We need to talk about for-profit childcare

Because profit should never take priority over the safety of children.

As the news broke about the pedophile employed in Melbourne childcare centres, one of the first things that people starting saying on social media (before comments were turned off) is that all men should be banned from working with children. Another suggestion was that CCTV should be stepped up. A third, that smartphones should be restricted.

When something like this happens, we want it stopped, fast.

But while these measures make impressive headlines, I doubt any of them will even begin to protect children from sexual abuse by a focussed predator in the current profit-driven childcare sector.

Let’s start with the suggestion of banning men from working in childhood. The sector is already short staffed, so it’s unlikely, but even so, men can be great childcare workers. And teachers. And sports coaches. The ones that genuinely care for children, that bring that energy to their work in a childcare centre or classroom or sports team, shouldn’t be shut out because of predators in a knee-jerk response to a complex problem. Men who do care for children - their own or other people’s - are more likely to develop empathy for them, the kind of empathy that makes them less likely to feel entitled to abuse them, and also to see bathing them or changing their nappies as ordinary daily work and nothing more.

Having said that, men need to accept scrutiny if they want to work with children, because it’s overwhelmingly men that commit these crimes. Non-abusive men would surely understand that.

Another solution is to bring in CCTV to all childcare settings. Sure - why not? But it certainly won’t protect a vulnerable child from a determined abuser who knows the building. A predator in offending mode is focused. They hang around places where children also gather - childcare centres, shopping centres, video arcades - and they watch and wait for their moment. A few cameras are not going to protect children from that kind of single-mindedness, particularly if they know and trust the abuser, and are too young to understand what’s happening. Great headline from a company in panic mode, not a solution.

A third idea is to ban phones, and this does have some merit because we know that pedophiles use their phones to both create and transmit images of child sexual abuse - it appears this is how this abuse was discovered, presumably through images tracked back to the centres. But for childcare workers with other caring responsibilities, for example, their phone is what makes working outside the home possible. So while I agree that phones use should be restricted and closely monitored, it’s going to be difficult to enforce and it will impact people who have done nothing wrong.

And it’s not going to stop abusers.

I know this is all horrible to think about but we have to if we are serious about preventing child sexual abuse from happening as much as it is. If you’re panicking about what has happened and wondering how you can protect your child, I recommend watching this seminar by David Finkelhor. I also recommend learning more about the work of Childlight, who view child sexual abuse as a global health crisis, on par with a pandemic.

There is a much bigger conversation to be had about childcare for profit, which the ABC has been covering in depth. While I don’t know much about the two main childcare franchises mentioned in this story, Affinity and G8, the abuser worked at both.

An unrelated news report in the AFR states that G8s CEO, Pejman Okhovat, was paid $3 million in 2024 after raising fees for families by 4.5%. For context, the head of the West Australian Department of Education is paid about a tenth of that.

Obviously, if you are running a childcare business for profit, you are going to be looking for constant growth. In your worldview, the children entrusted to your care are assets, each with the potential to deliver returns to shareholders provided they don’t cost you too much money, of course. Childcare being badly paid helps, as does a casual and transient workforce who don’t feel secure enough to speak up for safety.

So yes, we need better regulation around for-profit childcare. Better conditions, better training, in particular around child protection, better pay, so that there is more job satisfaction and stability, so that children know their carers by name. In short, treating childcare with the respect such work deserves.

Also, how about better designed centres that follow CPTED (Crime Prevention through Environmental Design) principles with input from people who actually spend time with small children? I’ll never forget visiting a new city playground in Perth that had a bench built against a wall that a child could easily climb onto, before tumbling down two storeys onto a busy road. It was so badly designed that it’s now gone, but I couldn’t believe it had passed through so many reviews without one person noticing it was a death trap. Ask for advice from parents when it comes to designing spaces for kids, and listen to them.

And we need to talk about the people who seek out this material. Why aren’t we talking about them? Anyone who has ever looked at child abuse images needs to understand that this is not some private little quirk. It is a crime, and it directly results in the sexual abuse of children - an estimated 300 million cases a year globally. There is nothing harmless about it. One of the things I was worried about when I started writing my current novel, which is about this subject, was that I would somehow accidentally download images, or even see images, that would stay with me or cause the AFP to come knocking on my door.

As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. You need to be determined to get access to these images, and you often need to provide your own - thereby implicating yourself - to get access to more. You can be certain that if someone does have them on their laptop or phone, they didn’t somehow fall into the hard drive.

It’s also worth noting the change in language. When the headmaster of one of Perth’s private schools was found accessing problematic websites on his work computer back in 2004, the images were referred to as ‘child pornography’ in the press. When the headmaster of another school, also in Perth, was charged in 2024, what he’d downloaded was referred to as ‘child sexual exploitation material.’

When the police report on such arrests these days, they always emphasise that the media should not use the term ‘child pornography’ or, even worse, ‘kiddy porn,’ because this implies consent, which children cannot give, because they don’t understand what they are consenting to. These are images of crime scenes.

High profile cases like school headmasters will draw media attention, but most don’t, bar a tiny square on the crimes page of Perth Now. But when global child safety institute Childlight calls child sexual abuse a pandemic, I believe them.

What we also need to consider is how to stop people from downloading images and creating a demand. I don’t know that the images are worth much in monetary terms (I’m not game to google that one) but from what I’ve learned, it’s more that extreme pornography can be addictive, and people need a bigger hit each time. This is not helped by the fact that within online pedophile communities, sexual attraction to children is normalised; in fact some now prefer to be called MAPs or minor-attracted people, because pedophile carries some stigma. We seem to have arrived at an era where questioning anything to do with sex is kink-shaming.

But I think we can draw a line with children.

In Germany, there is a program called Dunkelfeld (Dark Field) that runs from the Charite hospital in Berlin. This program addresses the ‘dark field’ of people who are not in the criminal justice system or known to police, but who are offending, either by accessing images or creating them by abusing children. They are offered a confidential helpline to discuss their attraction to children, in the hope that being able to talk about their feelings will keep them accountable. If it keeps even one child safe, it’s worth discussing.

The saddest thing I have read so far is a dad saying, I thought I was dropping my child off to have a good day. When you hand your children over to someone to care for them, it’s an act of trust. Kids are resilient, but they will need help. I really hope the compensation these families receive is a number that will make other for-profit childcare centres sit up, take note and be a little less sloppy in their hiring. And a lot more than the current $5000 on offer. Of course, these are businesses, and they need to operate so that parents can work. Hitting their bottom line may, ultimately, hurt the children and their families.

How, though, is the CEO still in a job? And apparently ‘meeting with affected families’ no less, when he paid himself $3 million while denying that his business prioritised profit over welfare? I cannot understand that. I mean, that kind of salary is grossly unnecessary even when children are being well cared for. If you paid yourself $3 million to run a childcare business, and children in its care are now being tested for STIs, then you put profit before welfare, and you need to step down. End of story.

Finally, let’s listen to the affected parents. I remember reading an article that argued (I think?) for universal early education from birth for all children (because apparently children learn nothing at home), without a single quote from a parent. It was just a mass of rehashed data, facts and figures with no nuance, no human factor.

Let’s remember that it was a mother that looked through her old WhatsApp messages from the centre and realised this man had been working with a lot more children than the childcare business had admitted. I hope that those mothers whose children were abused are heard.

The Victorian Government has ordered an urgent review due on August 15, which given weekends, holidays and delays, is really not very long to examine the issue of for-profit childcare centres somehow completely missing the sexual abuse of children in their care.

Children are so much more than an economic problem to be solved, or a means to deliver returns to shareholders. Those children and their families deserve so much more, and I hope they get it.