this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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As a male kinder teacher I agree more needs to be done to protect children. But the solution is not to vilify people like me (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone to c/australia@aussie.zone
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I agree much more needs to be done to protect children. That’s the very reason I do this work. But the solution is not to vilify or pathologise men who choose to care for and educate young children. The solution is to overhaul a fractured system – starting with the ridiculous patchwork of state-based regulations governing early childhood education and care in Australia.

We need a unified, national approach that ensures consistency, accountability and support – for children and educators alike. We need robust, mandatory training in child protection for all educators, regardless of gender. We need professional standards that uphold child safety and the dignity of workers. We need appropriate reward and remuneration to encourage the very best to answer the call of early childhood education. And we need to acknowledge that good men in this field are not the problem – they are part of the solution.

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[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 28 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

You might be missing the context, which is that an Australian childcare worker, who is a man, and who was in the industry for about a decade and had access to over a thousand children in that time, was recently arrested on child sexual abuse charges relating to a number of those children.

This has prompted a lot of editorial inches on the myriad problems in the for-profit childcare industry and how they compounded to allow this situation to occur for so long. I haven't seen any coverage that blamed men, but there have been a few talking about the prejudice against men who want to work with children and the suspicion directed at them, especially right now.

Nobody sensible is actually suggesting that the solution is to vilify men who work with children, that's just a side effect of the revelation that a man who worked with children was a child molester. This piece is simply trying to redirect some of that reflexive distrust toward reforms that could actually make childcare and similar industries safer for children.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 6 points 4 weeks ago

I've definitely seen reports of people who are trying to pressure childcare centres to not employ men, or to remove their kids from places that do employ men. I don't know how true that is, or how widespread it is, if true. The people doing this are not, from what I've seen, in the media, but parents with horribly misaligned reactions.