As I’ve written recently, revelations of abuse and maltreatment of babies and toddlers in childcare centres are shocking and damning. The arrest of Australia’s most prolific paedophile was just the tip of the iceberg. Sexual abuse and physical abuse are far too common. Slapping babies repeatedly or leaving toddlers tied to highchairs for hours and disgusting meals that a Victorian workhouse orphan would turn their nose up at.
Why are so many people, women especially, so determined to push their children into such houses of horrors from the very earliest age?
Of course, left-leaning media try to blame it all on for-profit childcare. While they have a point of sorts – unscrupulous operators will cut costs as much as possible, to maximise profit – that doesn’t mean that government-run childcare will be any better. Indeed, more new revelations expose just what a house of horrors government-run ‘care’ all too often is.
Residential care is an increasingly utilised model whereby child protection departments outsource the care of vulnerable children to agencies running on rostered staff.
In Victoria and Queensland, staff can work with these highly complex kids without having completed the bare minimum – a TAFE certificate – first.
Many children, [Saachi Stoneley] among them, would escape these houses notorious for violence, abuse and property destruction.
Like Catholic bishops and education bureaucrats, people higher up in the government system knew full well about the abuse.
In April 2021, a senior worker at one of the homes, Be the Change, repeatedly reached out to a man in his 40s who was known to sexually abuse Saachi.
The texts, sent across 10 days to Benjamin ‘Benji’ Stansmore, instructed:
“Hello please tell saachi to call me so I don’t have to call the police.”
Saachi’s mother Siobhan had for months alleged to the police, the department and Be the Change that Stansmore was raping her child.
When Siobhan found out about this “inappropriate” exchange – and the worker’s perceived reluctance to engage the police – she took it up with the department responsible for placing Saachi with Be the Change.
To her disbelief, the department explained it away as a safety check.
Even worse, the department passed off Stansmore as Saachi’s ‘boyfriend’. She was 14. He looks to be 30 if he is a day. Stansmore was convicted of three child sex offences in 2023 – one of them pertaining to Saachi.
For more than a year, the department refused to move Saachi from the Fraser Coast in south-east Queensland, where she was being abused.
Last year, she turned 18 and was finally allowed, by law, to tell her story.
Lest we be inclined to blame Saachi’s mother, her only failing was to trust the government.
About six months before Saachi went into state care, Siobhan had sought help for her daughter’s violent outbursts and suspected conduct disorder.
Somewhere along the wait for a psychiatrist, life at home became so volatile child protection authorities got involved.
As former Victorian premier Joan Kirner once remarked, “The only difference between a pitbull and child services is that eventually the pitbull lets go of your child.”
The two residential care homes Saachi was moved to were far from the “therapeutic” environment Siobhan says the department had promised.
Within weeks of moving into a group home run by Anglicare, Saachi was pulled onto the merry-go-round of dysfunction, set in motion by kids more streetwise than her […]
Siobhan went to police stations in Maryborough and Hervey Bay to report her child was being abused by men who supplied her with drugs.
The ABC has seen more than a dozen emails Siobhan sent to the department between 2020 and 2021, detailing the sexual abuse.
Even when authorities reluctantly took action, they merely piled insult on to injury. Siobhan was not told of Stanmore’s sentencing until the day, and given less than three hours to produce a victim impact statement. If that sounds like a cover-up, it’s still going on: the Queensland child safety department refuses to comment, hiding behind ‘privacy laws’. The former CEO of the government-run ‘care’ (now disbanded) likewise hides behind ‘confidentiality and privacy’. Queensland Police won’t comment either.
All of which sounds exactly like the sort of cover up and tacit enabling that the churches have been so (rightfully) condemned for.
It’s just not Queensland, either. Other states have similarly shocking stories and statistics. Up to one-third of children in state ‘care’ are believed to be sexually abused.
Former Victorian child protection department worker Shannon Miller […] left his team manager role about two years ago. He believes there was a sexually exploited child in nearly every residential care home he came across.
What the hell is wrong with our society?
