Domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) commissioner Micaela Cronin says Australians are not scared enough of "manosphere" content drawing young Australian men into radical, violent and misogynistic views.
The commissioner is urging state and federal governments to take more action to prevent misogynistic influencers online from undermining decades of work to end violence against women and children.
"I don't think we are scared enough about what is coming down the pipeline," she told the ABC.
"Governments, both the Commonwealth and states and territories, have to collectively grapple with the scale of the problem we're facing."
Ms Cronin said the upcoming second action plan, which provides specific details on what governments have agreed to do to end violence against women and children, should be accompanied by substantial funding increases to frontline services and prevention programs.
As Ms Cronin enters the final 12 months of her five-year term as the first DFSV commissioner, she is particularly concerned by the rate of young people perpetrating sexual violence against one another.
She said that while there were a number of factors contributing to the problem, including an increase in violence against children who then go on to replicate the behaviour, the internet is partly to blame.
"[Part of the problem is] the increase of the impact of the online environment on children and young people's understanding of the world and themselves and relationships and sexual relationships," she said.
"[Along with] the rise of the influence of harmful pornography on how children are being educated about what sex is."
Authorities still playing catch-up
Young men are routinely being fed male-supremacist content on social media, and it appears to be affecting their behaviour in the real world.
Studies from Monash University and the University of Adelaide have described a rise in sustained, sexist behaviour of boys in school, which teachers link to an increased exposure to extreme, anti-women content.
In another Monash survey of 2,600 teachers, educators said they had been subjected to sexual harassment, degrading behaviour and violent threats.
The academics who led the study describe it as "misogynistic radicalisation".
Ms Cronin said the impact the online world was having on young people kept her up at night.
"I'm very worried about that … the difference in what we are seeing about young men's attitudes than their grandfather's attitudes, the increase in misogyny online, the impact that is having both on young women and young men, gender-diverse people, about their views about relationships."
Earlier this year, a Melbourne University study found younger men are more likely than older men to hold misogynistic views about a woman's place in society and violence against women.
Almost a quarter of gen Z men believed the movement for women's equality should be violently resisted, with researchers finding that content that is misogynistic and endorses violence against women is the most likely influence on extremist attitudes in Australia.
Asked whether growing male-supremacist beliefs and violence against women are being taken seriously enough as a national security issue, Ms Cronin said progress was being made, but authorities were still catching up to the scale of the problem.
"I think we're getting there … there's a catch-up process still around information sharing."
"If you're going to be thinking about how do you use what we're learning about online misogyny to keep women safe in their homes, [it] is different than when you are talking about terrorism and community acts."
"[But] there are similar processes about developing those attitudes absolutely, and we need to be thinking about that in our prevention and early intervention approaches."
What action is being taken?
One prevention measure the commissioner endorses is the federal government's digital duty of care, which she said could help subdue some radical anti-women content online.
"We need to be thinking about safety and principles of safety from the very outset, not as an afterthought, not putting up guardrails after the horse is already bolted," she said.
But Ms Cronin said there were still more federal and state governments needed to do, such as implement the hundreds of recommendations from previous reviews, royal commissions and inquests into violence against women and children.
These recommendations include cutting off late-night alcohol deliveries earlier in the evening, funding justice-system navigators to support those going through the courts for sexual-violence matters and investing more in frontline services.
"What I'm really looking forward to is the launch of the second action plan and seeing the investment that is required to implement what we already know needs to be done," she said.
That plan is expected to be released in the first half of 2027.
