Child’s disclosure of abuse by childcare worker Ashley Paul Griffith dismissed by Queensland police

A three-year-old’s bedtime disclosure of abuse by Australia’s alleged worst pedophile, Ashley Paul Griffith, were dismissed by Queensland Police four months ahead of the childcare worker’s 2022 arrest.

Ashley Paul Griffith is facing more than 1600 charges.

A Brisbane mother has accused Queensland police of dismissing her three-year-old daughter’s disclosures that Australia’s worst alleged pedophile sexually abused her four months before his arrest.

The woman says a detective told her the girl “doesn’t seem like a child who has been interfered with”, and failed to interview the childcare worker, Ashley Paul Griffith, despite another report to Queensland police about his behaviour at a separate centre just months earlier.

Her daughter is not one of the 91 alleged victims of Mr Griffith, seriously undermining Australian Federal Police claims that it was highly unlikely he abused more children, and raising questions about the decision of police to conceal the names of affected childcare centres.

The woman, identified by the pseudonym “Kym”, says her then three-year-old daughter told her at bedtime in April 2022 that “Ashley touched my privates”.

“My heart sank but I said ‘who is Ashley?’ and she said ‘the man teacher’ or ‘the boy teacher’,” she told A Current Affair on Tuesday.

Her daughter then disclosed details of something that happened at rest time, she said.

Police asked the girl to show on a teddy bear where she had allegedly been touched, causing her to become confused.

“The detective did say to me afterwards, ‘I’ve been doing this for a really long time, I deal with a lot of children who have been interfered with, and your daughter doesn’t seem like a child who has been interfered with’,” Kym said.

Mr Griffith has been charged with more than 1600 child sex offences over 15 years, but Queensland police cleared him of two separate complaints in the year before his arrest in August 2022.

Mr Griffith had been at the centre for only two days after being hired from a relief agency and was immediately stood down after Kym reported the incident, the program reported. Six months earlier in 2021, an ex-colleague reported him to police, alleging she’d seen him kiss a child.

Both investigations were handled by the Child Protection and Investigation Unit at Boondall police station. Police did not refer either to state authorities managing the Blue Card system that allowed him to work with children.

Federal and state police have never identified the childcare centres where Mr Griffith worked, keeping parents in the dark despite the possibility he abused more children. Some centres have taken it upon themselves to notify parents that he had worked with their children.

AFP Northern Assistant Commissioner Justine Gough suggested at the time his arrest became public that parents who had not been contacted had little to worry about: “I can assure … that if you have not been contacted by law enforcement, it is extremely unlikely your child was allegedly offended against by the man.”

Mr Griffith was only publicly identified this month after Queensland laws were changed to allow identification of alleged sex offenders prior to them being committed to stand trial.