Carer charged with child abuse worked at 20 centres
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News.com.au
30 minutes ago
- News.com.au
50 Cent congratulates rival Diddy for not-guilty verdict on top charges: ‘The Gay John Gotti'
50 Cent was quick to react to the Sean 'Diddy' Combs verdict Wednesday – seemingly hailing the disgraced rapper for beating the feds before quickly dubbing him 'the Gay John Gotti.' 'Diddy beat the Feds that boy a bad man!' the rapper said in an Instagram post alongside a photo of himself grinning and applauding emojis. 50 Cent, who has a longstanding feud with the disgraced music mogul, then compared him to the infamous Mafia boss who was nicknamed 'The Teflon Don' after prosecutors couldn't get charges to stick, The NY Post reports. 'Beat the Rico, he the Gay John Gotti,' the rapper added. The 'In Da Club' hip-hop artist was name-dropped during the trial back in May during shocking testimony that touched on the longstanding feud between the hip-hop legends. Diddy's ex-assistant, Capricorn Clark, had told jurors her boss once implied he might pull a gun on Fitty. 'I don't like all the back and forth … I like guns,' Clark recalled Combs telling his manager after seeing 50 Cent at an MTV event. 50 Cent – who famously took nine bullets during a 2000 shooting in Queens – reacted to the name-drop with mocking faux fear. 'Wait a minute PUFFY's got a gun, I can't believe this I don't feel safe,' the New York City native posted on Instagram after the testimony. 'LOL.' The beef between the pair began nearly 20 years ago after 50 Cent, whose real name Curtis James Jackson III, released a diss track — 'The Bomb' — in 2006 that accused Combs of knowing who killed The Notorious B.I.G. He spent much of the Combs' sex-trafficking trial roasting him over the torrent of graphic evidence and accusations levelled against him. The Bad Boy Records founder was ultimately found guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He was acquitted on two sex-trafficking charges and one racketeering charge. The acquittals on the sex trafficking counts mean he will avoid a 15-year mandatory minimum sentence. He could have faced life in prison if he were convicted on sex trafficking or racketeering conspiracy. Combs now faces a maximum 10-year prison sentence on each of the two prostitution counts.
Sydney Morning Herald
42 minutes ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
On-site child safety experts, independent regulation called for to combat ‘paedophile's dream'
The NSW government announced the establishment of an independent early childhood regulator last week, responding to a rise in safety breaches at childcare centres. Calls for independent regulation of national Child Safe Standards aimed at preventing sexual abuse of babies and toddlers in the state's burgeoning childcare sector were supported by National Children's Commissioner Anne Hollonds. 'The regulators don't have enough teeth to act,' she said. 'We need strong independent oversight and monitoring. The regulators are often not visiting centres – there are big gaps in time between their visits. All those things need to be fixed.' Deb Tsorbaris, chief executive of Victoria's peak body for child and family services, the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, said on-site child safety officers were currently recommended but the position must be made mandatory. 'This is a critical role that would make sure difficult questions are asked during recruitment and onboarding and [that] continual safety audits, training and engagement with children and families becomes part of the culture of our childcare and early years settings,' Tsorbaris said. 'Unfortunately what happened at this childcare centre [where the alleged sexual abuse of eight children aged between five months and two years is being investigated by Victoria Police] doesn't surprise me.' Loading Victoria's multibillion-dollar childcare sector is in crisis after police on Tuesday charged childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown with 70 offences, including child rape. Brown worked in 20 daycare centres across Melbourne and Geelong over the last eight years. On Wednesday, under pressure over the growing scandal, the Victorian government announced two reviews of the sector and a range of reforms, including mobile phone bans at childcare centres. Janise Mitchell, chief executive of the Australian Childhood Foundation, supported calls for the creation of an independent regulator, and said applications for working with children checks must include mandatory training. 'We released some research showing 37 media reports in the 2024 calendar year of people who had working with children checks around the country being found to have been abusing children,' Mitchell said. 'There is an over-reliance on the working with children check, it is not a failsafe … We have been calling for mandatory training to be included since March last year. [Now] it is purely an administrative process. 'We know perpetrators use these systems to gain access to kids, but because so few perpetrators ever come to the attention of the justice system, they're able to use these credentials to find their way into systems.' Mitchell said there were more than 5.8 million people with working with children checks across the country, 'and most of those haven't received any training in understanding the issue [of child safety].' Brown had a valid working with children check when he was arrested, police have said. Anne-Marie Morrissey, a former childcare centre co-ordinator and now an associate professor of early childhood education at Deakin University, also supported creation of an independent Victorian childcare safety regulator. '[We need] as much regulation independence as possible: it's not working as it is,' Morrissey said. 'Centres can work the system, people come out and they get it together and put on a good front.' The sector 'certainly needs stronger regulation', said Morrissey, a long-term researcher. 'And I don't think the Commonwealth, in areas where it does have power and influence, is really doing enough ... We have to have a real overhaul and look at the nitty-gritty of what is going on that these things can happen.' Several experts said they were not aware of any way parents could get access to information about what allegations or investigations had been undertaken by the Victorian regulator into specific childcare centres. 'What happens when things are reported? There's no transparency around that. We [sector observers] don't know what's going on,' Morrissey said. Loading 'People report things, and we never know what happens; there never seems to be consequences, in particular with these commercial chains. They just seem to go on their merry way.' Monitoring of childcare business activities was so poor 'a centre might get closed down, and then they pop up somewhere else, possibly under another name'. State and federal inquiries and royal commissions have found serious flaws in the working with children check system. The 2015 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended a national system, with information and intelligence shared across borders. A decade later the system is still a patchwork of different state laws, due to the states being 'over-protective' of their state schemes, said Robert Fitzgerald, one of the commissioners. 'It is shameful we have not achieved a nationally co-ordinated Working With Children regime, 10 years on from those recommendations. It means there is a gap in the safeguard system,' he said. A review by the Victorian Ombudsman in 2022, following a sexual assault of a 13 -year-old by a man with a valid check, found the system was 'absurdly' flawed. The checks only look for criminal convictions and do not take into account police intelligence, arrests or complaints, even when they relate to child safety matters. 'It's a very broken system' that created a false sense of security for childcare centres employing new staff, National Children's Commissioner Anne Hollonds said. Loading Several experts pointed to underlying systemic pressure straining safety at the nation's childcare centres: the federal government is trying to rapidly expand the childcare sector, creating huge strain on centres to find qualified staff. 'We've dropped the ball, in the rush to open more centres, because of the demand. We've dropped the ball on safety,' said Hollonds. Victoria added 151,736 new childcare places between 2013 and 2023, 72 per cent of them in for-profit centres. But Australia is short tens of thousands of early childhood educators to meet current demand – and needs thousands more to meet the federal government's legislated plans for three days of subsidised childcare for every family, due to start in January. This leads to 'severe understaffing at most centres,' said the Greens' Abigail Boyd. 'When you have understaffing it means you don't have people keeping an eye on each other, and you have educators alone with children. Unfortunately, it is a paedophile's dream. 'There used to be a culture of teamwork in these centres. They knew each other really well. If there was someone who wasn't doing the right thing, they would all know about it.' While the state's school and kindergarten teachers must be registered with the Victorian Institute of Teaching, no such licensing scheme exists for childcare educators. That makes it impossible for authorities to track their movements between centres, or co-ordinate the collection of intelligence, allegations or complaints. 'Just like schoolteachers have to be registered, we need the same thing for early childhood teachers, absolutely,' said Hollonds. As a condition of registration, teachers are required to undertake continual education and training. Loading In 2023, federal childcare regulator the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) recommended childcare educators be required to undertake bi-annual training in child safety, including identifying grooming and abuse. Registration would also enable states to operate 'person of interest' systems – another key recommendation from the 2023 review. Working with children checks only consider offences a person has been convicted of. A 'person of interest' system could also track complaints and unsubstantiated allegations, as well as childcare workers who were regularly changing centres. Ashley Paul Griffith, one of Australia's worst paedophiles, worked at 11 locations across Brisbane, and was the subject of multiple unsubstantiated complaints before his arrest. 'Typically the offender moves on before their offences become known. They are looking for opportunity,' said David Bartlett, a criminologist and director of BDK Insights. ACECQA recommended moving to a risk-based approach, taking action against staff when complaints are received rather than waiting for an offence to be committed. Griffith was caught by police in possession of child abuse material; police then worked backwards to discover he was a childcare worker. 'That should send shockwaves through the sector, because it means the sector is not picking them up,' said Boyd.
Sydney Morning Herald
an hour ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
With more allegations of sexual abuse at childcare centres, is banning men the answer?
As horrified parents grapple with the latest sexual abuse scandal at a childcare centre, which has forced 1200 preschoolers to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases, an abuse survivors' collective has called for a ban on male workers. Louise Edmonds, a founding member of the Independent Collective of Survivors, says the safety of children must be prioritised over all else. 'With growing evidence and lived experience pointing to the disproportionate involvement of men in cases of child sexual abuse, we must ask difficult questions,' she said. 'In my view, men have no place in daycare centres, not out of prejudice, but out of a duty to prioritise the safety of children over the optics of equality. Safeguarding must come before ideology.' Others argue a ban is not the answer, saying sexual offending – which, crime statistics show, is primarily perpetrated by men – is not the only type of abuse plaguing childcare centres, and that the system must be strengthened to ensure all kinds of child maltreatment are either prevented, or quickly identified, reported and acted upon. Edmonds' comments come as NSW pledges a trial of CCTV in childcare centres and moves to ban people who have been refused a Working With Children Check (WWCC) from appealing the decision. Concerns about safety in the early childhood sector have intensified amid a growing number of serious allegations against childcare workers. Loading In separate incidents over a single month last year, three NSW childcare workers were charged with sexual touching of children or, in one of the cases, child abuse. Last November, Australia's worst paedophile – childcare worker Ashley Paul Griffith – was sentenced to life in prison for 307 sexual offences against 73 victims over almost 20 years. This week, two men, one of whom was a childcare worker, have been charged with serious abuse of young children in Victoria. Joshua Dale Brown is accused of abusing eight children at different centres in Melbourne, and police said he and the other man were known to each other.
