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My son, under five, told me, and I thought that was the hard part.
I thought I had the training. As a psychologist I had sat in the other chair for years while adults described things from their childhood that they had never said out loud to anyone, and I had watched what it took for them to say that out loud. I knew what disclosure was. What I did not know, until it was my child, is that the telling is not the event the childcare and intersecting justice system is waiting for. The system is waiting for something else entirely. Fully formed sentences from a toddler. Evidence it can hold. A witness who was looking at the right moment. A recording.
A child’s words to his mother are not evidence. They become evidence when they can say them again, in an interview room, with the detail police need, and with something outside him to back it up. Ours never got there.
The file closed with three words. “No offence detected”.
That is a version of the disclosure pathway but it is not the one the evidence describes most often. The assumption underneath it, that a child being harmed will say so, promptly, clearly, to the right adult, is wrong. Delayed disclosure is the norm. There were grooming moments and threats that took years for my son to spontaneously disclose.
In December 2025 the Queensland Child Death Review Board published In Plain Sight, a review of how the system responded to Ashley Paul Griffith. It laid the problem around disclosure and detection out at a scale that should have stopped the country.
the assumption we build everything on
Every safeguarding system in this country is built on a fragile premise: that harm surfaces through disclosure. Complaints processes wait for one. Investigations are triggered by one. Regulators assess whether a service responded appropriately to one.
The premise is wrong. Disclosure is not an event that reliably occurs and then gets processed. It is slow. It starts and stops. Most people do not finish it in childhood, and a very large number never finish it at all.
If our protection system only activates when a child tells, our protection system is a lottery. The sheer scale of Ashley Griffith’s undetected offending is proof of that.
Here is what the numbers actually say.
what the research says, and it isn’t close
The Australian Child Maltreatment Study asked 8,503 Australians aged 16 and over. Child sexual abuse prevalence: 28.5 per cent. Of those, 45.2 per cent had never told anyone before the researcher asked. Not a friend, not a partner, not a clinician. Nobody. Of the ones who did tell, eventually, the average wait was 7.1 years.
For children it is worse. Gewirtz-Meydan and Finkelhor went through a US national survey of 13,052 children and looked closely at the 506 who had been sexually abused or assaulted. Among the 10 to 17 year olds, 66.3 per cent of episodes never reached a parent or any other adult. Those are the children old enough to have the words.
Across all children aged 0 to 17, 19.1 per cent of cases reached police.
Lets look at that figure again, 19.1 per cent of cases reach the police, because it is the one that undoes everything our detection system in childcare has been built on. Four in five cases never reach police.
what we have known about daycare specifically since 1988
I have written before about Nursery Crimes, the study David Finkelhor conducted with Linda Meyer Williams and Nanci Burns, published in 1988 and now out of print and selling for around $180. It examined 270 substantiated cases of sexual abuse in daycare across the United States, involving 1,639 children, all of them under seven.
Their disclosure findings should be printed on the wall of every regulator in this country.
Only 19 per cent of those children told anyone on the same day. Nearly a third took more than six months. Around half had been threatened, told that they, or their families, would be hurt if they said anything.
And here is the finding that reorganised how I understand my own son. The threats did not, in that group, stop children from disclosing. They changed when the children disclosed. Many waited until they were somewhere the perpetrator was not: on holiday, at home for a break, after leaving the centre. They told when the environment changed. They told when they were safe.
Two more figures from that study.
Eleven per cent of children who did disclose were initially disbelieved by the adult they told.
And 86 per cent first disclosed to a parent or relative. Only 7 per cent told daycare staff.
That was 1988. Thirty-eight years ago. We have known all of this for thirty-eight years and built the system anyway.
Here is the objection the sector will make first, so I will make it myself. Finkelhor’s team concluded that children in daycare are not at special risk of sexual abuse.
I am not telling you daycare is more dangerous than a family home. I am telling you that whatever does happen in there, we have no reliable way of finding out about it.
twenty days
I need to put myself in this before I start on anyone else.
My son disclosed on the day it happened. He said clearly that someone had hit him on his bottom. There were visible physical signs. There were immediate behavioural changes. There was nothing subtle about any of it.
I did not take formal action for nearly twenty days.
That was not a lack of concern. It was the brain doing what brains do when the information arriving exceeds the capacity available to process it. The professional in me could have named it as dissociation in someone else within about four seconds. In myself it took considerably longer.
The consequence is not abstract. Physical evidence has a window, and by the time I moved, the window had closed.
He started talking properly in Bali. Away from the centre, away from the people, thousands of kilometres from anything that looked like the room it happened in, he repeated his account daily, pointed to exactly where, and described it in detail. He was not more certain in Bali. He was safer in Bali.
I did not know then that I was watching a 1988 finding play out in a hotel room. I know now.
Several other children from our centre eventually made reports to police. The investigation still resolved as no offence detected. Years later my son disclosed further, involving multiple male staff.
I am a psychologist. I had every advantage of training and language and access. I still lost twenty days.
If it can happen to me, we need to stop asking why parents hesitate and ask what the system can do to prevent the hesitation that it should be anticipating.
the one who took twenty years
There is one child in the Queensland report I return to.
Griffith worked across early childhood services in Queensland for close to two decades. He was arrested in August 2022 and pleaded guilty in November 2024 to offences against 65 Queensland children, girls aged between one and nine. Nearly all of them were identified because he made a record of what he did to them.
She was the exception.
She attended an outside school hours care service between 2003 and 2006, when Griffith was at the very beginning, still moving in and out of university. She did not tell anyone at the time. She grew up. She was an adult when his arrest hit the news in 2022, and she came forward.
He pleaded guilty to offending against her.
The report says there is no evidence he produced abuse material involving her, and that she is the only child for whom the offending was not prosecuted on the basis of that material. The sentencing judge put it the other way around. Griffith recorded all but one of the children he was convicted of abusing.
Sixty-four were believed because a man kept a record of what he did to them. One was believed because she remembered, and said so, nearly twenty years after the fact.
She is the whole argument. A delay of nearly two decades did not make her account less true, less usable or less prosecutable. It made it later.
what delayed disclosure actually is
Delay is not a flaw in the child’s account. It is what happens when a child is harmed by someone they were told to trust.
Delay is information about us. Not about them.
Which brings me to the thing I most need parents to hear, and it is the hardest sentence in this essay to write without frightening you.
The absence of a disclosure is not evidence that nothing is happening.
Silence is the normal outcome. It is what the research predicts. A child who has said nothing about daycare has told you precisely nothing about daycare, not that it is safe, not that it isn’t. There is no reassurance you can extract from the fact that your child seems fine and has never mentioned anything.
I am not telling you to be afraid of every daycare centre. I am telling you to stop treating quiet as an all-clear, because quiet is not data.
what you can actually do about a child who hasn’t told you anything
If disclosure can’t be relied on, the work moves upstream.
This is not a complete list, and four habits will not keep a child safe on their own. What you ask the service about itself matters more, and that is where part two ends up. These four are the ones I do in my own house.
Have the small conversation often, instead of the big talk once. The Protective Behaviours process was developed by Peg Flandreau West, Donna Fortin and Joan Levy in Wisconsin in the 1970s, and is now delivered across Australia in various forms. It rests on two lines worth saying out loud in your house until they are furniture: we all have the right to feel safe all the time, and there is nothing so awful, or too small, we can’t talk about it with someone. Say them in the car. Say them while you’re doing something else. A child will not raise the hardest thing in their life during a formal sit-down.
Use correct anatomical names from the start. Children who have the words use them. Children who don’t describe things in ways adults find easy to dismiss.
Ask about the environment, not the incident. Who put you down at rest time? Who was in the room? Who helps you in the bathroom? Which grown-up is your favourite and why? You are not interrogating a child. You are learning what normal looks like in that room, so you notice when it changes.
And ask the centre their names. Every adult. Every casual. Every agency relief educator. Griffith was placed by an employment agency at nine centres in a single year. Parents can name their child’s schoolteacher and often cannot name the four adults who are alone with their toddler at rest time. Curiosity is not paranoia. Ask your child the names of the educators too, and reinforce their names at pick up and drop off.
what I’m doing with it
I am going to keep putting these numbers in front of people who make decisions, because they are not ambiguous and the excuse of not knowing expired thirty-eight years ago.
And when a parent tells me their child said something once, six months ago, and then never again, and they have been wondering ever since whether they imagined the weight of it, I am going to tell them what the research says.
That once is how it usually arrives. That late is normal.
That never is, appallingly, the most common outcome of all.
Part two: Ashley Griffith continued three children did tell. They told a centre director, a regulator and the police, and it made no difference. That essay is about the second filter, and it is the one I would most like a regulator to read.
One share. One parent. One child safer.
References
Finkelhor, D., Williams, L. M., & Burns, N. (1988). Nursery crimes: Sexual abuse in day care. Sage Publications.
Gewirtz-Meydan, A., & Finkelhor, D. (2020). Sexual abuse and assault in a large national sample of children and adolescents. Child Maltreatment, 25(2), 203–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077559519873975Mathews, B., Finkelhor, D., Collin-Vézina, D., Malacova, E., Thomas, H. J., Scott, J. G., Higgins, D. J., Meinck, F., Pacella, R., Erskine, H. E., Haslam, D. M., & Lawrence, D. (2025). Disclosure and non-disclosure of childhood sexual abuse in Australia: Results from a national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 160, Article 107183. ScienceDirect
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.107183
Mathews, B., Finkelhor, D., Malacova, E., Higgins, D. J., Collin-Vézina, D., & Do, H. P. (2025). Characteristics of first disclosure of child sexual abuse: Age, delay, recipient, and feeling of support. Child Abuse & Neglect, 170, Article 107803. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2025.107803 Springer
Queensland Child Death Review Board. (2025). In plain sight: Review into system responses to child sexual abuse. Queensland Family and Child Commission.
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.
This essay began as a dictated account, was edited with AI assistance, and was then revised line by line by me. Imagery is AI-generated.
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