Joshua Dale Brown allegations are nightmarish for parents: what society needs to do now

Alleged sex abuser Joshua Dale Brown, a Victorian childcare worker. Picture: supplied

We must do better to protect our kids. The nation has been stunned again with the news that a 26-year-old childcare worker, Joshua Dale Brown, has been charged with 70 offences involving eight children, some as just five months old, that he is alleged to have abused and filmed.

Brown was charged with offences relating to the alleged sexual abuse of minors, including sexual penetration, producing child abuse material for use through a carriage service and recklessly contaminating goods to cause alarm or anxiety.

Brown’s Point Cook home was raided by Victoria Police in May. Brown had worked at 20 childcare centres in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs and Geelong since January 2017.

More than 1200 children will have to undergo testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

Brown cannot hide behind suppression orders. Police took the unusual step of naming and showing the face of Brown because there are real fears there will be more victims. Police are focusing on one childcare centre in Essendon where Brown worked for three months prior to his arrest but a comprehensive investigation of all of his employment history at childcare centres will take many months to conclude.

This is the stuff of nightmares for parents. While the allegations are shocking, Brown is innocent until proven guilty and the charges will now proceed through the courts.

There is a long history of childcare scandals in Australia, with the sentencing of pedophile childcare worker Ashley Paul Griffith. In September last year, the 46-year-old Gold Coast man, pleaded guilty to 307 charges, including 15 counts of repeated sexual contact with a child, 28 counts of rape and 190 counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16. Griffith was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 27 years.

Without wanting to appear crass, I would like to borrow the words of Silvio Dante in The Sopranos. I really can’t see any point in keeping Griffith around. Remanded in custody after his arrest, Griffith was “jammed’’ in Wolston Correctional Centre in Queensland, a practice of prison retribution where boiling water combined with jam in an electric jug is thrown into a prisoner’s face by another inmate. Homemade napalm.

These extrajudicial practices and long prison sentences might be seen as deterrents but sadly this sort of criminality is unaffected by disincentives. We do know that victims suffer deep psychological trauma. Indeed, there is a strong argument to make that child sex offending is a crime akin to murder, given the impact on victims.

Prevention is the preferred pathway and here our state jurisdictions are dropping the ball.

In all my time looking at this type of offending, the conclusion I have come to is a rather obvious one. Child sex offenders will lurk wherever children are. Schools, sporting and cultural groups – anywhere children might gather. We should also understand that the family home or more broadly the extended family environment is also fertile ground for child sex offending.

Reports indicate the alleged offender in the Victorian childcare case had no criminal record and had passed a Working with Children Check (WWCC).

There are wider problems with the process. There is no substantive national database. One state or territory does not talk to other jurisdictions in a reliable way. This needs to be fixed immediately.

In any event, WWCCs can be manipulated by offenders with criminal antecedents. Recently, there has been a trial in Victoria where an alleged offender with a history of child sexual abuse was able to manipulate the WWCC process by making a minor change to his surname, one letter removed and another put in its place.

This did not trigger any issues with proof of his identity. It appears his employer, an independent secondary school, simply checked his altered surname and nothing of concern showed up. He went on to be employed by the school and is alleged to have indecently interfered with students.

One of 20 childcare centres in the Melbourne area at which Joshua Dale Brown worked between 2017 and 2025. Picture: supplied

The Allan government in Victoria is looking to race through legislation banning mobile phones for childcare workers in the workplace. It is a sensible reform but tragically the new laws have been driven reactively rather than proactively.

Overall, we are dealing with predators who will navigate a way through the gaps in the system.

It is disappointing that many of the recommendations designed at prevention issued by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse have not been adopted across the nation’s jurisdictions. It is not so much a question of deliberate neglect, more a matter of administrative torpor in our bureaucracies who have turning circles like the Queen Mary. Police have dramatically improved their investigative processes and they need to be supported by other government departments.

Joshua Dale Brown. Picture: Facebook

The old stereotypes of dirty old men preying on children does not apply. Whenever arrests are made for crimes such as the distribution and possession of child sexual abuse material, we should not be shocked that those led away in handcuffs come from seemingly respectable backgrounds – they are teachers, police officers, medical practitioners – invariably men and often bearing a veneer of respectability. The only common strand for pedophiles is that they lurk where children are.

Finally, we might look to the broad Australian community. In the wake of the Royal Commission – a traumatic deep dive into the worst of humanity – left the nation dazed. It has been said frequently that the Royal Commission’s five-year-long deliberations led to a sort of fatigue across the nation.

These are unpleasant truths and ugly crimes. It is perhaps understandable to want to look the other way but, in doing so, we create the preconditions for this type of offending.