Two months ago, the news broke of the arrest of a former childcare worker accused of possibly the worst career of serial child abuse ever discovered in Australia. The 45-year-old is accused of more than 1,600 offences, including rape, against nearly 100 children, over 15 years. His arrest was the culmination of eight years of dedicated investigation after video material was discovered circulating on the internet in 2014.
In the end, the net closed in after detectives were able to identify specific pattern bedding which they traced to a childcare centre in Brisbane.
Now, we can put a name and a face to the alleged crime.
And that’s where it gets difficult.
This is the face of the childcare worker alleged to be Australia’s worst pedophile.
Ashley Paul Griffith can be identified for the first time under new Queensland laws that allow alleged sex offenders to be named before they are committed to stand trial.
The 45-year-old former childcare worker stands accused of 1623 charges relating to the abuse of 91 little girls over a 15-year period in a dozen centres spanning states and continents.
The Australian could reveal his identity as of 12.01am on Tuesday when new laws came into effect to “modernise” the reporting of such offences and hold perpetrators to account, with media now able to name those accused in a slew of cases before the courts.
And there’s the issue.
Because no one wants to defend an alleged paedophile, especially not one accused of such heinous crimes.
But does that justify watering down laws in such a dramatic fashion?
However, other accused serious sex offenders, including a high-profile Australian man and two reality show contestants, can still not be named due to court-issued suppression orders that override the legislative changes.
Face it, everyone knows who the “high-profile Australian man” is. And there’s the problem with these laws. We’ve seen too many grim examples of people’s lives ruined by flimsy or outright false accusations. The reason we have laws such as preventing naming suspects until they were committed to trial was so that such ruination couldn’t happen until at least the accusations had met the evidentiary threshold of committing to trial.
Even then, innocent people have been put through the wringer, their lives and reputations ruined, perhaps forever. Because, such is the opprobrium around sex offences, that even being cleared at law will often never clear the stink of public opinion.
But… this alleged monster?
Griffith has remained anonymous since his arrest by the Australian Federal Police in August 2022. The case was made public by the AFP a year later in August after more than 1000 child exploitation charges were laid against him for offences at 10 centres in Brisbane, one in Sydney’s inner-west and another in Pisa, Italy between 2007 and 2022.
It followed an eight-year-long investigation that had allegedly connected the Gold Coast man to child abuse material posted online in 2014, AFP officers said while announcing his arrest eight weeks ago.
Court documents viewed by The Australian allege he systematically recorded each assault and rape on phones and cameras, keeping meticulous files of each of his victims. The charges revealed a pattern of escalating offending, with two little girls at one centre raped more than two dozen times each over several months.
It’s undeniable that anonymity allowed him to keep offending for many years.
Griffith had previously been investigated by Queensland Police on two occasions in 2021 and again in 2022, but no charges were laid despite a former colleague alleging she had seen him kissing a child.
His blue card which allowed him to work with children was unaffected as a result, with court documents revealing he had allegedly continued to offend up until two months before his arrest.
But, is this a case of motte-and-bailey?
Previously, media could not name accused persons until after they were committed to trial, due to concerns over “reputational damage” caused if somebody maliciously made up complaints.
The Australian
In an episode of Stephen Fry’s Absolute Power, the spin doctors are hired to sell the public on an Orwellian National Identity Card scheme. So, they hire actors to play such unsavoury characters as paedophiles and terrorists, explaining that anonymity is essential to their predatory lifestyles. The gambit is clear and clever: who would defend the anonymity of a paedophile?
But then the spin team begin to realise that they are under government surveillance.
And therein lies the rub: no one wants to protest watering down long-standing laws if it means that devils are brought to justice. But, as Robert Bolt asked in A Man for All Seasons, when the devil comes for you, where will you go, having torn down all the laws?
