Detective Jon Rouse has spent most of his career protecting children, but he is still haunted by a phone call that is etched in his memory about the devastating consequences when there is no one to protect a young person from a sex predator .
Det Insp Rouse said he got the call just a few days after he started working in 2000 with Queensland’s Argos Taskforce, which investigates child sexual abuse.
“The caller couldn’t talk at all for the first five minutes. There was just sobbing,” Inspector Rouse told Queensland Police News.
“I waited patiently and finally he told me his story.
“He was in his mid-fifties at the time of the call. He told me that as a young child he was placed in an orphanage run by nuns.
Recently retired Queensland detective Jon Rouse has spent nearly 30 years fighting to protect children from abusers
On weekends, as a ‘treat’, the gardener took some children to the drive-in movie theater, where they were sexually assaulted.
“When he mustered up the courage to tell the nuns what had happened, he said they ‘had his feet beaten with sticks until they bled’ and asked how he could ‘tell such terrible lies about this good man.’
“Apart from listening to his story, I quickly realized that there was nothing I could do to get justice for this man, as it had happened so long ago, and I determined that the perpetrator and all witnesses had died.”
The chief police officer, who is reluctantly retiring at the age of 60, said the most common question he is asked is ‘how can you do this kind of job?’.
My answer is always “how can it not be?”.
“In law enforcement, everything we do has to do with trauma. Whether it’s traffic accidents, domestic violence or murders, everything we do as police officers can cause us psychological damage.
“I especially take my hat off to our agents across the state and to the Child Trauma Task Force at headquarters that investigate cases where children have died. Their sole focus is to get justice for those victims.
‘At Argos we have the opportunity to intervene. And in many cases, we stop the abuse before children are old enough to ever remember what happened to them.”
Det Insp Rouse said he learned from his time on a child protection task force that the hidden scale of child abuse was enormous
It emerged on Tuesday that a former Gold Coast daycare worker has been charged with 1,623 child abuse offenses reportedly involving 91 victims.
The 45-year-old Gold Coast man has been charged with 136 counts of rape and 110 counts of sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 10 in Brisbane, Sydney and beyond between 2007 and 2022.
Det Insp Rouse said his many years in Taskforce Argus and before that a four-year stint with Queensland’s Child Abuse and Sexual Crime Group showed him the magnitude of the problem.
“The only thing we seem to be really good at at that time is finding more[abuse],” he told radio station 2GB.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see us solve this problem because it’s a percentage of people.”
He also learned that child abuse transcends all international borders because there were “horrible people all over the world.”
“When we go online, you don’t know where the perpetrator is and you don’t know where the child victim is,” he said.
“Sometimes they are in Australia and Queensland, but probably 80 to 90 percent of the time overseas.
“I don’t care where the kid is, I’ll try to do something to make sure they don’t get hurt.”
He said that, with the encouragement of the senior police task force, Argos has built a large global network with other international legal bodies to protect children.
“We could get a lead anywhere in the world and sometimes free a child from the mischief within hours,” he said.
The foundation set up in memory of the murdered and abused Gold Coast 13 year old Daniel Morcombe paid tribute to Det Insp Rouse
Det Insp Rouse said that although he is leaving the force, he will continue to fight to protect children.
He has become a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, where he will teach and conduct research on the role of AI in enabling or combating child abuse.
He also remains a board member of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Australia and works with the Daniel Morcombe agency.
The Foundation set up to protect children in memory of murdered Gold Coast 13-year-old Daniel Morcombe recently paid tribute to Det Insp Rouse.
‘TThe Daniel Morcombe Foundation has a longstanding relationship with Detective Jon Rouse APM, and we celebrate his life’s work dedicated to protecting children from harm and championing the cause of keeping children safe,” the Foundation said in an Instagram post .
“As a valued ambassador of the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, we look forward to continuing and growing our relationship with you.
“Congratulations on your retirement, we are confident that your energy and passion for protecting children from disaster will not diminish.”