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Sexual predators are targeting children as young as nine online and coercing them into producing abusive material of themselves, while senior police warn that childcare centres are under-reporting abuse to maximise profits and preserve their reputations.
Cases of children “self-producing” videos and images of sexual and physical abuse online are becoming increasingly prevalent alongside AI-generated child abuse material and alarming social media content that authorities say is normalising violent behaviour in teenage boys and young men.
Police also say that children are routinely accessing social media platforms and online chat rooms despite the federal government’s feted ban prohibiting those under 16 from accessing them as detectives observe an uptick of boys, some as young as seven years old, abusing their siblings after being exposed to pornography.
“More offending is occurring in the childcare sector than what’s actually being reported,” Detective Superintendent Linda Howlett, the commander of NSW Police’s child abuse squad, told this masthead ahead of the launch of National Child Protection Week on Sunday.
“A lot of childcare centres will not report because [they’re] making huge amounts of money.”
Howlett said centres chose not to report abuse to preserve their reputations and avoid having children withdrawn from their care by concerned parents.
“Obviously, they don’t want [that] to happen because they’re making a lot of money out of this,” she said.
Detective Superintendent Virginia Gorman, the commander of NSW Police’s sex crimes squad, said that despite the federal government’s social media ban, children were accessing, and being targeted on, popular platforms.
“That doesn’t mean that children don’t get online,” she told this masthead in her first interview since being appointed the squad’s commander three months ago. “It’s just probably that their parents don’t know about it.”
Howlett said: “Unfortunately, a lot of these kids are on sites that people prey upon them.”
The number of reports made to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, which is led by the Australian Federal Police and refers matters to state police forces for investigation, is expected to reach almost 120,000 this year.
During National Child Protection Week, NSW Police will target known sex offenders across Sydney alongside the regular monitoring of the state’s child protection register.
In a wide-ranging interview focused on child abuse, Gorman and Howlett, sounded the alarm on social media content available to teenage boys who are mimicking violent behaviours they see online, including in cases like that of a 16-year-old girl who died after being choked during sex on Sydney’s northern beaches.
“People learn that behaviour, and a lot of them are learning that type of behaviour on TikTok,” said Howlett, who has been investigating child abuse for the past 15 years. “They think it’s normalised and it’s actually accepted.”
Howlett said that TikTok was the worst offending platform for harmful content influencing young boys, whose behaviour and treatment of female peers has reignited a national conversation about consent education in schools after boys from two Sydney private schools were charged over separate alleged gang rapes of teenage girls last month. The students, from the prestigious Scots College in the city’s eastern suburbs and St Gregory’s College in Campbelltown, cannot legally be identified and remain before the courts.
A TikTok spokesperson said if videos depicting strangulation or violent or misogynistic content did exist on the platform they would be in violation of its community guidelines and would be removed. Violent content, they said, was more likely to be found on pornography websites, many of which in Australia are restricted to adult use.
“In addition to taking action on any violative content, such as sexual abuse and exploitation, dangerous activities including choking, and misogynistic and hateful ideologies or behaviours, we also maintain strong relationships with law enforcement agencies across Australia, who are able to report content of concern directly to us,” the spokesperson said.
On average, 24,000 accounts suspected of being operated by children under 16 are removed each month. More than half a million suspected underage TikTok accounts were removed when the federal ban was introduced.
A spokesperson for Communications Minister Anika Wells said the federal government was pushing to urgently strengthen the eSafety Commissioner’s regulatory powers to hold technology companies accountable. Companies could be penalised up to $99 million for systemic breaches of the social media minimum age law.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence-generated child abuse material in schools – including the superimposing of girls’ faces onto pornographic content – has also alarmed detectives as students increasingly access the technology.
“AI has got great potential to cause big issues in the future,” Gorman said.
Child abuse squad detectives have observed a recent uptick in reports of young boys offending against siblings after being exposed to pornography. In some instances, the boys are as young as seven years old.
“A lot of them are just acting out what they see online,” Howlett said.
In cases where the boys are under 10 – the age of criminal responsibility in NSW – and cannot be prosecuted, authorities work with the children on rehabilitation and behavioural change.
Child abuse in rural NSW, particularly in Indigenous communities, is under-reported because of parents’ apprehension about having their children removed from their care and a lack of trust of authorities stemming from the impacts of the stolen generations, Howlett said.
In many Indigenous communities, she said, generational violence against women and children had normalised abuse.
“We need to do something as a community because we cannot continue to have these children being offended against,” she said.
“The life that they end up leading often leads to mental health issues, alcohol and drug abuse because that’s their way of dealing with the offending.”
Gorman said the key to combatting the rampant child abuse across the country was community awareness, particularly for parents, about the risks posed to children, including online.
“They need to realise that if their children are engaging with people online, it’s not right and they need to not permit it,” she said.
“The internet has brought the world much closer to children so that they know and see a lot more. Consequently … the internet to them is a normal way of life.”
In some cases, including that of notorious daycare paedophile Ashley Paul Griffith, offenders’ use of technology means child abuse squad detectives can charge predators without needing to interview their victims.
Griffith, who is serving a life sentence in Queensland, is expected to be extradited to NSW later this year to face almost 200 charges related to his time working in childcare centres in the state.
Detectives have identified dozens of NSW children among Griffith’s further alleged victims.
“It can work for us, and it also can work against us,” Howlett said. “Sadly, that’s how we became aware of it. He was sharing the images.”
Howlett said the use of smart glasses capable of capturing video and images should be banned in childcare centres, as police push for extra safety measures in the sector to reduce abuse, including more CCTV cameras and a requirement that no carer be left alone with a child.
Howlett urged parents and members of the public to report any suspected abuse or mistreatment of children to police, no matter how insignificant it may seem.
“They could have one small part of the puzzle, and that’s what we really want to focus upon. They might think it’s really minor, but at the end of the day it could fall into something that we’re investigating,” Howlett said.
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