I want to start with something honest. When I read the headlines about the Sydney childcare worker charged with 329 offences, and when I think back to the Joshua Dale Brown case out of Melbourne last year, my stomach turns the same way yours probably does.
I have worked in the industry for well over a decade, I have also worked with a lot of the centres Hamish Tait visited and worked at. I know the educators, I know the children.
I'm also a mum with children in childcare. I hand my babies over at the door of a centre and trust strangers to keep them safe. That trust feels sacred, and when someone breaks it, the rage is immediate and total.
So let's sit with that feeling for a second, because it's real and it deserves respect. And then let's do the harder thing. Let's think.
Here's what I've watched happen every single time a story like this breaks. The very human urge to protect our kids gets pointed at an entire group of people. This week it's men in childcare. "Get them all out." "No man should ever work with children." I understand where that comes from. I just don't believe it's right, and I don't believe it keeps our kids any safer.
I know this pattern intimately. As an Aboriginal woman, I've spent my whole life watching my community get judged as a whole for the actions of individuals. One person does something wrong and suddenly it's "those people," "that community," "they're all like that." The media runs with it. Policy follows. And the ninety-nine percent of people who did nothing wrong wear the shame and the surveillance meant for the one. It's lazy. It's unjust. And it never, ever fixes the actual problem.
That's the lens I want to bring to this. Not because I'm soft on abuse. Because I'm serious about stopping it.
Let's Talk About Who Harms Children
The public conversation right now is stuck on one type of abuse, sexual abuse, and one type of offender, men. Both cases dominating the news, Brown in Victoria and Hamish Tait in New South Wales, are men accused of horrific sexual crimes. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to insult you by hiding the uncomfortable bits.
For child sexual abuse specifically, men are the majority of offenders. Child protection researchers at UNSW put it plainly in July 2025: while men make up only a small proportion of childcare workers, they are responsible for the majority of child sexual abuse cases within those settings. That's true. Own it. Any argument that tries to wave that away isn't worth making.
But sexual abuse is not the whole story of harm done to children. Not even close. And this is where the public conversation goes quiet, which tells you a lot about what actually frightens us versus what actually happens.
Child maltreatment covers four main types. Physical abuse. Emotional or psychological abuse. Neglect. And sexual abuse. When you look at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data on children abused while in care, the breakdown by primary type of abuse looks like this:
- Emotional abuse, around 30 per cent, the most common of all
- Physical abuse, around 27 per cent
- Neglect, around 19 per cent
- Sexual abuse, around 13 per cent, the least common
The thing we fear most and legislate around most, sexual abuse, is the smallest slice. An earlier AIHW national report on the safety of children in care found a similar spread, with physical abuse at 32 per cent, emotional abuse at 28 per cent, sexual abuse at 21 per cent and neglect at 19 per cent.
So when we throw every man out of the sector to stop sexual abuse, we've done nothing about the roughly 70 to 80 per cent of harm that comes from everything else. We've patted ourselves on the back and left the biggest categories of abuse completely untouched.
Abuse Doesn't Check its Gender at the Door
Here's the part that makes people uncomfortable, so I'll say it gently but clearly. Women harm children too.
When you look at all forms of maltreatment combined in early childcare, women are the majority of perpetrators, not men. The reason is simple and not sinister. Neglect is the single largest category of child maltreatment, and neglect is most often attributed to primary caregivers, who are overwhelmingly women, both at home and across the caring sector.
I want to be careful here, because I'm not trying to flip the panic onto women. That would be exactly the lazy thinking I'm arguing against. The point isn't "women are the real danger." The point is that abuse is not a male trait. It's a human failing, and it wears every gender.
The research backs this squarely for daycare settings in particular. A peer-reviewed review of maltreatment in daycare settings found that the proportion of female perpetrators in daycare is higher than in other childhood maltreatment contexts. In the Australian perpetrator data compiled by the Australian Institute of Criminology, among cases substantiated against men, emotional abuse was the most common harm type, followed by physical abuse and neglect, with sexual abuse the least common.
If we genuinely cared about the children rather than the headline, we'd be asking about behaviour and patterns and systems. Instead we're asking about anatomy. That's not child protection. That's a witch hunt with better branding.
Most Men in Childcare are not the Villain in this Story
Men make up a tiny sliver of the early childhood workforce. The 2024 National ECEC Workforce Census found that 91.2 per cent of the workforce is female. Depending on how you count, men sit somewhere between three and nine per cent, and in direct-contact educator roles it drops to around three per cent. That's a few thousand blokes nationally.
The overwhelming majority of them get up every day, show up for other people's children, wipe noses and read stories and tie shoelaces and go home having done nothing but good. When we treat all of them as suspects, we're doing to them exactly what's been done to my mob for generations.
We're taking the crimes of a few and stapling them to the identity of the many. And it works about as well as it ever does, which is to say not at all. It doesn't catch offenders.
Offenders are, by definition, hiding. What it does do is drive good men out of the sector, deepen the shortage, and teach every man who stays that he is one accusation away from ruin. That's not a system that protects children. That's a system that protects our feelings while children keep getting hurt in all the ways we refuse to look at.
Why we Need more Men, not Fewer in Early Childcare
Children benefit from seeing care, warmth and nurturing modelled by men. For a lot of kids, a male educator is the first safe, gentle, non-threatening man they encounter, and that matters enormously for how they understand masculinity for the rest of their lives. Research on male educators, including the two-year place-based study by Cole and colleagues on building a gender-balanced workforce, points to the value of male role models and to the barriers, chiefly suspicion and isolation, that push men out.
There's a bitter irony here worth naming. The more we treat men as inherent threats to children, the fewer good men we get in children's lives, and the more we reinforce the very idea that men and care don't mix. We manufacture the absence and then use it as proof.
The Parallel I Can't Unsee
Every time I watch this play out, I see a familiar approach.
When one Aboriginal person does something wrong, the whole community gets the lecture. The whole community gets the extra policing, the funding cuts dressed up as accountability, the tut-tutting on the news. Nobody says "that individual made a terrible choice." They say "the community." They say "the culture."
The blame gets smeared across thousands of people who were just living their lives, and the actual causes, poverty, intergenerational trauma, the long tail of colonisation, get ignored because individual blame is so much easier to sell than systemic honesty.
That's exactly what's happening to men in childcare right now. Individual monsters, Brown and Tait among them, commit real and monstrous crimes. And instead of building systems that catch those specific individuals and the specific behaviours that enable them, we reach for the group. We say "men." The way people say "those communities."
I know how that feels from the receiving end. It feels like being punished for existing. And I know it doesn't work, because if collective blame worked, my community would have been 'fixed' by punishment a hundred years ago. Blame is not prevention. It never has been.
What Keeps Children Safe
Safeguarding that works targets behaviour and systems, not identity. That means the boring, unglamorous stuff that doesn't make a good headline:
- No lone-adult access to children, applied to every worker regardless of gender
- Genuine supervision and line-of-sight practices across all rooms
- A reporting culture where staff feel safe raising concerns about a colleague of any gender
- Proper monitoring for child sexual abuse material, since that's often where sexual offending shows its hand
- Robust screening tied to behaviour and history, not blanket assumptions about who is and isn't a risk
- Regulation that addresses all four types of abuse, because the physical abuse, the emotional abuse and the neglect are the larger part of the harm
Any legislation that comes out of the Brown and Tait cases needs to be measured against that list. If a proposed change only targets men, and only targets sexual abuse, then it's addressing a small corner of the problem while congratulating itself on the whole. A knee-jerk reaction to the worst twelve months of headlines is not the same as a considered response to the actual evidence on how children are harmed.
Where This Leaves Us
Hold two things at once. The horror is real, and the individuals responsible should face the full weight of the law. And the answer to individual evil is never collective punishment.
I want the men who abuse children gone. I also want the good men to stay, to be trusted, to model something better for our kids. I want laws built on the whole picture of abuse, not the frightening fraction of it that happens to be dominating the news cycle. I want us to be braver than our fear.
We can protect our children fiercely and think clearly at the same time. My community has had to learn that lesson the hard way.
The childcare conversation would do well to learn it too.
Sources:
- UNSW Newsroom, "Childcare sexual abuse is mostly committed by men. Failing to recognise that puts children at risk", July 2025
- The Conversation, same authors, 2 July 2025
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Child protection (abuse in care by primary type)
- AIHW, "First national report provides insights into the safety of children in care", 10 December 2021
- Australian Institute of Criminology, Hurren et al., "Who are the Perpetrators of Child Maltreatment?"
- Maltreatment in Daycare Settings: A Review of Empirical Studies (PMC)
- Department of Education, 2024 National ECEC Workforce Census
- Jobs and Skills Australia, The Future of the Early Childhood Education Profession
- Cole et al., "Building a Gender-Balanced Workforce: Supporting Male Educators"
