Police believe the 45 per cent fall in sexual assaults recorded across Canberra during April is "masking" a major problem of under-reporting.
Chef police officer Ray Johnson said that police had seen a reduction in sexual assault and "we are concerned that actually this is masked because people are at home with the perpetrator so we are keen to extend the message that police are ... there to assist".
"We are very conscious of that [under-reporting issue]," he said.
In a report last year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2.2 million people - predominantly women - had experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or previous partner.
Family violence offences and assaults are also recorded within ACT police's publicly-accessible crime data and all notably fell in number during April at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, compared with April 2019.
The data does not show how many of these family violence assaults were sexual assaults.
While the overall number of family violence incidents reported to police during April fell only slightly (down 12 per cent), the number of offences levelled against perpetrators fell 47 per cent, which suggests that on attending the incidents, police are not finding the evidence they need to build a substantive case for court.
Across the territory 30 per cent fewer people were arrested for family violence, compared with the same month last year.
NSW police conducted a highly proactive program of apprehended domestic violence order compliance checks as the coronavirus lockdown restrictions swung into place.
In April alone, NSW police made an additional 3684 checks compared with April 2019, and specialist teams were deployed across the state to arrest and prosecute offenders..
ACT police were unable to provide similar comparative data because this would require a "manual interrogation of all family violence listed matters in our case management system".
ACT police conduct compliance checks "in circumstances where it is believed compliance is not occurring, or where an individual has been assessed as unlikely to comply with court orders".
"Where police become aware of a breach of court order, appropriate action will be taken".
ACT Greens MLA member Caroline Le Couteur, who will not be contesting her seat in the next election, has been advocating strongly for improved transparency around family violence data in the ACT to help frame better policy-making and direct support service funding.
The clunky ACT police database PROMIS, shared with the Australian Federal Police, is not well-designed for data collection. PROMIS was intended to be replaced by a new system called Spectrum, but this program was quietly defunded by the federal police .
When ACT police minister Mick Gentleman was asked a question on notice by Ms Le Couteur about the need for greater transparency related to family violence data, he responded that "due to the nature of family violence investigations, not all criminal offences are identified at the time of the incident".
"A large number of incidents that ACT Policing attend do not result in a criminal offence so the number of family violence related offences reported do not reflect the number of family violence incidents attended and investigated by ACT Policing," he responded.
He said that while police work closely with government and non-government agencies on the issue "each organisation collates and reports on their own data and reports on different aspects of family violence including the age and gender of the victim".
"Each agency has a different role to play in prosecuting offenders and supporting victims of family violence. These roles are complimentary but recorded and reported differently."
