A single mother who maintains a private sex offender registry while undergoing cancer treatment is calling on the Albanian government to introduce a larger, government-run list after the horrific crimes of a child care worker came to light.
Since the beginning Perpetrators exposed about nine years ago Tania Roy publicly identified 4,604 people across Australia found guilty of sex crimes.
Ms Roy, from Gympie in Queensland, said the registry she runs alone on a full-time basis would be dwarfed by the size of a federal government database.
“We need access to a public database of convicted offenders that helps us know who is in our lives,” she told Daily Mail Australia.
“The Australian public wants it and they want it for a reason.”
New calls for a public record come after a 45-year-old male former childcare worker was charged with 1,623 child sex offenses in Brisbane, Sydney and abroad.
Tania Roy (pictured), a single mother who manages 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 sex crimes across Australia
Ms. Roy has been managing her registry while undergoing chemotherapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia but has recently gone into remission.
She said she was confused about why she has done more work to notify the public about convicted sex offenders than the federal government.
“I don’t understand the government’s hesitation to do this because they are already freely releasing certain information,” Ms Roy said.
“So why they wouldn’t put that in a public database is beyond me, we as parents want to know who we’re dealing with.”
“Single moms and single dads are active on dating apps, meeting people, but have no real way of knowing anything about them.
“This is a start.”
In 2019, then Home Secretary Peter Dutton announced that the Liberal government had earmarked $7.8 million for a public pedophile registry.
The plan included publishing an offender’s names, aliases, dates of birth, suburb and the nature of the crime – as well as their photo – before being scrapped.
Ms. Roy rejected any suggestion that the threat of vigilance was a reason not to set up a federal database. She said that after exposing thousands of sex offenders, she was aware of only one minor case of vigilance reported to police.
“(A registry is) not to get thousands and thousands of vigilantes together and go in on them to track down these perpetrators,” she said.
“It’s about protecting your loved ones, protecting yourself, taking some of that vulnerability away.”
Western Australia is currently the only state with a public sex offender register, which Roy says contains “very limited information.”
Ms Roy, from Gympie in Queensland, has called on Anthony Albanese’s government (pictured) to introduce a public registry, saying the private registry she runs alone full-time would dwarf the scale of a federal database
The Coalition Government budgeted for a Child Sex Offenders Register in 2019, which would include the names and photos of the perpetrators (photo, mockup from Daily Mail Australia)
Offenders Exposed helped residents of Victoria’s Willaura identify a convicted sex offender who took to Facebook asking for help with accommodation while touring the state on an alleged charity drive.
The man was on the sex offender register for eight years after being convicted in 2020 of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl at a caravan park in Mildura.
He had even stayed two nights at the home of a helpful woman who had no idea he had been convicted of child molestation.
Ms Roy said that if the woman could have looked up the perpetrator’s name on a public record, she would not have allowed him into her home.
“We contacted towns and let them know he was coming and then looking for shelter and he is 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 molestation charges while working as a child care worker (photo, Justine Gough of AFP)
“If you let people like that roam our country, and we have no idea, how vulnerable does that make us?”
Ms Roy admitted a register would not help in the case of the ex-nursery who was charged with more than 1,600 child molestation charges this week as he had not previously been convicted of such crimes.
“These are people who have flown under the radar, I don’t know how you could ever stop that,” she said.
“We need to look at stronger deterrents to try to stop them, even then I don’t know if that’s going to work.”
The Australian Federal Police, along with counterparts from NSW and Queensland, this week revealed the chilling allegations against the former Gold Coast childcare worker.
His 1,623 child molestation charges include 136 counts of rape and 110 counts of sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 10 between 2007 and 2022.
The 45-year-old man has been in custody for the past year after he was initially charged with two charges of making child exploitative material and one charge of using a carriage service for child pornography.