Childcare horrors are shocking, but they're no surprise to me

The Age

04-07-2025

It's the stuff of nightmares. Broken bones. Burnt hands. Children strapped into high chairs for hours and force-fed until they vomit. Toddlers yanked, shaken, dragged along the ground. Kids found unsupervised in carparks or roaming next to busy main roads. Babies left in soiled nappies all day. Ignored, neglected, left to cry.
And then there's the video – just nine seconds long. A defenceless baby, strapped into a bouncer, crying hysterically as a childcare worker slaps her across the face repeatedly for fun. Her colleague films it, laughing, and uploads it to Snapchat. It's hard to believe this is happening in Australia's childcare centres, but it's been going on for years, all in plain sight.
But there's even more heinous crimes. It took the announcement of a 26-year-old male educator being charged with more than 70 counts of child sexual abuse at a Melbourne childcare centre before people started asking the question … is childcare safe?
For someone like me, who has been investigating childcare for almost a year now, the news was horrifying but not a surprise. In Victoria, NSW and Western Australia, at least one report of sexual misconduct is made every day. And that's just what's tracked and reported. In Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory, there's no reportable conduct scheme, so we simply don't know.
The Victorian man facing charges, Joshua Dale Brown, worked at 20 childcare centres, most of them owned by big private operators including private equity-owned Affinity Education, listed ASX giant G8 Education and United States-owned Only About Children. His case is ongoing and remains before the courts.
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Scratch the surface, and you find more. On Wednesday, a worker from Affinity childcare group is scheduled to face a NSW court charged with nine counts of sexually touching a child. This case is also ongoing.
In March, Quoc Phu Tong, who worked at a Seaforth centre run by Only About Children, was sentenced to two years in prison for the intentional touching of a child.
Then there's Ashley Paul Griffith, a childcare worker sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to a series of offences at early learning centres, mostly in Queensland. His crimes, described as 'depraved', included rape and the production of child-exploitation material. Griffith's abuse went undetected for years, despite holding a valid Blue Card – Queensland's working-with-children check – due to systemic failures in the child-protection systems.