‘Cloud of secrecy' that's failing Australian parents

News.com.au

2 days ago

As Victoria police investigate a number of sexual assault claims linked to Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Brown, lawyer and sexual assault advocate Andrew Carpenter has made a disturbing revelation about another high profile child abuse investigation.
Brown, 26, was charged in May with more than 70 offences including sexual activity in presence of a child under 16, sexual assault of a child under 16 and possessing child abuse material.
He has yet to enter pleas to the charges.
Carpenter's comments, made on Gary Jubelin's I Catch Killers podcast, refer to the handling of the investigation of serial paedophile Ashley Paul Griffith, who last year was sentenced to life in prison for sexual offences relating to at least 73 victims, mostly girls aged between three and five years old, in several early childhood centres across a span of nearly 20 years.
Griffith is one of Australia's worst paedophiles, and his crimes shocked the public when, in 2022, the AFP announced the charges against him.
Yet Carpenter describes the handling of that investigation – especially in comparison to that currently underway in Victoria – as being 'covered in a cloud of secrecy,' revealing there had been complaints against Griffith since 2014.
'I applaud the Victorian police for their work,' says Carpenter.
'As soon as they uncovered the alleged offender in Victoria, they identified 24 centres where crimes have been alleged to have occurred, they notified thousands of parents and students as to what centres they were, a timeframe in which the alleged offender was working there, and they got on the front foot, set up hotlines for individuals to get information, and asked 1200 children to get STI checks.'
In Griffith's case, says Carpenter, the response couldn't have been more different.
'The hardest thing with [Griffith's case] is that the public still doesn't know what centres this offender went to,' he explains.
'And we are talking about almost 3000 counts at the start. I think they whittled it down to about 1500, but it was 73 children that he pleaded guilty to abusing. And the public still does not know which centres he worked at and which timeframe this occurred in.'
'Griffith's crimes were preventable and foreseeable,' he says.
'There were people dating back nine years who actually first raised concerns about him. He was spoken to by the police, but they didn't even take steps to go through his device, on which they would've found tens of thousands of images of child abuse. His crimes were calculated and over a span of time, and the parents that complained about him earlier on didn't see any recourse.'
A father himself, Carpenter believes there could be 'hundreds, if not thousands of other students out there that have been impacted by this individual in Queensland that will never be known.'
He says the very young age of Griffith's victims would mean many of them may not be able to properly recall events well enough to disclose the abuse.
'I asked my oldest son who's five today, if he remembers a child that he went through preschool and kindy with that he last saw a year ago,' he continues.
'He couldn't remember who it was. And you've got children now, five years after the fact of when this guy had his main offences – they wouldn't remember a thing that happened to them. So the issue here is that we've got one police force that's coming out on the front foot saying 'we need to adequately investigate this now', and then we've got the Queensland police officers that have investigated [Ashley Griffith's crimes] within a cloud of secrecy, where the full extent of his crimes will never be truly known.'
'I mean, we're not even at the tip of the iceberg with Queensland,' adds Carpenter.
Equally disturbing, the lawyer says a whistleblower seeking to make media aware of Griffith's crimes ended up being charged with computer hacking. She was later found not guilty of computer hacking allegations.
When 60-year-old Queensland grandmother Yolanda Borucki spoke to A Current Affair producers about failings in the investigation into Griffith's crimes, she quickly found herself at the centre of a police raid.
Yolanda told reporters that she had made a complaint about Griffith at a Uniting Church childcare facility a year beforehand, but nothing was done.
'A few days later, a task force rocked up at her doorstep and raided her house, and she got charged with computer hacking,' explains Carpenter.
'All for simply saying, 'here is evidence of me providing the childcare centre proof that I had made a previous complaint.' She went through the ringer of a trial and her fight got made public,' he continues.
'Yet the offender who sat in secrecy for many years was able to keep his anonymity for quite some time.'