In the Brisbane office of the taskforce Argos, scrawled on a whiteboard was a “most-wanted” list containing the online identities of dozens of global members of a dark web paedophile forum.
The man now accused of being the country’s worst-known serial child sexual abuse offender was not on that list.
Police this week revealed the former childcare worker stands accused of 1,623 child abuse offences against 91 young girls at a dozen centres over a period of 15 years.
Unlike many of the prolific online posters Argos helped put away, the accused man – who cannot be named for legal reasons – is alleged to have shared only a very small number of images and videos online, relating to two girls at a suburban Brisbane childcare centre. Police were reportedly stunned when they raided his home and found cameras and phones containing almost 4,000 child abuse images and videos dating back to 2007.
The man remains in custody and his case is scheduled for a mention in Brisbane magistrates court on 21 August.
An internet arms race
For serial child abusers, the internet has proven the biggest resource and the biggest threat.
The dark web can be a source of money, illegal images, prestige – and community.
But it also brings danger.
The illegal chat boards and forums have always been designed to be hard to access, but police have repeatedly cracked in, with often devastating results. In the case of Argos, police succeeded in taking the forum over completely.
In recent years researchers and law enforcement agencies have noticed a shift in language from the sorts of men who visited those wretched forums.
Online offender communities have become “very aware” and cautious of law enforcement surveillance, says Michael Salter, an associate professor of criminology at the University of New South Wales and an expert in child sexual exploitation.
“Offenders know that law enforcement are crawling offender forums across the dark web and they’re responding accordingly,” Salter says.
“We see on the dark web a lot of complaints about what offenders call ‘hoarding’; that producers are producing CSAM (child sexual abuse material) that they’re not sharing … with the offender community, or they’re creating locked-down online groups where there’s far less accessibility.
“We don’t know, but I suspect we’d find a huge amount of new CSAM that is being privately held.”
Jodi Death, a researcher at Queensland University of Technology, has studied child sexual abuse for years and has worked with victim-survivors as an academic and as a child protection caseworker in NSW.
She says criminals aren’t stupid – they don’t need the media to tell them the cops are watching.
“The problem with the dark web is that [if] you get detected in one place, you just move to another place,” she says.
“So the police have an incredibly difficult job and actually do really quite a remarkable job of tracking down the offending and the sites that they do track down.
“But we don’t know enough. And potentially we won’t know enough. And technology moves so rapidly these days that, you know, our policing agencies are really against it to try and stay in front of the technology.”
Police are catching a relatively small proportion of the child abusers who go online, she says, and they represent a relatively small proportion of the total paedophile population.
The ‘professional’ paedophile
Statistics show that most child sexual abuse occurs in a family setting, but Salter says often the predators going online are offending outside the household.
The sorts of men in dark web forums are typically those who have “limited access to children”, who share material for status in those communities, he says.
The pandemic, however, disrupted the habits of those some researchers have labelled “professional” pedophiles – people who choose a career based on it providing access to children.
“We did an analysis funded by the e-safety commissioner looking at activity in the early periods of Covid, and what we saw was a lot of discussion from men – if they were abusing children they were doing it in a professional role, outside the family – and we saw them complaining about how it restricted their access to children,” Salter says.
“It’s a really challenging conversation, [because] obviously we don’t want to stigmatise men who work with children … but unfortunately men who have a sexual interest in children, who are offending against children, they are drawn to professional roles where they’re able to work with those kids.
“We also need to acknowledge that men who sexually abuse children, who have dedicated their lives to accessing those children, tend to present really well. They have good relationships, good friendships. They tend to be well respected, earning a good income.”
This is why advocates say the Reportable Conduct Scheme and Child Safe Standards are so important.
Recommended by the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in 2017, reportable conduct schemes would capture grooming behaviours, professional boundary breaches, and misconduct that falls below the criminal threshold for the criminal justice system.
Leah Bromfield, director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia, says institutions are much safer now as a result of the royal commission, but that means predatory “child abusers have become even more skilful and manipulative at grooming children”.
Without a reportable conduct scheme, which many states have yet to implement, Bromfield says: “It’s very hard to know if a person at one point in their employment history a manager in a local childcare centre said to this person, ‘I’m giving you a letter of direction to not continue to do nappy changes without another person present.’ There’s just no system to monitor whether that happened. So where are you going to pick it up?”
In Queensland, a review into working with children checks in 2017 recommended police be allowed to share information about a suspect with Blue Card Services to allow the risk to be managed while an investigation is finalised. It has not been implemented.
Far more common than people think
Death says research shows that between 80% and 90% of child sexual abusers are men – and that there’s plenty more we could do to stop them offending.
The first step is simple: make it as easy as possible for their victims to report them.
“Kids will try and disclose in multiple ways. So they might not necessarily come out and say that [someone’s] touched them inappropriately, but they might be trying to communicate something. So we need to be showing that we’re interested in kids and what they have to say,” she says.
“And being prepared to acknowledge that this is a situation that could happen anywhere. It’s about creating safe environments, where kids can talk, because that’s going to be our primary mechanism of detection.”
Another thing she wants us to know: child abuse is far more common than people think.
About one in three girls will suffer sexual assault before they turn 18, and as many as a quarter of boys, though perhaps as low as one in nine.
“Child sexual abuse is every day; and it’s every day, in every community; it doesn’t discriminate based on class, or race or even gender,” she said.
“I think we’re better at being aware of child sexual abuse being a possibility. But we still don’t want to believe it when it happens in our families, in our schools, in our neighbourhoods, because we think it’s somebody else, that it’s going to happen to not us.
“Until we’re real about the capacities of perpetrators to get close to kids, and to silence kids, we’re never, realistically, going to deal with the issue.”
• In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
