VII. Australians Abroad: A Pattern Wider Than One Case

The Carman case must be situated within a documented cross-national pattern, rather than treated either as an isolated incident or as evidence of a uniquely Australian malady. Sex tourism – including the sexual exploitation of children – is driven primarily by men from economically advantaged countries travelling to regions where poverty, weak law enforcement, and economic dependency create conditions of extreme vulnerability. Citizens of the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, and Japan feature alongside Australians in prosecution records and academic literature documenting child sexual exploitation in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. UNICEF estimates that approximately two million children are affected by commercial sexual exploitation globally each year, with a significant proportion concentrated in Southeast Asian economies where, in some cases, the industry may contribute between two and fourteen percent of gross domestic product.

Academic research on child sex trafficking makes a finding that should command sustained attention: while a minority of perpetrators are preferential offenders with fixed predatory orientations, the majority are described as ‘ordinary men who buy sex to reinforce their masculinity and exercise power over the weak and vulnerable.’ The mechanism is not aberrant psychology but ordinary entitlement, activated by a context in which the normal constraints of social scrutiny, legal accountability, and community visibility are perceived to be absent or minimal.

Australia has specific and documented involvement in this broader pattern. The Australian Federal Police maintains active extraterritorial jurisdiction under Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 provisions and partnerships with agencies in the Philippines, Thailand, and elsewhere. The AFP has itself acknowledged in official reporting – including through its joint work with ECPAT – that Australian travelling child sex offenders represent a genuine and significant problem requiring ongoing law enforcement attention. The claim, attributed to ECPAT Australia CEO Bernadette McMenamin, that approximately 4,000 Australians were engaged in regular sex tours in Southeast Asia over a ten-year period with only sixteen prosecutions, circulates widely in advocacy literature, though this figure has not been independently verified against a robust primary dataset and should be treated as an indicative estimate rather than a confirmed statistic. What is not in dispute is that Australian prosecutions under extraterritorial child sex tourism laws have produced some profoundly serious cases – including an individual sentenced to thirty-five years for fifty-nine sexual offences against forty-four child victims across a sixteen-year period – and that the enforcement rate relative to actual offending remains very low by the AFP’s own analysis.

The Carman case, whatever the courts determine happened in that Pattaya condominium, sits within this broader landscape. It is not unique to Australia; it is not even disproportionately Australian within the global pattern of wealthy-nation citizens exploiting cross-border power differentials. But it is continuous with a pattern that Australian political culture consistently addresses as a law enforcement and consular matter – discrete, individual, technical – rather than as a cultural question about what some Australian men carry with them when they travel: a sense of entitlement, an expectation of diminished accountability, and the willingness to monetise vulnerability.

VIII. What Do We Actually Mean by ‘Australian Culture’?

‘Australian culture’ is invoked constantly in political debate as something requiring protection from contamination. It is invoked far less frequently as something requiring examination. The evidence demands the latter.

Australian culture is historically the culture of a colonial project conducted through systematic violence against the continent’s original inhabitants – more than a century of frontier massacres, the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families, and legislative suppression of First Nations languages, ceremonies, and social organisation. It is the culture of a penal colony whose earliest decades were, as the historical record confirms, characterised by high rates of assault, theft, and sexual violence among a largely male convict population transported to operate in conditions of profound coercion and social dislocation.

In its contemporary expression, Australian culture includes: a sporting culture in which the structural protection of institutional brands has historically been prioritised over the safety of women making complaints against high-profile athletes; a parliamentary culture in which serious allegations of sexual misconduct against sitting members have been documented across multiple jurisdictions; a media culture that has treated domestic violence as a ‘private matter’ while treating the conduct of minority communities as a civilisational problem requiring cultural analysis; and an institutional culture that, as the Ten to Men data makes plain, normalises intimate partner violence at a scale that produces 120,000 new perpetrators every year.

None of this means that violence is the defining feature of Australian culture to the exclusion of its genuine virtues, institutions, and democratic achievements. A culture is not only its ideals. It is also its patterns, its systemic outputs, and the things it consistently produces when its amplifiers – masculine norms, power differentials, institutional indulgence – interact with the universal baseline of male violence that no society has yet eliminated. When a society produces, at the scale Australia does, men who use violence against the people closest to them – and men who use the latitude of international travel to exploit economic and legal vulnerabilities – that production is not external to the culture. It is internal. It is cultural. And it demands the same quality of analysis that the culture readily applies elsewhere.

IX. The Consistency Test and Its Historical Instances

The consistency test is simple: does the analytical framework applied to migrant and minority community violence apply equally when the perpetrators are from the majority culture? Applied to the historical record, it produces an unambiguous result.

On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant – a 28-year-old white Australian man from New Town, Tasmania – carried out a massacre at and around the Port Arthur historic site that killed thirty-five people and wounded twenty-three others. It remains the worst mass murder in modern Australian history. Bryant was not a migrant; he was not the product of an imported culture. He was Australian in every sense the contemporary commentariat deploys the term. Port Arthur generated, correctly, immediate and lasting policy reform in gun regulation – the legislative response that has since become a model referenced globally. It did not generate sustained public examination of what Australian culture, in the social and institutional conditions that shaped Bryant’s life, had produced.

On 15 March 2019, Brenton Harrison Tarrant – a 28-year-old white Australian man from Grafton, New South Wales – entered the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers and murdered fifty-one Muslim worshippers, wounding forty others. He live-streamed the first attack. He had published a 74-page manifesto saturated with white supremacist ideology. He was convicted of terrorism, fifty-one counts of murder, and forty counts of attempted murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole – the first such sentence in New Zealand’s history. His manifesto drew explicitly on ideological currents circulating in mainstream Australian and global political discourse about immigration, ‘invasion’, and demographic replacement. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the attacks found that New Zealand’s security agencies had failed to adequately monitor the domestic far-right threat that produced him.

The argument is precise: Tarrant was not an import. He was an Australian man, radicalised through a combination of Australian social context, international far-right networks, and a specific political environment that normalises the language of civilisational threat. Demonstrating that the Christchurch massacre was caused by Australian political discourse would require more than the record shows. Demonstrating that a political culture routinely deploying the language of invasion, replacement, and incompatibility creates an environment in which such ideologies can be amplified and acted upon requires much less. That claim is well within the boundaries of what the evidence supports.

Consistency would require that when an Australian man is charged with murdering a teenage girl in Thailand, the same questions be asked that would be asked if the accused were a recent migrant charged with equivalent violence in Australia. Not harsher questions. Not pre-verdict presumption of guilt. The same questions, applied with the same rigour: What produced this? What cultural formations made this possible? What institutional and communal conditions failed to prevent it? What does the community from which this person comes need to examine about itself?

X. The Political Economy of Deflection – and Its Costs

The persistence of the asymmetry requires political explanation. Focusing public anxiety about violence on migrant and minority communities serves interlocking functions: it provides politicians with visible, racialised threats against which protective action can be performed; it mobilises a majority electorate more easily alarmed by the perceived threat of the stranger than by the statistically far greater threat from the intimate partner; and it allows the dominant culture to maintain a self-image of essential virtue interrupted only by external contamination.

These are not functions of bad faith alone. Electoral systems that reward short-term salience over structural complexity create genuine incentives for politicians to reach for available enemies rather than complex causes. A politician who campaigns on ‘stopping African gang violence’ delivers a message that is simple, emotive, and attributable. A politician who campaigns on ‘changing the masculine norms that produce 120,000 new domestic violence perpetrators every year’ is delivering a message that is accurate, urgent, and electorally difficult – because the perpetrators are their constituents, their donors, and in some cases themselves. The gap between prevention science and political discourse is not wholly a gap of ignorance or cynicism. It is also a gap of incentive structure. Naming this does not excuse it. But understanding it more precisely makes it harder to dismiss as mere conspiracy, and makes the advocacy task clearer: the goal is not to shame politicians into honesty but to make the political cost of asymmetric outrage higher than the political benefit.

The analytical cost of deflection is also significant. A society that investigates only some of its violence understands none of it fully. Decades of political focus on the crime patterns of minority communities have not produced the reductions in violence that evidence-based prevention work has achieved where it has been adequately resourced. The primary prevention sector – Respect Victoria, Our Watch, the DFSV Commissioner’s office – has demonstrated that sustained, culturally grounded, evidence-based intervention in masculine norms and institutional cultures does reduce rates of perpetration over time. That work has been done largely without the amplification of political rhetoric. Imagine what it could achieve if political culture treated male violence in the majority community with the same urgency, the same willingness to name cultural causation, and the same demand for collective accountability that it routinely applies to violence in minority communities.

XI. Conclusion: The Mirror

The mirror that Australian political culture most urgently needs to hold up is not the one trained on communities that have recently arrived on these shores. It is the one that reflects back the patterns embedded in the culture that has been here longest, that has shaped the institutions, written the laws, and dominated the discourse. That culture is not simply its Constitution, its cricketers, or its commitment to a fair go. It is also the daily violence that moves through its households, the conduct of some of its men in foreign countries, the ideological formations that produced the worst terrorist attack in New Zealand’s modern history, and the institutional indulgences that have allowed all of it to be explained, for too long, as deviation rather than pattern.

The reckoning this demands is not a reckoning with a foreign presence. It is a reckoning with the self – and it must be conducted with the same rigour, the same evidentiary standard, and the same willingness to follow the analysis wherever it leads that Australian political culture has, for decades, reserved for everyone else. Australia’s prevention institutions have already done the intellectual work. They have named the drivers, designed the interventions, and produced evidence of what works. The question that remains is a political one: whether the analytical framework that the evidence demands will be applied without exception, or whether the mirror will continue to be held only in one direction.

Tunchanok Donhomla was seventeen years old. Whatever the courts determine happened in Pattaya, she deserved to live. The least her death deserves is that we ask the right questions – consistently, rigorously, and of ourselves as much as of anyone else.

Sources and Data

Domestic and family violence data:

• Australian Institute of Family Studies, Ten to Men: National Study on Male Health – Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration Chapter (June 2025)
• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Summary (April 2026) and Factors Associated with FDSV
• Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission (June 2025)
• Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Gender-Based Violence in Australia at a Glance (August 2024)
• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Crime and Justice Statistics (March quarter 2026) and Recorded Crime – Offenders 2024–25
• Our Watch, Quick Facts About Violence Against Women (2024–25).

Intersecting risk factors:

• Australian Institute of Criminology, Domestic Violence Offenders: Prior Offending and reoffending in Australia (Statistical Report No. 580, September 2019)
• Australian Institute of Criminology / AIHW, Alcohol/Drug-Involved Family Violence in Australia (ADIVA) – Key Findings (Monograph 68, 2020)
• Mayshak et al., ‘Alcohol-Involved Family and Domestic Violence Reported to Police in Australia’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2022)
• AIC, Key Issues in Alcohol-Related Violence (Research in Practice No. 4, 2009).

Masculinity norms and prevention:

• Respect Victoria / The Men’s Project (Jesuit Social Services), Man Box 2024 Study and Willing, Capable and Confident: Men, Masculinities and the Prevention of Violence Against Women (2025)
• Respect Victoria, ‘What Kind of Man Do You Want to Be?’ campaign
• Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Rapid Review of Prevention Approaches (August 2024); Victorian Government, Royal Commission into Family Violence Implementation.

International and comparative data:

• WHO / LSHTM / South African MRC, Global and Regional Estimates of Violence Against Women (2013)
• Fulu et al., ‘Women’s and men’s reports of past-year prevalence of intimate partner violence and rape and women’s risk factors for intimate partner violence: A multicountry cross-sectional study in Asia and the Pacific’, PLOS Medicine (2017) [UN Multi-country Study, Asia-Pacific]
• Jewkes et al., Risk Factors for Men’s Lifetime Perpetration of Physical Violence against Intimate Partners – IMAGES Eight Countries, PLOS ONE (2015); OECD, Family Database SF3.4: Intimate Partner Violence.

Australians overseas:

• AFP / ECPAT, Expert Paper: Australian Travelling Child Sex Offenders (2021)
• McNicol and Schloenhardt, ‘Australia’s Child Sex Tourism Offences‘, Current Issues in Criminal Justice (AustLII, 2012)
• HT Legal Center, Australia Guide: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction for Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism (October 2021)
• ECPAT International, Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism – Southeast Asia Regional Overview (2021) reported case law including R v Wicks [2005] NSWCCA 409 and R v Kunsevitsky [2020] VSC 41.

Note: The frequently cited estimate of approximately 4,000 Australians engaged in regular Southeast Asian sex tours (attributed to Bernadette McMenamin of ECPAT Australia / ChildWise) has not been confirmed against a robust primary dataset and is treated here as an indicative advocacy figure rather than a verified statistic. The AFP’s own operational reporting and the volume of prosecution cases are considered the more reliable primary sources on the scale of the problem.

Community-specific crime data:

• Diversity Council Australia, ‘Fact Check on Victorian African Crime‘ (drawing on Crime Statistics Agency Victoria data, updated 2025)
• RMCC Australia, ‘Crime in Victoria: Let’s Look at the Facts‘ (Crime Statistics Agency Victoria)
• Youthlaw, ‘The Facts in Youth Crime‘ (2025)
• The Conversation, ‘Beyond Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility, African Youth Need More Culturally Aware Support‘ (March 2026).

Christchurch and Port Arthur:

• Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019
• Counter Extremism Project, Brenton Tarrant Profile
• New Zealand Court of Appeal, Tarrant appeal dismissed (April 2026).
• On Port Arthur: Mondaq, Top 10 Famous Criminal Cases in Australia.

The Pattaya case:

• Al Jazeera, ‘Thai police arrest Australian over killing of teenager found in suitcase‘ (27 June 2026); South China Morning Post, ‘Australian arrested after Thai teen girl found dead in suitcase’ (28 June 2026).

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Note on presumption of innocence: All charges against Simon Peter Carman remain allegations. He denies them. He is entitled to and has invoked the presumption of innocence. Nothing in this essay’s argument depends on or is affected by the outcome of those criminal proceedings.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, June 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010