Samantha Donovan: The Queensland Government has announced today that all child care workers in the state will have to do mandatory annual safety training. How to identify the signs of predatory behaviour will be part of the course. The decision comes after last week’s shocking revelations that a Melbourne child care worker has been charged with more than 70 criminal offences, including child rape. The Queensland training program will be developed by the Australian Child Protection Centre. And I asked the centre’s Amanda Paton if there are warning signs a child care worker may have a dangerous interest in children.
Amanda Paton: So, I think it’s really important to think about things that are outside the ordinary. If someone is trying to separate one child from another or having special relationships or paying particular extra attention to one or two particular children, if they choose to really promote within that setting a situation where they’re alone with children, they have devices on them regularly and they’re taking photos of children, if they’re trying to befriend and what we call there’s some kind of grooming behaviours that we really look out for as well. We talk more now around not just grooming a child, but grooming the family and the other adults around the child and also this kind of institutional grooming that occurs as well. And so the training will really outline a lot of those behaviours too.
Samantha Donovan: If those behaviours are identified, I can imagine it can be a very difficult and fraught situation to raise those concerns at times. What are the next steps that people working in the child care sector would need to take?
Amanda Paton: Yeah, look, and that’s probably one of the most uncomfortable and difficult things for for staff in any sector to really come to terms with. And so we need staff to be really on top of and understanding of their obligations, but also be understanding of what is their next steps, who can they go to within the agency or the particular centre, where would they report that to and what are they reporting? We also need to think about, and this will be included in the training, is there might be micro behaviours. So it’s often not one big thing that we actually see or get a sense of within a child safety perspective. It might be lots of little micro behaviours that it’s really important that staff have a mechanism within the centre, whether that’s a confidential kind of space to report that to, but it’s really important that they actually report all those little small behaviours that might not seem much at the time, but when you add them up, it kind of speaks to a larger pattern of behaviour.
Samantha Donovan: What’s a good example of those micro behaviours that you’re referring to?
Amanda Paton: Yeah, so little things like it might be when a child has, say, fallen over and they’re hurting or they’ve hurt themselves. It might be that there’s actually an inappropriate or an unnecessary amount of touch that’s going on with that particular behaviour. You’ll get a sense of as an early childhood worker, what’s an appropriate amount in touch in that context. It might not be super overt. You might not think straight away, oh, that’s actually quite sexualised, but it might be just little words and little kind of phrases and things that a person might use.
Samantha Donovan: Do you think the psychological testing of childcare workers is needed?
Amanda Paton: I’m a clinical psychologist myself and look, I think psychological testing, there’s no really clear evidence that that would actually allow us to identify who would be a risk to children and who wouldn’t. There’s no typical psychological profile. There’s no typical profile that we would see on a standardised test. What you can do though and what early childhood settings absolutely should do is undertake extremely thorough interview and recruitment processes, making sure that there is multiple conversations with past employees, making sure there’s conversations and multiple interviews with the potential worker, doing kind of trials of that worker within the early childhood setting.
Samantha Donovan: At least one survivor of child sexual abuse has called for men to be banned from working in childcare centres. What’s your reaction to that call?
Amanda Paton: Look, I don’t think that’s the solution. Men play a vital role within our community. Children and young people require a diverse range of adults and supportive people within their life. I don’t think banning men from childcare centres is the answer. We’ve seen cases of female staff causing very significant physical harm and neglect and really inappropriate behaviour to children within daycares. Excluding someone because of their gender, I just don’t think is the way to go. Where does it stop if we do start discriminating against an entire gender within this setting?
Samantha Donovan: Amanda Paton is the Deputy Director of Practice for the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia.
