Paedophiles have infiltrated Australia’s $22 billion childcare industry by exploiting lax regulation, piecemeal oversight, and glaring staffing inadequacies, a major Four Corners investigation has uncovered. This revelation exposes a crisis that has been hidden until now, with almost 150 childcare workers identified as convicted, charged, or accused of sexual abuse and inappropriate conduct. Half of the 42 people convicted were sentenced in the past five years, and another 14 are currently before the courts.
The public records pieced together by the investigation reveal an increasing rate of offending within childcare, exposing a system that has allowed predators to thrive. With only 15 per cent of reports of child sexual abuse leading to charges and a mere 2 per cent resulting in convictions, experts suggest that the real number of predators who have worked in childcare over the years is likely in the thousands.
Systemic Failures and Expert Insights
Drawing on more than 200,000 pages of previously confidential documents, police tip-offs, court records, and evidence from parents, educators, whistleblowers, and experts, the investigation exposes a system so broken it has created a perfect storm for abuse. “The psychology of these people is to seek out opportunity, and childcare centres represent an excellent opportunity for them,” said Drew Viney, the former head of AFP’s National Victim Identification Unit.
Our analysis shows that most of the abuse occurs in for-profit centres, where cost-cutting, high staff turnover, and routinely breached or gamed child-to-staff ratios leave supervision dangerously thin. Staff burnout, low pay, and fast-tracked training courses are also gutting quality and oversight. This trend worries Michael Bourke, a global authority on child sex offenders, who noted, “Predators are drawn to childcare for the same reason that fishermen are drawn to the place where there’s the most fish.”
The True Scale of Failures
Some of those with cases before the court can be named, while others remain hidden behind suppression orders. Joshua Dale Brown, for instance, is accused of assaulting eight children and producing child abuse material where he worked. Sydney educator David James allegedly filmed 10 children across six of the 60 services he worked at before his arrest.
Four Corners accessed the largest-ever database of childcare regulator files, revealing widespread gaps in safety, with hundreds of centres breaching child safety laws. More than 700 cases involve missing, expired, or unverified Working With Children Checks, a fundamental safeguard meant to keep predators out of childcare. The files, covering 2021 to 2024, include hundreds of cases of poor supervision and breaches of staff ratios—a key line of defense in keeping children safe.
“When you look through the documents and you see the same patterns in all of these places, it’s lack of staffing, it is a lack of regulatory response. It’s all these factors coming together that create all these gaps for these paedophiles to wriggle through,” said NSW Greens MP Abigail Boyd.
Implications and Calls for Reform
Australia’s childcare system is in crisis, with passionate educators and good centres overshadowed by systemic failures. State and federal governments have promised reforms, including CCTV trials, higher penalties, and an overhaul of the Working With Children Check system. However, experts argue that more needs to be done.
In NSW, legislation passed on October 23 includes 30 reforms such as compulsory child protection training, a tripling of penalties, and more transparency. The NSW government has described these reforms as nation-leading. “We are at a historic moment where across all levels of government, there is a real sense of urgency that we have to get early childcare right,” warned Professor Michael Salter.
“Half of everyone who’s charged with a sexual offence in Australia is charged with a sexual offence against a child. Children are massively over-represented in the sexual violence statistics, but they are not where our sexual violence prevention dollars are going,” Professor Salter emphasized.
The calls are growing louder for a national childcare commission, stronger information-sharing between authorities and police, mandatory reporting with real accountability, and urgent action on chronic staffing failures. There is also a pressing need for more scrutiny of the role of for-profit operators and a broader discussion on the pervasiveness of child abuse.
Watch Four Corners’ full investigation, Hunting Ground, tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
Story by Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillett
Research: Jade Toomey and Dylan Welch
Additional research: Madi Chwasta and Lara Sonnenschein
