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Another week, another grim parade of trusted authority figures caught preying on children: often while the very bureaucracies meant to stop them. shrug and tick boxes and wave them through. Victoria’s child safety regulator, the ACT’s former top law officer, and a prestige school’s English teacher: all cases where the system didn’t just fail. It actively enabled the risk.
A convicted child sex offender serving as the president of a Melbourne community organisation received an exemption from requiring a Working with Children Check (WWCC) by Victoria's child safety regulator last year.
San Maung Saw Wah, 73, leads the Melbourne Karen Buddhist Association Inc. (MKBA), which organises cultural programs hosting children as young as six, according to the information it submitted to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.
Child abuse expert Adjunct Professor Chris Goddard said the decision by Victoria’s Commission for Children and Young People to exempt a convicted child sex offender, “defies belief”. Photos and videos show Saw Wah sitting metres from children at ceremonies and helping organise a three-day camp for 70 young people.
He was convicted in 2015 of sexually assaulting a young girl while he was head of the Australian Karen Dance Association. The judge noted he was seen as a “grandfather figure” by the victim and her family. Registered sex offenders are banned from child-related work in Victoria. Yet last year the regulator told his organisation the rules “did not apply” because they supposedly didn’t “exercise care, supervision or authority over children.”
The Victorian government recently revoked the CCYP's powers to assess organisations and investigate allegations.
But the arse-covering continues.
The CCYP directed the ABC's inquiry to its successor the Social Services Regulator, which did not answer questions about whether Saw Wah's criminal background was considered in the review.
Social Services Regulator Jonathan Kaplan did not comment on the specifics of this matter [...]
The National Children's Commissioner Deborah Tsorbaris also did not comment on this matter specifically.
Meanwhile, in Canberra, former ACT Attorney-General Gordon Ramsay faces grooming charges. Police allege he spent years cultivating a teenage boy with expensive steak dinners, theatre nights, daily “good morning/good night” messages, alcohol (knowing the family’s no-booze-before-18 rule), clothes, lingerie and sex toys. He allegedly pushed for increasingly explicit “SPUN” photos (meaning the removal of clothing) in a shared iCloud folder and reassured the hesitant boy to “keep trusting him”.
The police statement notes concern raised by the boy's family in June 2024 about how much time the pair were spending together.
Later in the year, Mr Ramsay is alleged to have messaged the boy saying due to his "parents mentioning going to the police, they needed to delete the SPUN photographs".
Mr Ramsay is then alleged to have sent an email saying all the photos would be in one folder on his device and he would delete the shared folder and the boy should do the same.
Ramsay pleaded not guilty. The case dragged partly because the DPP’s office accidentally sent unredacted suppression-lifted documents to the ABC.
Lastly, in a story that’s becoming all-too familiar, yet another teacher has been catfished – only, this time it wasn’t a cop posing as a kid, it was an actual kid playing To Catch a Predator.
A former Knox Grammar teacher has avoided jail for grooming a child, with a judge ruling it could still have caused harm despite the teenager acting as a vigilante in an attempt to “catch pedos”.
The sentence followed the revelation that William Gulson was due to accept a University of Sydney award the day before he learnt his punishment.
They revoked it at the last minute.
The 28-year-old was sentenced to a three-year community correction order – essentially a good behaviour bond – at Downing Centre Local Court on Friday for procuring whom he thought was a 15-year-old child for sex.
He was also placed on the NSW Child Protection Register.
Judge Hugh Donnelly distinguished it from “more serious” cases because there was no real child and no meeting. But he found beyond reasonable doubt that Gulson “had an interest in children younger than 16.” Crown prosecutor Jessica Chan was more blunt:
“In no sense… could a teacher of a 15-year-old child seeking to procure a 15-year-old child for unlawful sexual activity be described as trivial offending”.
One of MKBA members said […] “We keep saying we want to protect children, but when it comes to this, we can’t even implement basic safety measures.”
Three stories. One theme: the people and agencies we trust to protect children keep dropping the ball – or handing predators the ball. Regulators exempting convicted offenders from basic checks. Elite legal figures grooming teens while supposedly upholding justice. Schools and universities nearly honouring men caught red-handed. And in the vacuum, children themselves are reduced to playing detective on dating apps because adults won’t do the job.
How did we reach this pass? A child protection regime that is fragmented, captured by process over protection, and terrified of “stigmatising” certain communities or “over-reacting.” A cultural elite that lectures the plebs about safety while its own members get kid-glove treatment. And a broader failure that leaves actual kids so unprotected they feel they must pose as bait to expose the monsters.
