Another industry failing boys

A look at the recent child-care fracas...

In a recent article I looked briefly at a number of female-dominated industries that are failing men and boys - education, aged care, disabilities. The purpose of examining this is not to suggest women can’t run industries or sectors: male-dominated sectors are failing men and boys just as badly, and as I have looked at several times regarding health care, female-dominated industries are also failing women. Instead, I want to highlight that this entire way of thinking - to recognise that men and boys are being failed by female industries - is not a part of the mainstream narrative. And this is by design, as the language used to discuss such systemic failures, ‘gendered’, is itself exclusively used to discuss problems women and only women face.

I suggested we need to reclaim that language.

Today I want to briefly add another industry to the discussion. That industry is early childhood, specifically day-care. The ABC last week ran an actual tabloid ‘house of horrors!’ headline to highlight a signal instance of child abuse that spoke to a wider problem in the sector: a boy who had been neglected, abused and assaulted by one of the staff “for her own amusement”. I’ll simply give the list of offenses that that staff member pleaded guilty to, from here:

• force feeding of children;

• leaving children in highchairs for between 3-6 hours per day on most days;

• rough physical conduct, including:

o yanking children off the ground or other surfaces by one arm;

o lifting children off the ground or other surfaces and placing them roughly, or slamming them back onto the ground;

o the pinching of a child;

o dragging children; and

o yelling at a child.

These actions are described as “unreasonable discipline” but the ABC adds some details, such as that she would squirt water at the children when force feeding them if they didn’t cooperate. I’ll leave you to draw your conclusions as to whether this was merely discipline gone too far, or something else entirely.

The staff member, Ms Jaroudi, faced no gaol time for these actions and was fined $38650: the company she worked for was fined over $180k. This is in accord with what I understand to be the statutory punishment for breaching that particular act. The boy’s mother called this a joke.

All this happened in 2021, Ms Jaroudi faced court last year and it was covered in the Telegraph. The ABC are weighing in after an investigative report into the industry, which is damning, and aired on Four Corners, as well as being covered in various news articles such as here, including Prime Minister Albanese’s reaction here and the administrators being appointed to one national chain of centres here. Others, from industry bodies to the Children’s Commissioner, have taken up the issue.

The picture painted is of greedy for-profit organisations paying low wages, cutting corners, failing to meet basic standards and putting children at risk. This is probably accurate - the high subsidies paid for child-care in this country will attract charlatans and people interested only in making a profit - and for around 10% of centres, they do not even bother meeting the minimum standards.

We are told that 3000 babies and toddlers are hospitalised each year due to incidents in child-care facilities (an increasing figure), and that there are 26 thousand ‘serious incidents’ each year, also a rapidly increasing number, which can include “deaths, serious injuries, trauma or illness, missing children and allegations of sexual, physical or emotional abuse.” Then there are the many cases of neglect - children being served poor food, left sitting in high-chairs for hours, not engaged with, not supervised. Some of this is undoubtedly the fault of the management for understaffing or under-resourcing - but it does not take graduate training to keep your eyes on children, or engage with them. Overworked educators can blame lack of staffing and resources if they fail to hit educational goals - they have no excuse for hitting the children.

What we are not told is that over 92% of staff at such places are female (source, pg vii) and the few men mostly work vacation care and after-school. So the abuse and neglect being highlighted will overwhelmingly have been perpetrated by women - if this were not the case, we would certainly hear about it.

The framing is otherwise. The owners are always shown as men - even for the centre in the example case above, which was owned by a husband and wife, only the man’s photo was shown - and the whistle-blowers are all women: women who are overworked, underpaid and inexperienced. Likewise the perpetrators of abuse in the Four Corners report are given a face in the form of ‘Muhammed Ali’, a worker who sexually assaulted a number of boys: this is the framing, despite the various mortgages of children being dragged, swung around or otherwise assaulted, or negligently allowed to wander into traffic while staff play catch-up: those staff overwhelming appear to be women.

It’s the Aged Care Royal Commission all over again - if only the staff had better pay and more support, they might not be negligent and abusive. Honest.

It’s the abuse rates in fatherless households all over again - mums just need more support to stop abusing their own kids. That’ll fix it, promise.

Doubtless many organisations who allow this sort of neglect and abuse to occur unabated deserve their share of the blame - but this framing is wholly inadequate. Child-care is a massive, complex issue, only partially served by this sort of reporting. The value of pouring resources into early intervention and trained educators (not just baby-sitters) in the formative years is clear - but it is expensive, very expensive. The more regulations to ensure educational goals are met and child-care centres are safe, the more both governments and the industry must divert money away from the children and toward administration to ensure compliance, and the more the tax-payer, or parent, or both, must pay.

This is not a bad thing: I am personally in favour of it, and regard that huge expense as an investment. But it is an expensive thing, and it is a complex thing.

I will keep my observations to the following:

• The victims identified are mostly, though not exclusively, boys, but the focus is then on the mothers, or the female whistle-blowers. The ABC simply cannot tell a story unless the victim is a woman.

• We have numbers for the gender of the staff, but not the victims. I suspect these abusive women are targeting boys, because that is the nature of female abuse. We don’t know for sure.

Hence I conclude this is probably another industry where a female workforce is failing boys - another ‘gendered’ problem not being treated as such.