The case for nationalising early childhood education and care is not just economically sensible, it’s a moral imperative. Let me explain why.
The most common adult perpetrator of child sexual abuse is a caregiver known to the victim.
Last month, former Sydney private school sports coach Hugh Melchior was sentenced to another year on bail after being caught with over 700 child abuse videos, and youth worker Jarib Branfield-Bradshaw was charged with possessing child exploitation material. Police allegedly found content on Branfield-Bradshaw’s work and home computers.
The latter story was shown to me by a friend. They were in total disbelief that someone who’d made a career out of supposedly helping children could secretly be motivated to abuse them. That’s the whole point. Professional support is the perfect cover. And at the risk of sounding crude, you don’t go fishing in the desert.
Predators operate wherever their prey is most likely to be, assuming a disguise of altruism, usefulness and general good character. Case in point, Meta has just been ordered to pay $375 million after being found liable for enabling harms including child sexual abuse, and misleading customers over the safety of its online platforms. In the same way that fast food giants manufacture products specifically for children — think McDonald’s notorious ‘Happy Meal’ — tech companies and individual offenders alike wilfully monopolise environments teeming with underage targets.
Ours is a world where child sex offenders are not only living and working among us, they’re cocooning and controlling us in a veil of false comfort woven from the top down. By design, we depend on them. Look no further than Donald Trump; fascist, felon, leader of the “free world”. He is himself a pawn in the global sexual blackmail economy, doing the bidding of its Israeli architects.
Still, in the face of concrete evidence, cognitive dissonance persists. Every time a child abuse case breaks in the news, shock ripples through the community. Rightly so. It upends our faith in humanity. Incredulity follows: “how did this happen?” Then comes the reflexive defence of offenders: “but they seemed so nice.” Ultimately our collective amnesia and moral disengagement prevail. After the revelation of Joshua Brown’s alleged serial offending across 24 Victorian childcare centres last year, resulting in over 150 charges so far, many insisted, “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
This is demonstrably false. Sexual abuse in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings has been rife for decades.
In 2023, the first national Child Maltreatment Study revealed that as many as 1 in 4 or 28.5% of Australians are sexually abused before age 18. That’s 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 5 boys. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 12% of survivors who were sexually abused before the age of 15 experienced the first incident between the ages of 0 and 4. These are likely underestimated figures because abuse can occur before the formation of explicit memory functions. Survivors may therefore be unable to consciously recall being abused or self-report during surveys.
Children account for 20% of the national population, but are the majority of sexual violence victims. Over half of all people in Australia who are charged with a sex offence, are charged with a sex offence against a child. Being charged is one thing. Being found guilty is another. Child sexual abuse remains the most under-punished crime in the country, with a measly conviction rate of 0.3%.
Part of the problem is the disconnect between what the public is exposed to, what is able to be captured on record, and what actually happens behind closed doors. How offenders present themselves creates further confusion. Ashley Paul Griffith, considered by many to be Australia’s worst child sex offender, abused 73 girls mostly aged between 3 and 5 over a 20-year period and was famously responsible for delivering ‘Stranger Danger’ education to his daycare colleagues in Queensland.
We’ve long reached the consensus that child exploitation is wrong. We still haven’t accepted that many powerful individuals and institutions intentionally commit wrongdoing, not only to children, but everyone around them. If a person or organisation is willing to hurt and deceive a child, why would they be concerned about hurting and deceiving the rest of us? Perpetrators carefully groom their victims, as well as families, friends, colleagues, and whole communities into believing they pose no risk. Their aim is to convince children they are complicit in their own abuse, while neutralising the protective instincts of bystanders to stop them intervening. They are masters of provocation, weaponising the natural reactions of others to divert attention away from their role as primary perpetrator.
In 2023, the University of New South Wales led a groundbreaking survey of child sexual offending behaviours and attitudes among Australian men. It found that as many as 1 in 10 has a history of sexually abusing children either on or offline.
The statistical majority of these men are caucasian, middle-aged, married, well-educated, socially supported, frequent and adept internet users earning a high income. Only half say they are actually attracted to children. The other half are most likely motivated by factors such as power, control and entitlement; uphold restrictive gender stereotypes; and don’t believe their actions are harmful or that they need help. In short, 5% of all Australian men have deliberately hurt a child with no intention of stopping.
That said, we have to treat every individual on a case by case basis. Not all men who are sexually attracted to children have offended, and many actively seek support, which should be encouraged. In Australia we have world-leading services, such as Stop It Now, for people who have sexual feelings towards children and recognise they need help.
Those who pose the greatest risk are repeat offenders who don’t believe they need help or that they’re doing anything wrong. They also happen to be the most proficient at avoiding detection. Compared to non-offenders, this cohort is more inclined to consume violent and deviant pornography such as bestiality, and own cryptocurrency for purchasing child exploitation material. They are also 2-3 times more likely than the average person to be working with children, reinforcing the notion that they deliberately choose careers that provide access to potential victims.
When considering this data alongside cascading institutional and cultural failures within the ECEC sector itself, we see that conditions are ripe for abuse. Add in upward trending privatisation, along with underfunding of public services by federal and state governments, and a perfect storm emerges.
The list of systemic elements that enable abuse is indeed long. From substandard workplace culture and regulatory frameworks; unenforced co-supervision; and poorly designed physical environments without CCTV; to corruptible or non-existent complaints processes; ineffectual background checks and backlash directed at whistleblowers — it can be hard to know where to begin. But really it boils down to a matter of under-resourcing and understaffing.
Offenders often gain access to ECEC roles via word of mouth and leverage organisational weaknesses in order to play the hero. They often strike during one-on-one activities like feeding or nappy changes, and take advantage of staffing constraints and windowless rooms to abuse without supervision.
Children typically disclose institutional abuse to their mothers, yet mothers who raise concerns are frequently ignored. Female staff who report misconduct are likewise dismissed or worse, punished through bullying, emotional blackmail, isolation and demotions designed to erode their confidence, credibility, and mental health.
This reflects both the broader devaluation of women’s voices and how gendered dynamics entrench institutional failures and silence those most likely to detect harm. Claims that daycare centres are biased against male employees are misplaced. Men are often treated with undue care to avoid appearing discriminatory—a dynamic offenders can exploit. Conversely, female perpetrators may exploit stereotypes of innate harmlessness to disguise or minimise their own offending, particularly when co-offending with men.
If we truly wish to prevent child sexual abuse, we must understand the mindset and specialised methods of offenders. Such knowledge is foundational to anti-grooming education, a long overdue and urgent measure among many needed to rebuild child safeguarding systems.
Approximately 82% of Australian families rely on childcare. The main reason being that it enables parents to participate in the workforce. In the current dire economic climate where house prices and living costs are soaring, early childhood education and care isn’t a luxury, it’s an essential service. For many it’s unaffordable, unpredictable, and worst of all unsafe.
Low income households are limited by cost. Regional and remote communities have fewer options. Every family, regardless of location and circumstances, is vulnerable to predators who are operating in a broadly under-serviced industry.
It therefore comes as a welcome surprise ahead of next month’s federal budget announcement, that veteran ABC finance reporter Alan Kohler has proposed nationalising the industry, going so far as to advocate making childcare and kindergarten free.
Current subsidies are up to 90% for low income families, but means test tapering often leaves middle class families with nothing to spare outside of mortgage repayments and childcare.
For decades, workforce participation for fathers hasn’t changed, while for mothers it has increased from 60 to 80%. Here is where gender inequality intersects with cost of living pressures.
One option is to subsidise low income families 100% and taper it down from there, or make it a flat 90% subsidy for all. However, for-profit organisations account for 70% of the industry. Kohler rightly questions the value of giving private childcare companies subsidies of 90% to 100% of their product.
It would cost the government around $60 billion to purchase the 9,750 active centres. Kohler suggests that the commonwealth issue childcare bonds to super funds, which would yield around $3 billion in interest at the current 10-year bond rate.
Total revenue stands at $20 billion annually. If it was free, it would be used by more families, increasing the running cost to around $30 billion. Add in the $3 billion in childcare bond interest and it comes to $33 billion, half of which (around $16 billion) would be covered by the current subsidies.
The rest, Kohler argues, would be “an investment in workforce participation, productivity and gender equality. It would also be an effective way to deal with housing affordability, the cost of living and staying in power”. He neglects to mention it would significantly help keep kids safe and reduce rates of child exploitation.
Child-focused settings don’t have to be inherent hunting grounds. They have been made especially vulnerable by society-wide disregard for their role in a child’s development and ignorance of how predators operate. This is to our collective shame.
It’s high time we focused our resources on overhauling the early childhood education and care industry, and started offering community-wide grooming prevention training. At this point, we should not be surprised that child predators want to work with children, particularly in an industry that provides direct access, yet so little oversight. If we want to create a safer, better future economically, culturally and spiritually, we have to invest in the protection, education and care of the leaders of tomorrow — our nation’s children. It’s that simple.
