Ghastly crime and grave questions

Evidence uncovered by national crime correspondent David Murray that serial child rapist and sex abuser Ashley Paul Griffith could have been stopped in his tracks 10 months sooner had authorities, including the Queensland Police Service, acted on red flags raised by a co-worker necessitates serious inquiries. So does the broader issue of how Griffith, 46, a former childcare worker who pleaded guilty in Brisbane’s District Court last week to 307 child sex abuse offences, eluded supposed safeguards. These included Queensland’s working-with-children screening Blue Card, which he held as he preyed on children for two decades. Federal police discovered evidence Griffith abused 91 girls, in Queensland, NSW and Italy.

Griffith’s sustained evil ended only when he was taken into custody in August 2022. But, as Murray reported on Saturday, a staff member at a Uniting Church childcare centre and kindergarten in Brisbane saw and reported alarming behaviour by Griffith in October 2021. She witnessed him leaning over a young girl during children’s nap time, moving his mouth along the sleeping girl’s mouth, as if kissing her. The woman emailed a Uniting Church area manager hours later, documents sighted by The Australian show. The incident was reported to childcare regulators that night and police the next day. But it was not investigated with any urgency. There is no evidence Griffith’s electronic devices or home were searched (his digital library of 4000 images showing his raping and abuse of girls for decades was found later). Police did not interview him for a month, after which they decided not to take further action. A local sergeant was initially assigned to the complaint, Murray reports, and a specialist child protection squad had still not contacted a church manager four days later to take up the investigation.

Police and child protection authorities, in contrast, were swift to act against whistleblower Yolanda Borucki, the Uniting Church’s manager of early learning operations, when she spoke out publicly after Griffith was charged. Church authorities also have questions to answer over why, within six months of the reported incident, Griffith was moved on, with a redundancy, to work with children in other centres. And in a revelation that raises questions about how much church and other authorities have learned from decades of institutional child abuse scandals, Murray reports that Uniting Church managers were told by their internal insurance expert they were not to admit any liability as police investigated Griffith. As Griffith awaits sentencing, the case’s ghastly facts are clear. But a searching inquiry is needed to ensure mistakes and slackness that left children to suffer are never repeated in future.