childcare
Hidden in Plain Sight
How sex abuse has gone undetected inside Australia’s childcare sector.
A crisis in Australia's childcare sector
The Australian government is scrambling to respond to an alarming number of child sex abuse cases emerging in the nation’s childcare sector. In November last year, parents across the nation watched in horror as former childcare worker Ashley Paul Griffith pleaded guilty to more than 300 charges against 73 children. Joshua Dale Brown is currently facing charges relating to more than 70 offences against 8 children at a childcare centre in Melbourne. Figures obtained by the ABC identify 150 convicted and alleged offenders who worked at Australian childcare centres, each abusing multiple children, with most convicted in the last 10 years.
There is a particular physical recoil most of us feel in response to each new allegation or conviction. A wave of nausea. A visceral panic or rage. How could someone do this to a child? How could they get away with it? What if this was my child? As someone who was sexually abused as a child, perhaps there is an added layer. A deep-seated dread. A knowing of what might lie ahead for the victims. The memory of fear, betrayal and hurt.
Victim or not. Parent or not. Any sane person knows with absolute certainty that the system has failed children in the most terrible way. In the wake of the Brown allegations, more than 1,200 children possibly exposed to the accused paedophile were tested for Sexually Transmitted Infections. The trauma of these events extends to many children and families who may not have been sexually abused but for whom the possibility can never quite be ruled out.
A system that failed by design
How did we get here? How do we fix it? The Australian childcare sector is a cautionary tale of growth outstripping resources, regulatory failure, chronic understaffing and inspection systems that cannot keep up. A workforce spread too thin, tasked with impossible care ratios while wrangling mounting paperwork and procedural requirements. In 2025, 7 percent of childcare centres in Australia had obtained a waiver to operate while short-staffed. Figures obtained by the ABC revealed that 1 in 10 childcare centres had never been rated by regulators and 47,000 children attend centres that don’t meet national quality standards.
The Four Corners investigation exposed that child sexual offending within this system is not opportunistic, but organised and deliberate, exploiting understaffed rooms, overworked supervisors and patchy inspections. Encrypted online forums reveal networks of offenders sharing detailed instructions on how to infiltrate childcare centres, groom colleagues and parents, and gain access to babies and toddlers while avoiding detection.
These spaces function as both training grounds and echo chambers, where abuse is normalised and strategies refined. Paedophiles operating in childcare centres are rarely investigated based on allegations from within the centres. In most instances, the childcare centre offender has been brought down by the online sexual abuse material they generate during their offending.
Perhaps the most glaring oversight to emerge from the recent criminal investigations was that childcare workers had unfettered access to their personal mobile phones at work. Legislation that bans or heavily restricts the use of personal devices in childcare centres has since been passed by politicians anxious to allay parental fear in Australia. Some centres have also banned male workers from changing nappies, while others require permission from parents for male workers to carry out ‘intimate care’. Other centres have implemented ‘four eyes’ policies where two members of staff are required to be present during intimate care such as nappy changes or toileting. States considered mandating CCTV use in childcare centres, however laws prevent their use in toilet or nappy change areas due to the risk of hacking closed-circuit systems and misusing the footage.
There has been clear pushback in defence of male educators targeted by these new regulations, arguing that some men were great educators and were unfairly tarnished by the recent events. But in November 2023, a nationally-weighted UNSW study of men’s self-reported sexual behaviour (n = 1,965) found that 15.1 per cent of men reported some level of sexual interest in children, while 9.4 per cent admitted to at least one form of sexual offending against a child. Most concerning was the overlap: 4.9 per cent of men reported both sexual interest in children and a history of offending. The findings suggest that sexual abuse exists not at the margins of society, but embedded within it, with offenders often remaining undetected while positioning themselves close to children and families.
UNSW researchers, Delanie Woodlock and Lenka Olejnikova, have called for urgent recognition of the uncomfortable truth that most childcare sexual abuse is committed by men. “Past inquiries into child sexual abuse by male educators have found that, in efforts to avoid appearing discriminatory, male workers are often subject to less scrutiny,” they write. “Ironically, this fear of seeming biased can create the very conditions that offenders exploit—grooming colleagues, parents and children to commit abuse while hidden in plain sight.”
Why regulation alone can't protect children
Even when laws and regulations exist on paper, enforcement remains the point of failure. This is not just a breakdown of policy, but of understaffed rooms, stretched supervisors and inspection systems that cannot realistically keep pace. Even where safeguards exist, no one is consistently there to enforce them. Centres operate short-staffed, inspections are infrequent, and overworked educators are expected to monitor each other when already drowning in responsibility.
Effective law enforcement would ultimately require people with a vested interest in the business to flag their own internal breaches and risk immense reputational damage. It would also require centres with enough staff to allocate two people to what was previously a one-person job. It requires staff who have the time to observe that policies and laws were being adhered to. If male workers are considered the problem, this would further reduce the already limited pool of people centres have to hire from.
Conditions frequently observed within childcare centres could also impede adherence. Educators being stressed and overburdened are unlikely to have the time and energy to police those around them. Even something like mobile phone use can be a slippery rule to enforce. Gradually, as the fresh horror of the abuse cases fades, people will let their guard down. We will tell ourselves a story that allows us to distance ourselves from the truth that children have and continue to be abused in the most vile ways.
Better offender registries and cross-agency information sharing are critical, but still only captures people with a prior conviction. The offenders yet to be caught are also a significant concern. Calls to record complaints against workers that were unsubstantiated in a database for prospective employers to access pose ethical problems. What about the unlikely event that there has been a mistake? The wrong person identified by the child or the parent as the abuser? A complaint recorded for future potential employers to see would decimate job prospects.
Naomi Schaefer Riley
The politics of "safety" and the denial of choice
In some ways, it would be easier if this were the result of regulatory failure alone. That if we changed the rules and bolstered the ability of regulators to enforce them, we could protect children. But the truth is this is also a systemic cultural failure. The extent of the offending is a clear reminder that a culture of silence and ignorance still surrounds child sexual abuse regardless of where it happens. Griffith was first reported by a parent, whose child had named him and described the sexual abuse, 10 years prior to his arrest. In 2015 Shannon McCoole was sentenced to 35 years for abusing 7 children in out-of-home care over a period of 4 years during which time children, foster parents and co-workers repeatedly reported his suspicious behaviour.
Victims were not believed and red flags were missed or ignored. Warning signs were actively minimised. Last year, in relation to childcare centre offending, the Queensland Family and Child Commission warned “the prioritisation of an organisation's reputation, a fear of defamation and legal risks to organisations and individuals may act as a deterrent to raising or sharing concerns about a person, particularly where complaints have not been substantiated.”
Unfortunately, reported cases represent a small fraction of actual abuse being perpetrated, with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse finding that on average it took 23 years for victims to disclose. This does not account for pre-verbal children who may never be able to disclose. ABS figures estimate that around 84 percent of incidents are never reported to police.
A long history of turning a blind eye to child sexual abuse—this wilful ignorance and refusal to confront what is ugly—has given us a childcare system that relies on hope rather than protection. As hard as it is to live with the truth, facing it is the only way to act with clarity. It is the only way to build systems that are proactive rather than reactive.
A more effective solution may lie beyond childcare centres. At present, Australian parents receive a Child Care Subsidy to help offset the cost of out-of-home care. In theory, the subsidy could be expanded to other forms of care, so parents are not forced into centre-based childcare by financial pressure. A petition by the volunteer-led group For Parents calls for what it describes as a simple but powerful change: allowing the Child Care Subsidy to be used for a broader range of care options, including care by grandparents, nannies, au pairs and co-working spaces that allow parents to keep children close.
As of this writing, the petition has gathered more than 18,800 signatures. If the government cannot guarantee the basic safety of children in childcare centres, it has an obligation to give parents real choice and genuine autonomy in how they care for their children in the early years.
The main opponents to this solution are the Labor government, which has won elections on its expansionist childcare policy, and childcare advocates who appear reluctant to acknowledge that centre-based childcare is fundamentally flawed. Expanding the subsidy, giving parents options outside of centre-based childcare, would require an admission of guilt. It would require the government and advocates to admit that the early education settings they have waxed lyrical about and funnelled billions into are not quite the havens they made them out to be.
Australian childcare advocacy group The Parenthood, partly funded by not-for-profit childcare provider Goodstart, has publicly opposed moves to give parents more choice in how they use the subsidy due to concerns more children would be abused in a home setting. In an email to me explaining this position, Parenthood CEO Georgie Dent wrote: “public money must go into properly regulated quality early childhood settings,” and “direct payments to parents, grandparents or other family members—without oversight, training or regulation—will not improve child safety or learning outcomes. The evidence on this is confronting: the rates of child sexual abuse perpetrated by grandparents in family daycare settings are deeply concerning. It underlines why strong safeguards and accountability mechanisms are essential whenever public funds are involved in the care of children.”
While approved Family Daycare centres are eligible for childcare subsidy funding, which seems to support the argument that regulated childcare settings are inherently more risky, Dent declined to provide the source for the evidence she cited regarding grandparents abusing children in family daycare settings. It’s likely she is mistakenly using this evidence to allude to broader figures about most sexual abuse being perpetrated by people known to the child.
What the evidence says about real risk
According to the ABS, 88 percent of sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child. Of this, 47 percent is perpetrated by an adult male non-immediate family member. This is a figure I first became familiar with after disclosing being sexually abused by my step-grandfather. I was shocked to learn that most abuse happened at the hands of a family member, rather than a stranger in a dark alley. I had felt very alone in the fact that I had been abused by a family member and this isolation had no doubt compounded the shame. However, to find out I was in the majority provided some relief.
It’s important to note that childcare workers also fall into the category of “most likely” offenders, simply because they are known to the child. Current data is too limited to argue confidently that one setting is safer than the other. If child sexual abuse is the primary concern of advocates such as Georgie Dent, it is difficult to justify continued funding of childcare centres given repeated failures to regulate the sector in a way that protects children.
The central question remains: are children actually safer in childcare centres, given what we know about patterns of offending? In absolute terms, more abuse occurs outside childcare centres, but children spend around 84 per cent of their time outside these settings, making higher raw numbers unsurprising.
The more meaningful question is one of relative risk: is abuse overrepresented in childcare environments, given that not all children attend daycare and those who do spend an average of 27 hours per week there? Answering that would require reliable data we simply do not have, and it would assume abuse is consistently reported, which it is not.
Despite gaps in the data, there is substantial evidence in academic literature that institutional settings carry higher risk due to environmental factors. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse highlighted that institutional environments, including childcare, carry higher risk despite abuse occurring in all settings. Key risk factors include “a disproportionate clustering of adults with a propensity to abuse children” and the absence of parents. Offenders exploit this absence because nearby parents are more likely to detect subtle signs of distress, and are more likely to remove children from unsafe situations.
Critically, centre-based care can magnify harm by exposing large numbers of children to a single offender. As one review observed, “the unfettered access perpetrators have to children in institutional contexts… may go some way to explaining this phenomenon.”
Hal Niedzviecki
Where prevention really begins
One of the best ways to protect children anywhere is simply to improve awareness and empower people to report. This means educating any carer or parent about the signs of abuse, child behaviours, grooming behaviours and actively teaching parents and educators how to speak up. They must know that their reports will be taken seriously, and that law-enforcement and judicial process is equipped to deal with their reports.
As someone who was sexually abused in a private home as a child, I am disappointed that disincentivising home care and depriving parents of the choice to implement proximity care models is being seen as a legitimate way to reduce sexual offending against children. I would not have been better off in a childcare centre, this would not have stopped the abuse. In my view, it may have even compounded the trauma of not having free access to the loving and supportive parent I had. I would have been a target for offenders in the childcare system due to my history of sexual abuse. I find it repugnant that families are being seen as a risk factor and that limiting exposure to family life is being considered a helpful way of addressing the prevalence of child sexual abuse.
I have long advocated for more awareness of the risk and signs, and more support for families to act and stop or report abuse. We must raise awareness, stop it at the start and ensure severe penalties are in place in the event abuse is carried out. Parents and grandparents must not be framed as villains in order to justify childcare advocacy groups opposition to expanding the subsidy.
The truth is uncomfortable, but it is no longer deniable. Children are not being failed by isolated bad actors alone, but by systems built on denial, convenience and political preservation. We have treated child safety as a branding exercise rather than a moral obligation, prioritising optics over outcomes and reassurance over reform. Real protection will not come from more slogans, more hollow safeguards or more funding tied to ideology. It will come from honesty about risk, humility about failure, and the courage to give families real power over how their children are kept safe. Until then, we are not protecting children. We are merely hoping.
Keep reading
Hidden in Plain Sight
The Unwelcome Truth about Rape
The BPA Panic and the Distortion of Science
