Safety Theatre and Social Exclusion In Child Safety: Who Are We Really Protecting?

Background checks and exclusion regimes promise safety, but they misidentify risk, entrench inequality, and shut out the very people best placed to prevent harm.

Where Harm Actually Lives

Grace Tame is right to insist that child sexual abuse is not rare, not incidental, and not confined to the margins. It is widespread, often hidden in plain sight, and enabled by systems that fail to reckon with how harm actually operates. The evidence tells us that abuse most often occurs in relationships of trust: within families, institutions, and professions that are meant to protect. It is perpetrated not by outsiders trying to force their way in, but by people already embedded, already believed, and already granted access.

Where the conversation becomes dangerous is in how we respond to that reality. Rather than interrogating power, access, and institutional failure, the reflex has been to expand exclusion. Working With Children Checks are tightened, categories of people are broadened out of eligibility, and suspicion is quietly but decisively redirected toward those who have already been criminalised. In that shift, something fundamental is flattened: the distinction between criminalisation and risk to children. They are treated as if they are the same thing. They are not.

As Samantha Burns, a survivor of child sexual abuse, puts it: “Criminalisation has become shorthand for danger, and that’s convenient. It means no one has to ask harder questions about where harm actually lives, or who is allowed to carry it without scrutiny.”

Criminalisation Is Not Risk

The expansion of WWCC regimes rests on a logic that feels intuitive but does not withstand scrutiny. A person has a record; therefore, they pose a risk. A person has been criminalised; therefore they should be excluded from any role involving children. But the evidence does not support this. The overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse is not perpetrated by people with visible criminal records attempting to enter child-related work. It is carried out by those who already have access: people who pass checks, who present as trustworthy, who are often socially and economically secure. In that context, the tightening of background checks begins to look less like a safeguarding measure and more like a form of risk displacement, shifting attention away from where harm actually occurs.

“We keep designing systems to keep certain people out, instead of confronting the fact that most harm is done by people already let in, people who look safe, sound safe, and pass every check.”

What these systems produce, above all else, is a sense of reassurance. They create the impression that risk has been identified, assessed, and managed. However, this is a fragile kind of comfort. Background checks can only ever capture what has been reported, investigated, and successfully prosecuted. In the realm of child sexual abuse, where underreporting is endemic and conviction rates remain extraordinarily low, this is a narrow and incomplete picture. A clean record is not evidence of safety. It is often evidence of non-detection. As Burns puts it, “The system doesn’t measure safety, it measures who has been caught. And in the context of child sexual abuse, that is a dangerously incomplete picture.”

Who Gets Excluded, and Who Gets Protected

At the same time, those who have been criminalised are subjected to a different kind of visibility altogether. Their records are accessible, circulated, and treated as enduring markers of character. The effect is not just exclusion from employment, but exclusion from contribution. Entire cohorts of people, disproportionately women, and particularly Aboriginal women, are locked out of the very sectors where their insight could strengthen safeguarding practice. This is not a neutral outcome. It is a deliberate narrowing of who is permitted to participate in the work of care and protection. “What we are really doing is deciding who gets to care, who gets to contribute, and who is permanently cast as a risk. That’s not safeguarding, that’s social sorting,” said Burns.

There is a further layer to this that is rarely acknowledged. Sisters Inside argues that many criminalised people, especially women, are themselves survivors of childhood abuse, sexual violence, and systemic harm. Their criminalisation with the colonial legal system is often shaped by those experiences. Yet rather than recognising this, the system draws a hard line: once criminalised, your capacity to contribute to child safety is revoked. The people who understand grooming, coercion, and institutional betrayal not as abstract concepts but as lived realities are excluded from the table entirely. It is difficult to imagine a more counterproductive approach to safeguarding.

This exclusion sits alongside a striking inconsistency in how harm is publicly recognised and responded to. In New South Wales, suppression laws and other legal mechanisms have, in some cases, limited the public identification of individuals accused or convicted of serious sexual offences, particularly where courts determine that publication would prejudice proceedings or where other thresholds are met. The effect is that some perpetrators, often those with resources, remain shielded from public scrutiny, while others with unrelated or less serious criminal histories are permanently marked and excluded. As Burns explains, “There are people whose harm is hidden in plain sight, and others whose past is never allowed to fade. That’s not about safety, that’s about whose reputation the system is built to protect.” The system does not simply identify risk; it stratifies visibility. It decides whose past can be contained and whose must be endlessly exposed.

Safety as Optics, Not Practice

Taken together, these dynamics create a version of child safety that is more symbolic than substantive. “We’ve built a version of safety that looks convincing on paper, but doesn’t hold up in practice. It reassures the public while leaving the conditions for harm largely untouched.” The appearance of action is prioritised over the conditions that actually prevent harm. Those conditions are not mysterious. They are found in properly resourced services, in workplace cultures that take disclosures seriously, in supervision structures that reduce opportunities for abuse, and in accountability mechanisms that do not collapse under institutional pressure. They are also found in who is allowed to participate in designing and delivering those systems.

If we continue to treat criminalisation as a proxy for risk, we will continue to exclude the very people who have the most to offer in building safer environments for children. And if we continue to rely on background checks as a primary safeguard, we will continue to overlook the forms of harm that are least likely to be captured by them.

Child safety cannot be built on exclusion alone. It requires a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about where harm actually comes from, and an equally strong willingness to rethink who we trust to be part of the solution. “Right now, we’re not building safer systems. We’re building systems that feel safe, and those are not the same thing.”