Many questions are being asked about one of the country's worst child sex abuse cases, with a former childcare worker charged with more than 16 hundred offences involving 91 children. Leah Bromfield was formerly the Professorial Fellow to the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. She says this case shows that institutional child abuse is not a thing of the past.
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00:00 It's a common mistake to think that a working with children check is a certificate to mean
00:06 you're safe to work with children. They're not. A working with children check is a safety
00:12 net to stop people who we already know that there are problems with from working with
00:17 children. It's not a prevention mechanism. It doesn't capture people who haven't yet
00:22 been caught.
00:24 Many parents will be surprised and extremely worried to hear that.
00:29 I think it's a hard day as a parent, and I'm a parent myself, to send your children off
00:34 to institutions, schools, childcare centres. I'd reassure parents that most people working
00:41 with kids are there for the right reasons. Most of our institutions are incredibly safe
00:46 and they've gotten safer since the Royal Commission, but it doesn't stop predatory perpetrators
00:51 from slipping through the cracks.
00:53 So how could this man have been picked up?
00:58 When we talk about what were the red flags, red flags make it seem like it's so obvious,
01:03 but child sexual abuse doesn't happen in the spotlight. It thrives in the shadows. What
01:09 we do tend to see, though, is what I think of as orange flags. When we look in hindsight
01:14 at these types of cases, we often see lots of smaller warning signs, professional boundary
01:21 breaches, grooming behaviours, policy breaches that just weren't picked up, and we all have
01:27 to be really vigilant to the orange flags, even when we think, "Oh, maybe that person
01:32 was doing the right thing." We have to not question intent, but actually pick up and
01:38 act when we notice those professional boundary breaches.
01:41 Leah, does there also need to be more training for staff to recognise any behaviour amongst
01:46 kids which may show that they're being abused?
01:51 Yeah, absolutely. Look, our child sexual abuse, child abuse prevention system in organisations
01:57 is not just one thing. We have to have training for staff, absolutely. The National Royal
02:03 Commission recommended child safe organisations be rolled out across Australia. It's happened
02:10 in some states. In some states it's under law. In other states it's not quite there.
02:16 Those child safe organisations include policy, training, screening, and it's really, really
02:23 important that all of our organisations that are working with kids actually implement those
02:28 10 child safe organisations principles.
02:32 There are calls today for a national audit of childcare centres. Do you support that
02:37 move and what should be involved and looked at in that audit?
02:42 I would support us properly implementing the child safe organisation principles in all
02:48 child facing organisations. I don't think we can react solely to childcare. We still
02:54 have child sexual abuse in our schools. I think that we should in each state and territory
03:01 be regulating under law the child safe organisations principles so that it's a requirement for
03:08 all of our organisations that are working with kids to actually have those principles
03:13 in place, that parents can feel confident about that.
03:17 It is a grim question, Leah, but do kids at young ages need to be told what behaviour
03:23 is not right? Do we need to increase their awareness of this?
03:28 Yes, in developmentally appropriate ways. So we need to talk to our kids about their
03:35 bodies. They need to be able to know the names of their private parts. We've had disclosures
03:41 of child sexual abuse that have not been recognised as a disclosure because the child used a family
03:47 pet name for their private parts. Our kids need to know that they can name their private
03:52 parts, that they can talk about them and that other people aren't allowed to touch them.
03:58 Those are the sorts of conversations that we can have even with very young children
04:01 that are not distressing to them.
04:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]