Invisible predators: the shifting behaviour of paedophiles has Australian police playing catch-up
As a former childcare worker stands accused of more than 1,600 charges, experts say changing technology habits are making offenders harder to detect
Andrew Messenger, Ben Smee and Jordyn Beazley Fri 4 Aug 2023
In the Brisbane office of the taskforce Argos, scrawled on a whiteboard was a “most-wanted” list containing the online identities of dozens of global members of a dark web paedophile forum.
The man now accused of being the country’s worst-known serial child sexual abuse offender was not on that list.
Police this week revealed the former childcare worker stands accused of 1,623 child abuse offences against 91 young girls at a dozen centres over a period of 15 years.
Unlike many of the prolific online posters Argos helped put away, the accused man – who cannot be named for legal reasons – is alleged to have shared only a very small number of images and videos online, relating to two girls at a suburban Brisbane childcare centre. Police were reportedly stunned when they raided his home and found cameras and phones containing almost 4,000 child abuse images and videos dating back to 2007.
The man remains in custody and his case is scheduled for a mention in Brisbane magistrates court on 21 August.
An internet arms race
For serial child abusers, the internet has proven the biggest resource and the biggest threat.
The dark web can be a source of money, illegal images, prestige – and community. But it also brings danger.
The illegal chat boards and forums have always been designed to be hard to access, but police have repeatedly cracked in, with often devastating results. In the case of Argos, police succeeded in taking the forum over completely.
In recent years researchers and law enforcement agencies have noticed a shift in language from the sorts of men who visited those wretched forums. Criminals aren’t stupid – they don’t need the media to tell them the cops are watching. Online offender communities have become “very aware” and cautious of law enforcement surveillance, says Michael Salter, an associate professor of criminology at the University of New South Wales and an expert in child sexual exploitation.
“Offenders know that law enforcement are crawling offender forums across the dark web and they’re responding accordingly,” Salter says.
“We see on the dark web a lot of complaints about what offenders call ‘hoarding’; that producers are producing CSAM (child sexual abuse material) that they’re not sharing … with the offender community, or they’re creating locked-down online groups where there’s far less accessibility....
