A single mum operating a private sex offender registry while undergoing treatment for cancer is calling on on the Albanese government to introduce a larger, government-run list after the horrific crimes of a childcare worker were exposed.
Since starting Offenders Exposed about nine years ago, Tania Roy has publicly identified 4,604 people found guilty of sexual crimes across Australia.
Ms Roy, from Gympie in Queensland, said the registry she runs full-time by herself would be dwarfed by the scale of any federal government database.
‘We need access to a public database of convicted offenders that helps us know who’s in our life,’ she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘The Australian public want it and they want it for a reason.’
Fresh calls for a public registry come after a 45-year-old male ex-childcare worker was charged with 1,623 child abuse offences in Brisbane, Sydney and overseas.
Tania Roy (pictured), a single mum operating a private sex offender registry while undergoing treatment for cancer is demanding the government introduce a larger, government-run list
Since Ms Roy started Offenders Exposed (pictured) about nine years ago, the website has publicly identified 4,604 people found guilty of sexual crimes across Australia
Ms Roy has run her registy while undergoing chemotherapy for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia but has recently gone into remission.
She said she was confused as to why she has done more work in notifying the public of convicted sex offenders than the federal government.
‘The hesitancy of the government to do this I don’t get, because they’re already freely allowing the release of certain information,’ Ms Roy said.
‘So why they would not do that on a public database is beyond me, we as parents want to know who we’re interacting with.
‘Single mothers and single parent fathers are out there on dating apps, meeting people, but with no real way of knowing anything about them.
‘This is a start.’
In 2019, then home affairs minister Peter Dutton announced the Liberal Government had budgeted $7.8million for a public paedophile register.
The plan included publishing the names, aliases, dates of birth, suburb and nature of a perpetrator’s offending – as well as their photograph – before being scrapped.
Ms Roy rejected any suggestion the threat of vigilantism was a reason not to create a federal database. She said after exposing thousands of sex offenders, she was aware of only one minor case of vigilantism which was reported to police.
‘(A registry is) not about getting thousands and thousands of vigilantes together and getting into them to hunt down these offenders,’ she said.
‘It’s about protecting your loved ones, protecting yourself, taking away a bit of that vulnerability.’
Western Australia is currently the only state that has a public sex offender registry, which Ms Roy says contains ‘very limited information’.
Ms Roy, from Gympie in Queensland, has called on Anthony Albanese’s (pictured) government to implement a public registy saying the private one she runs full-time by herself would be dwarfed by the scale of any federal database
The Coalition government had budgeted for a child sex offender register in 2019, which would have featured the names and pictures of offenders (pictured, Daily Mail Australia mockup)
Offenders Exposed helped residents of Willaura in Victoria indentify a convicted sex offender who was asking on Facebook for help with accomodation as he made his way across the state on a supposed charity trek.
The man had been placed on the sex offenders register for eight years after he was convicted in 2020 of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl in a caravan park in Mildura.
He had even stayed two nights at a helpful woman’s home who had no clue he was a convicted of a child abuse offence.
Ms Roy said if the woman was able to search for the offender’s name on a public registry, she wouldn’t have allowed him into her home.
‘We contacted towns and let them know that he was coming through and then he was looking for places to stay and that he’s a registered sex offender,’ Ms Roy said.
The calls for a public sex offender registry come after a 45-year-old man was charged with 1,623 child abuse charges while working as a childcare worker (pictured, AFP’s Justine Gough)
‘When you’ve got people like this wandering around our country, and we have no idea about it, how vulnerable does that leave us?’
Ms Roy conceded that a registry would not help in the case of the ex-daycare worker this week charged with more than 1600 child abuse offences, as he had not previously been convicted of such crimes.
‘These are people that have been flying under the radar, I don’t know how you ever stop that,’ she said.
‘We’ve got to look into harsher sentencing deterrence into trying to stop them, even then, I don’t know if that’s going to work.’
Australian Federal Police, along with NSW and Queensland counterparts, have revealed the chilling allegations against the former Gold Coast childcare worker this week.
His 1,623 child abuse charges include 136 counts of rape and 110 counts of sexual intercourse with a child under 10 between 2007 and 2022.
The 45-year-old man has spent the last year in custody after he was initially charged with two counts of making child exploitation material and one count of using a carriage service for child pornography material.
