When I enrolled my son in childcare, nobody said the words.
Not on the tour. Not in the enrolment pack. Not in the parent handbook, not in the induction chat, not in the fifteen minutes where they walked me through the sleep room and the sunscreen policy and the nut-free rule. Nobody said child sexual abuse. Nobody said grooming. Nobody said, here is what we do about the risk that an adult in this building hurts your child, and here is how we’d tell you.
I signed the form and dropped him off. Day after day, placing trust in the system.
Several years later, several complaints went in to the childcare centre, including my son’s, and within days the phrase arrived, fully formed, the way it always does.
“The safety of children is our highest priority”.
The investigation closed with no offence detected. That’s the phrase on the police file. It isn’t the same phrase as nothing happened, and anyone who has read one of these outcomes knows the difference. But that’s a different essay. It’s the whole point of the book I’m writing, The Signs We Miss.
Awareness changes outcomes. Subscribe before hindsight does it for you, its free.
What I want to talk about is the sentence they reached for afterwards, and whether they had any right to it.
What a safety culture actually is
Culture isn’t what you say when something goes wrong. It’s what you were doing for the years before.
It’s what gets measured, what gets trained, what gets reported, who gets in trouble, and what happens to the person who raises their hand. If you can only produce evidence of your values after an allegation, you don’t have values. You have a media statement.
That’s not my opinion. That’s National Principle 1, agreed by every government in this country: child safety and wellbeing is embedded in organisational leadership, governance and culture. Embedded. Before. Ongoing.
I’ve watched organisations do this properly. Not perfectly. Properly.
What it looks like when they mean it
I worked in HR in aviation.
In aviation, safety wasn’t a value. It was a system.
Incidents went to an independent investigator. If you didn’t trust your employer, there was somewhere else to report. The assumption wasn’t that organisations always did the right thing. It was that sometimes they didn’t.
One share. One parent. One child safer.
The culture was simple: report mistakes and learn from them. Don’t hide them.
Safety wasn’t confined to induction. It was everywhere—in the training, the reporting, the promotions, the language people used. Training ran on a cycle, not once at induction. Incident forms people actually filled in. Safety awards, which sound corny until you work out what they tell you about who gets promoted. It was in the HR team’s language and the marketing team’s language, not just the pilots’. Top down and bottom up at the same time, ground crew to flight deck. You could not spend a week in that building without knowing what the organisation was afraid of.
That’s the tell. A real safety culture tells you what it’s afraid of, out loud, before anything happens. I don’t need to name the company. You’ll have heard their safety messaging too.
The thing mining figured out
Then I worked in HR in mining.
That was nearly twenty years ago, before any of the legislation below existed. Even then, I worked in organisations that treated safety as a core responsibility, long before the law made those failures criminal.
There are shocking operators in that industry and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the good ones knew exactly what they were and what the stakes were, and here’s where that ended up.
Since 31 March 2022, industrial manslaughter has been an offence in Western Australia. Company officers who knowingly disregard serious safety risks that result in a person’s death can face up to 20 years’ imprisonment and a $5 million fine. Companies face fines of up to $10 million, there is no limitation period, and those penalties can’t be insured away.
Officers carry a personal duty too. Not to explain a death after it happens. To prevent it beforehand. Their duty is due diligence: know the hazards, make sure the systems exist, verify they’re actually being used, and ensure risks are eliminated or minimised so far as is reasonably practicable.
I sat through those inductions. We trained every new starter, not just on procedures, but on safety attitudes: which behaviours created risk, what our safety culture looked like, and what was expected of each person. Then we did it again. Regularly. Not because people had forgotten, but because safety wasn’t something you learned once. It was something you practised every day.
You had safety officers. You had managers. You had KPIs. People still get hurt in mining. But nobody in that industry can credibly claim they didn’t know safety was part of their job.
The gap
Now put a two-year-old in that picture.
There’s no equivalent. Not one with teeth.
The 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended that every state and territory create a criminal offence for failing to protect children in institutions from a known risk of sexual abuse. Some jurisdictions have done so.
Victoria imposes up to five years’ imprisonment on people in positions of authority who negligently fail to act on a substantial risk to a child under 16. New South Wales extends the protection to children under 18, but the maximum penalty is just two years.
Two years. Compare that with twenty.
I’m not suggesting death and sexual abuse are the same legal harm. They aren’t. The point is different. We’ve built a legal framework that places personal criminal liability on executives when foreseeable workplace deaths result from ignored risks. We haven’t built an equivalent framework for executives responsible for preventing the foreseeable sexual abuse of children in their care.
That is beginning to change. Since February 2026, Australia has introduced a National Early Childhood Worker Register, mandatory child safety training, stronger penalties, restrictions on personal devices, CCTV trials and new governance requirements. They’re important reforms.
But notice where the accountability sits. We train the educator on the floor. We still don’t place comparable personal criminal liability on the director of a childcare company who allows obvious, known risks to persist.
Until we do, the incentive stays exactly where it’s always been: manage the complaint, not the risk. And they aren’t managing that well either.
I’ve counted the cases. Across five men now sitting on more than a thousand charges between them, not one of those offences was detected by a childcare centre or a regulator at the time it occurred. Every one of them was stopped by a digital footprint that triggered an external forensic investigation, usually by the AFP. Not by a parent complaint. Not by a colleague. Not by a Working With Children Check.
Talking the talk
Here’s what got to me about their safety is our highest priority statement.
They didn’t fail at walking the walk. They never talked the talk. Not once, not to me, not before, not in any document I signed. There was no language for this in that building. And then, after an allegation, they had the balls to go to a journalist and describe safety as their highest priority, as if it were a standing position rather than a sentence composed that morning.
You can’t be reactively proactive.
What I actually mean by a safety culture
I don’t mean a poster in the foyer. Although a poster in a daycare naming the risk of child sexual abuse and what we can all do about it would be a significant step forward.
I don’t mean a policy PDF nobody has opened since the last assessment. I don’t mean a values statement, a lanyard, a compliance tick, or a well-drafted media response. All of those would be steps in the right direction.
I mean that when I hand over a child who can’t yet form the sentence I don’t like that, someone in that organisation has already sat in a room and said the words child sexual abuse out loud, on the record, to the people who work there and to the parents who pay them. I mean protective behaviours taught deliberately, and me being told they’re being taught. I mean a reporting channel that doesn’t run through the person who might be the problem. I mean somebody at the top with something to lose.
Aviation worked it out after enough people died. Mining worked it out after enough people died. Both times it took liability, not conscience.
So ask it at your own centre and watch their face. Not is safety your priority. Nobody fails that one. Ask: what did you tell me about child sexual abuse before I signed anything, and what happens to you if you get this wrong?
I’m going to keep asking until somebody has a decent answer.
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.
Your voice belongs in this conversation.