CANBERRA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Australia's indigenous children are about seven times as likely as non-indigenous children to be the subject of substantiated abuse or neglect, a report said on Wednesday.
The Child Headline Indicators (CHI) report, released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) on Wednesday, cited the figures as 52.4 per 1,000 children compared with 7.4 per 1,000.
The report also revealed that there were 33.7 confirmed cases of sexual, physical or emotional abuse or neglect per 1,000 children in Australia's Northern Territory in 2016-17, up from 27.3 the previous year.
The nationwide figure was 10 substantiated cases per 1,000 children.
Approximately 25 percent of the NT's population is indigenous, the largest percentage of any of Australia's six states and two territories.
"The reasons for the over-representation of Indigenous children in child protection substantiations are complex: the legacy of past policies of forced removal; intergenerational effects of previous separations from family and culture; statlower socioeconomic us; and perceptions arising from cultural differences in child-rearing practices are all underlying causes for their over-representation in the child welfare system," said the report.
A case is deemed substantiated when authorities have received a complaint, investigated it and determined that maltreatment did occur.
CHI is a set of 19 indicators that serve as "high level, measureable indicators that identify the immediate environments as particularly important to children's health, development and wellbeing."
In addition to child abuse and neglect, the AIHW also uncovered an "unfavourable decrease" in immunization rates with 91.5 percent of children fully immunized at two years of age in 2016, down from 92.4 percent in 2014.
The NT was the worst performer in that category with 87.5 percent of children in the territory fully immunized by the age of two compared to 92.8 percent in the best-performing state, Tasmania.
Teenage birth rates improved from 17.6 per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 19 in 2006 to 11.4 in 2015. The decline was most prominent in the NT where the figure dropped from 63.6 per 1,000 in 2006 to 39.7 in 2015.
