Wherever there are children, there will be paedophiles knocking on the door. It’s as true as that sugar attracts ants. Some institutions have learned the hard way that ignoring this basic fact, whether by pretending it’s not happening or by secretly shuffling known paedophiles around the system, is the single worst approach. Some, like the churches, have rightfully paid for doing so, both financially and in lasting reputational damage.
Others, though, have been allowed to get away with it. The police, social workers and politicians, who not just ignored but aided and abetted vast networks of Pakistani Muslim paedophiles in Britain for instance, or public schools in the USA and Australia who have secretly shuffle paedophile workers around their systems with the same devastating results as when bishops did it.
It seems that having powerful protectors in unions, bureaucracies and governments goes a long way. Especially if you’re a multi-billion-dollar industry that has ideologically captured the chattering elite.
Paedophiles have infiltrated Australia’s $22 billion childcare industry by exploiting lax regulation, piecemeal oversight and glaring staffing inadequacies, a major Four Corners investigation has uncovered.
This being the ABC, the story is slanted to a pro-state-run childcare angle, with the Ultimo Collective framing the problem as an outcome of the wicked private industry, which is to totally disregard the demonstrable failures of government-run institutions in protecting children nearly everywhere else.
But that shouldn’t distract from the basic point: while Western society has been gaslit for decades into handing its children over to complete strangers, almost from birth, the outcomes have gone from bad to worse. We know the long-claimed educational and social benefits are illusory at best and wildly opposite at worst.
All that is almost nothing, though, to the risk of sexual abuse in childcare.
We have identified almost 150 childcare workers convicted, charged, or accused of sexual abuse and inappropriate conduct. Half of the 42 people convicted were sentenced in the past five years alone and another 14 are currently before the courts.
The public records we have pieced together show the rate of offending in childcare is increasing – exposing a system that has allowed predators to thrive […]
Drawing on more than 200,000 pages of previously confidential documents, police tip-offs, court records and evidence from parents, educators, whistleblowers and experts, the investigation exposes a system so broken it has created a perfect storm for abuse.
They could be talking about any education department in the country. But the problem is indeed the systems: unless they’re firewalled, systems involving children will always be vulnerable to predators, because they are, quite literally, paedophiles.
“The psychology of these people is to seek out opportunity, and childcare centres represent an excellent opportunity for them,” said Drew Viney, the former head of AFP’s National Victim Identification Unit, who helped catch one of the country’s most prolific paedophiles, childcare worker Ashley Griffith.
“The safeguards aren’t there … there’s failures at multiple levels from what I’ve witnessed firsthand.”
“These monsters are thriving in these spaces because it’s so easy for them,” said the mother of a child who was repeatedly sexually abused by Griffith in NSW.
Here comes the ABC, beating their favourite drum.
Our analysis shows that most of the abuse occurs in for-profit centres, where cost-cutting, high staff turnover, and routinely breached or gamed child-to-staff ratios leave supervision dangerously thin.
Staff burnout, low pay, and fast-tracked training courses are also gutting quality and oversight.
It should be no surprise that most abuse occurs in for-profit centres – because most centres are for-profit (over 70 per cent). Does anyone really think an entirely government-run sector would be any better? The ABC’s own reporting suggests otherwise.
Four Corners has accessed the largest-ever database of childcare regulator files – more than 200,000 pages of documents previously kept from public view – containing alarming findings about the sector in New South Wales, Australia’s largest childcare market, and a stark reflection of what is happening nationally.
The files reveal widespread gaps in safety, with hundreds of centres breaching child safety laws.
These range from ‘missing, expired or unverified’ Working With Children checks, to dozens of reported incidents of blatant child abuse to poor record-keeping allowing predators to slither in the shadows. And how did the government regulator respond?
In most cases the regulator responded with a caution or warning letter to the centre to do better, even in repeat cases […]
The NSW regulatory files included documents detailing supervision breaches, including hundreds of serious lapses – yet most ended with nothing more than a warning or “caution” letter that “no further action will be taken”.
We found just one fine: a $200 penalty issued in 2021 after a child scaled a fence and escaped. For the three other breaches that day, the centre received a simple caution.
Even repeated failures to meet the legally required staff-to-child ratios took years before any attempt was made to shut a centre down.
Tell me again that a completely government-run sector – where powerful public sector unions run more like a mob protection racket – would be any better.
The fast-tracked training courses is also something the ABC skirts over. One can’t help thinking, for ideological reasons: most of the fast-tracked – ‘cursory’, or ‘rubber-stamping’ would be a more accurate description – are run by the same dodgy education providers who operate as little more than a thinly disguised migration scam. With worse outcomes than usual.
“Predators are drawn to child care for the same reason that fishermen are drawn to the place where there’s the most fish,” [Michael Bourke, a global authority on child sex offenders] said.
“The predators are going to look for any prey-rich environment, any environment in which there’s children, and then there’s a decreased chance of being detected. So they’re going to be looking for places where there’s instant trust … and lack of supervision.”
Both things the spruikers of cradle-to-school childcare have been fostering for decades.
NSW Greens MP Abigail Boyd has been working with Four Corners to access these previously hidden files. She was horrified, albeit not surprised, by the extent of sexual abuse and the failure of the regulator […]
‘We need to wake up.’
Indeed we do. To the whole dangerous, deleterious, scam of universal childcare.
Instead, the government is determined to make it truly ‘universal’: every child, from their earliest weeks to the age of 18, effectively raised by the state – and prey to the worst people at every step of the way.
Why have we let ourselves be talked into this?
