Recently we were heading out—an ordinary trip, talk of the shops at the local centre and going into the city—when my son, out of nowhere, brought up the police officers he sees on our city trips. The police seem grumpy and mean, he said; they “just lock people away.” I told him that sometimes locking people away is a good thing: that some people hurt others, and the police put them in jail to stop them hurting anyone else.
He looked at me and told me that people who hurt people don’t go to jail.
They go with the babies.
He is five. He came to this entirely on his own. I have never discussed the investigation findings with him. He is simply one of several children whose daycare abuse allegation was closed with “no offence detected.” And in one unprompted sentence he had said the thing our institutions cannot bring themselves to say aloud: the ones who hurt children are not removed from children—they are placed among the youngest of them. “They go with the babies” is not a misunderstanding. It is the most accurate description of the daycare hunting ground I have ever heard, and it came from one of their small prey.
I am writing this down because he should never have had to learn the maths. And because the maths, it turns out, proves him right.
One share. One parent. One child safer.
The Starting Gun, Not the Reckoning
In October 2025, ABC’s Four Corners aired Hunting Ground, Adele Ferguson’s searing investigation into sexual abuse in Australian childcare. It was meant to be the reckoning. Ferguson called the crisis “far worse than previously known, and far from over”—”endemic and urgently in need of national attention.” She was right about all three. What she was too generous to say is that October was not the peak. It was the starting gun.
Because since that broadcast, the charges have not slowed. They have accelerated. And the most disturbing detail is not in any single case—it is in the pattern that connects them, and in the silence that has followed each one.
Why I Keep the Ledger
I write this as someone who is keeping score. I track these cases—every name, every centre, every charge sheet—and I have alerts set for daycare abuse matters across the country. This is not morbid curiosity. It is method. I sat on the other side of a “no offence detected” finding at our own daycare: my child and several others, disclosures no parent should ever have to carry, and an investigation that closed without a single charge or real acknowledgement of abuse. So I have learned what that phrase is worth. I keep the ledger because institutions do not, and because one day a name attached to that centre may surface on a charge sheet somewhere in the country. When it does, I intend to already have it written down.
The Profiler’s Warning: What the FBI Already Knows
The single most important voice in Hunting Ground was Dr Michael Bourke, a forensic psychologist who has spent his career profiling predators for the FBI, the CIA and Australian police. He did not offer reassurance. He offered arithmetic.
Bourke told Four Corners that 84 per cent of victims never disclose their abuse in their entire lifetime—”so we think we’re capturing just a small amount.” He explained why offenders are drawn to childcare in language no regulator wants printed: for
“the same reason fishermen are drawn to where there’s the most fish”
—a prey-rich environment offering instant trust and little supervision. And he named the mechanism that keeps the whole thing running: these crimes “thrive in secrecy and ignorance.”
Sit with that. The man who helped the FBI understand these offenders is telling us that the cases we can see are the shallow end of the water. If the public truly grasped the shape of the deep end, it would be terrified. That is not hyperbole. It is what the numbers below quietly insist.
The Failure of the Institutional Gaze: By the Numbers
Cross-referencing charges through July 2026, we are not looking at a handful of monsters. We are looking at a structure. Five men, one pattern:
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Ashley Paul Griffith (Queensland/global): Pled guilty to 307 charges involving 65 victims aged one to nine, including 28 counts of rape, at centres between 2007 and 2022. Police recovered more than 4,000 digital files documenting his own offending. In May 2026 his appeal against a life sentence was dismissed, clearing the path for NSW proceedings over a further 180 offences against more than 20 children.
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Joshua Dale Brown (Victoria): Arrested in 2025; his alleged history expanded to roughly 23 different childcare centres. From an initial 70-plus charges involving infants as young as five months, his count climbed to 156 charges by December 2025. More than 1,200 children were referred for infectious-disease testing.
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Hamish Tait (NSW, Operation Moonbi): In custody since July 2025 and, until this week, known to the public only as “an unnamed Sydney man.” On 14 July 2026 a court lifted the suppression order he had fought to keep, and the 35-year-old was finally named. By then his charge sheet had grown to 329 charges—including 162 counts of producing child abuse material—against 136 identified victims, with a further 22 still being identified, across 62 childcare centres in north-west Sydney where he worked between 2009 and 2025. Sixteen years of offending, surfaced only after the AFP reviewed 2.4 million electronic files.
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David William James (NSW, out-of-school-hours care): A former probationary constable who worked casual agency shifts at up to 58 OSH centres between 2018 and 2024. Sentenced in July 2026 over six of them for producing child abuse material of ten victims, all under six. And note how he was found: not by a supervisor, not by a Working With Children Check, but by the AFP discovering his material on the dark web in June 2024 and tracing it back to him. Investigators had to crack his devices after he refused his passwords, then comb through 142,000 files. His case proves two things at once—that the hunting ground is not only daycare but every setting where an adult is handed unsupervised access to children, and that even a serving police officer stayed invisible to the checks until a hard drive gave him up.
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Timothy Luke Doyle (NSW): The warning we already had. Arrested in June 2020 under Operation Arkstone at Kendall, on the mid-north coast, he faced 303 charges involving up to 30 children—sixteen from a single centre—over offending that ran from 2014 to 2020, with sentencing listed from late 2022. His co-accused partner, Steven Garrad, was charged over children Doyle allegedly gave him access to. This was public five years before Hunting Ground. The pattern was never hidden. We simply moved on.
The “Zero Percent” Detection Rate
Across these five men now sit more than a thousand formal criminal charges. The most confronting statistic remains unchanged from where it stood at four: 0 per cent of these offences were detected by a childcare centre or a regulator at the time they occurred. They police did not stop them from child or parent reports. Every one of these men was stopped by the same thing—not a mandatory report, not a vigilant colleague, not a clearance check, but a digital footprint that eventually triggered an external forensic investigation.
And it does not end at five. Ferguson’s team documented more than a hundred alleged offenders who worked or are working in childcare, and more than 700 cases of missing, expired or unverified Working With Children Checks—the one safeguard meant to keep predators out. The famous names are simply the ones the digital layer happened to surface.
How Suppression Keeps Parents Asleep
Bourke said these crimes thrive in secrecy. Watch how hard we have to fight to end it.
For a full year, Hamish Tait sat in custody while his name and his 62 centres stayed hidden behind a suppression order he was fighting to keep. For that year, a parent in north-west Sydney could not answer the only question that mattered to them—was my child in a room with this man? They were told to wait for a notification that may or may not come, about an offender they were not permitted to name. His identity was released only on 14 July 2026, and only because a judge sided with the AFP, prosecutors and media organisations against his bid for secrecy.
That is the tell. Transparency is possible—the same week Tait was named, the AFP published all 62 of his centres so families could finally check, just as David James’s 58 centres had been released for families to check against. But in both cases the public interest had to win a fight, and in Tait’s case it took a year of parents kept in the dark. When we suppress names and withhold centre lists, we tell ourselves it protects victims. Too often it shields institutions—and offenders—from scrutiny, and it leaves parents asleep. You cannot stay vigilant about a threat you have been forbidden to see.
The Spotlight Effect and the Digital Layer
When The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team uncovered abuse within the Catholic Church, they started with a discrepancy: the math didn’t match the public allegations. We are in that same moment.
In Australia, there are roughly 19,000 men in the sector. Research suggests 11.1 per cent (1 in 9) meet the criteria for motivated offending—roughly 2,100 potential offenders among the men alone. Compare that to the number of police charges and ask: where are they?
If the gap for men is a Spotlight moment, the gap for women is a total blackout. Police data suggests female offending is rare (2.2 per cent), yet survivor surveys identify female perpetrators in over 11 per cent of cases. In a workforce of 244,000 women, even a conservative estimate implies over 1,200 motivated offenders—yet their names almost never appear in the “substantiated” column. These are modelled estimates, not confirmed offenders; read them as such. But the point of a Spotlight moment is precisely this: you do not need the names to know the totals do not add up.
The answer to where these missing cases hide likely lies in the digital layer—the same place that finally exposed all five men, only earlier and encrypted. The Internet Watch Foundation reports that 92 per cent of CSAM involving babies depicts severe or sadistic abuse. Offenders are 23.2 times more likely to use encrypted platforms like Signal. While we monitor for behavioural “red flags,” the strongest signals of risk remain encrypted and invisible to institutions.
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When the System Closes the File
I have seen what sits beneath the surface. I sat with my five-year-old son—two years after that “no offence detected” finding—as he finally found the words. Not one alleged perpetrator. Multiple. I have read the oversight review of his case, labelled “effective,” that never interviewed all of the adult carers and never spoke to the other three children who had also made police reports. That is the part we do not measure. That is the part I now keep in a ledger, because no one else will.
“No offence detected” does not mean no offence occurred. It means the system did not detect it. It means the threshold was not met—and the file was closed anyway.
When I read that five men account for more than a thousand charges and that not one of those offences was caught by a centre while it was happening, I do not read a statistic. I read my own file.
What we call “cases” are only ever the tip of the iceberg. What sits beneath—unseen, unasked, unrecorded—is where the real scale of harm lives. Ferguson gave us the name for it in October 2025. The charge sheets since have only confirmed it. December, April, July—each one written after the fact, by a forensic analyst, from a hard drive, never by the system we pay to catch it in real time.
So I keep the ledger, and I ask the only question that still matters: when will Australia wake up—and how many more files will close before it does?
Stay informed, stay vigilant.
With insight,
Legal and Privacy Concerns. Under Australian privacy laws and for personal safety, the author uses a pseudonym and AI-altered imagery. This work features literary and reflective essays expressing a subjective lived experience; it is not a legal or investigative record. All references to harm or conduct reflect the author’s honest opinion and personal interpretation of events. Regarding the matters referenced, police investigations resulted in a finding of no offence detected; this work is an exploration of the psychological interpretations and healing that follow such experiences. While the author is a psychologist, the views expressed here are personal and do not constitute professional psychological advice or a clinical opinion.
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