I want to talk about a big news story in Australia that's broken about the childcare sector. I feel like people here will be more understanding of the issue but I can remove this if it's not appropriate.
[CW: CSA]
Some shit going down in Australia
A massive news story has broken in Australia that a male childcare worker had sexually abused a bunch of kids, and was putting his bodily fluids in the food when he apparently had a bunch of STIs.
There has been the typical kneejerk reaction from some of the state governments here, but nothing that's going to fix the problem. One state has made it you can't appeal a Working With Children's Check if it gets rejected. This guy was able to get all his certificates without issue, so how will removing the ability to appeal help?
I'm worried it will be an excuse to expand the surveillance state instead of fixing for profit childcare and lack of mental health services. I've seen other stories before of centres hiring unqualified people and ignoring sexual abuse because they need the staff.
Stories like this bring out the typical facebook and TalkBack radio responses, and of course no one wants to look at why this happens and actually focus on stopping the next case of abuse. It just becomes a fantasy about enacting violence on someone that deserves it.
I've thought about it, and the reality is I wouldn't know or be able to stop it if anything happened to my kids. We put a lot of trust into these centres to look after our children because the demands of capital force us to. Harsher punishments and surveillance don't work, we need to get these people support before they offend so it doesn't happen to start with.
Death to capitalism, death to the for profit childcare sector and all that have enabled it.
The classic Loving The Idea of manual labour without actually doing any of it