Life sentence for a man in Australia for abusing more than 60 children

A former Australian daycare worker was sentenced this Friday to life in prison for sexually abusing more than 60 minors, most of them girls. Among the more than 300 charges included 28 counts of rape.

Ashley Paul Griffith has pleaded guilty to raping and sexually abusing more than 60 children while working in daycares between 2003 and 2022. In a case that has been described as “depraved» and «beyond the limits of anyone’s imagination».

Sentencing Judge Paul Smith announced that the 46-year-old’s crimes had caused “significant harm” and added: “People expect their children to be protected in daycare,” he said in his sentencing comments.

“The crimes were depraved and committed by a man with a high risk of recidivism”the judge concluded at the end of the trial. Police believe some of his victims may have had as little as 12 months then.

Detectives began searching for Griffith a decade ago after discovering a cache of child pornography shared anonymously on the ‘Deep Web’.

Their efforts had been mostly unsuccessful until they made an unexpected breakthrough by matching visual clues in the background of the images to a daycare center in the city of Brisbane.

An unprecedented case

After charging him in 2023, senior officer Michael Fitzgerald said he was “one of the most horrible cases» of child abuse that the police force had seen: “It is beyond anyone’s imagination what this person did to these children,” he said at the time.

Griffith had passed the strict series of background checks required to work in childcare centers in the states of Queensland and New South Wales.