States need child safety standard to stop crimes like Chris Dawson’s, advocate Hetty Johnston says

Top child abuse victim advocate Hetty Johnston says states need to act to protect schoolchildren from men like Chris Dawson

Chris Dawson and AB is on their wedding day.

The conviction of former teacher Chris Dawson of carnal knowledge with a pupil was a warning shot to Australian states and territories urgently to install child safety standards in schools, an advocate for abuse victims says.

Co-chair of the National Office for Child Safety’s advisory board Hetty Johnston said only a handful of states had put in place the principles, years after the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended them.

Ms Johnston – founder and former head of Bravehearts – said the Dawson verdict underlined the importance of vigilance across the nation’s schools.

“I don’t know that we need any more inquiries (into historical sexual offences committed by teachers on Sydney’s northern beaches during the early 1980s),” she said. “The states know what they need to do to keep kids safe. They know now what is required and what is necessary and why everything went pear-shaped.

“Everybody should know when you’ve got one in three children being sexually assaulted in this country, you’ve got a bucket load of offenders out there. There are a lot of people in our community who have a sexual interest in children. And unless you follow … the National Child Safe principles and adopt that protective culture of the children in your care, you may as well put a shingle out and invite them in. That is the truth of it.”

The royal commission, in its final report in late 2017, recommended 10 “standards” to be legislatively applied across several sectors and institutions, including schools. The standards included ensuring families and communities were informed and involved, and that staff were adequately equipped with the knowledge and skills to keep children safe.

“If you’re going to spend a bucket load of money on an inquiry, that means you’re looking for something you don’t already know the answer to,” Ms Johnston said. “And the truth is we already know the answer.

“The culture back then (the 1970s and into the ’80s) was terrible, the governance and the oversight, the disinterest … the cover-ups for teachers who were sex offenders were rife.”

She said only NSW, Victoria and Tasmania had installed the principles. “Why the hell aren’t the other states and territories doing the bare minimum to make sure institutions are safe?” she asked. “Until they do that, the schools that are not required to comply with those child safe principles are the schools where the teachers who want to behave in this way will go, and they know they’ll get away with it.”

On Wednesday, Dawson was found guilty of carnal knowledge with an underaged pupil when he was a teacher at Cromer High in Sydney in 1980. During his trial, the court heard of his predatory behaviour towards his victim in school grounds and how his behaviour went unchecked by school authorities or the NSW Department of Education.

A departmental investigation was launched into Dawson years later but nothing eventuated.

Ms Johnston said Dawson’s case was the tip of the iceberg.

“He was caught,” she said. “He’s a dirty, filthy piece of work, and he was caught. Now people know about it. But multiply his case by the hundreds.”

Child abuse victim advocate Hetty Johnston. (AAP image, John Gass)

The NSW Police Force’s Task Force Southwood, formed in 2018 in the wake of The Teacher’s Pet podcast by The Australian’s Hedley Thomas, has been investigating claims, by former students of Cromer High that teachers were conducting sexual and inappropriate relationships with students.

It swiftly charged Dawson with carnal knowledge, and in 2020 charged another northern beaches teacher with sexually abusing a teenage girl between 1978 and 1980.

Lee Joyce Dunbar, a physical education teacher at Beacon’s Hill High School at the time of the alleged abuse, was to go to trial in the NSW District Court last year but entered a plea of guilty to one charge of indecent assault. The victim was 16 years old. Dunbar, in her late 60s, from inner-city Five Dock, was sentenced to 18 months served via a corrections order in the community.

It remains unclear whether Strike Force Southwood is investigating more teachers.