A daycare educator has been sentenced to two years in prison for the intentional sexual touching of a child under his care at a daycare centre on the northern beaches of Sydney last year.
Quoc Phu Tong, 35, pleaded guilty in January to touching a young boy on the groin and bottom over the boy’s clothes in September last year.
Tong committed the offence in view of two other educators at the Seaforth campus of the childcare franchise Only About Children (OAC), where he worked as a casual educator.
Tong faced local court in Manly on Thursday, where the magistrate handed down a sentence of two years with a non-parole period of 12 months, the maximum possible sentence given the jurisdictional limits of the local court.
Victim impact statements read to the court on behalf of the child’s mother and father, who were not present in the courtroom, detailed their anguish at the crime against their “beautiful happy little boy”.
The victim’s mother said the offending was “intentional and abhorrent” and had “left a permanent scar on our family”.
According to the police fact sheet, which outlines the claims against Tong and which was read aloud in court on Thursday, a boy woke up distressed from his nap in September last year and walked to the outside area of the centre. Tong approached the boy and started tickling his groin on top of his clothing with his fingers and rubbing the child’s bottom with both hands.
Police claim another educator saw the incident and told Tong to keep his hands up and away from the child’s groin, but she said Tong continued the touching. After a second warning, he “smiled and walked away”, said the fact sheet. He was later arrested and charged.
“You abused your position of power,” the boy’s mother said in her victim impact statement. “He came to you for comfort and he was met with the kind of behaviour that is every parent’s worst nightmare. The weeks and months since have left our family under a permanent dark cloud.”
The mother said the time since the offence has been “the toughest, saddest period for us as a family. We now see the world in a different way.”
“You have taken a piece of my little boy’s innocence and for that I will never forgive you.”
A statement from the victim’s father said that they had witnessed the “devastating impact” it has had on their son’s behaviour, with the boy becoming “anxious and emotional” around adults, including “people who genuinely love and care for him the most”.
“You took something from our child that should never have been taken: his sense of safety, his trust and sense of innocence … The guilt we feel as parents at not being able to stop this is unbearable,” his statement said.
Both parents criticised the actions of Only About Children, the daycare provider that employed Tong as a casual at various centres across Sydney since 2022.
Guardian Australia revealed on Monday that OAC did not report the incident to the department of education, NSW police or through other mandatory reporting processes until seven days after the incident was reported to OAC management by the educator who witnessed it, according to the police fact sheet.
In court on Thursday, through their victim impact statements, the parents of the child victim revealed that they were also not informed of the offending against their child until eight days after it occurred and seven days after the educator who witnessed it says she told OAC management about it.
“The fact we should be left in the dark for over a week goes beyond failure,” the boy’s mother said.
The boy’s father said in his statement that OAC had failed to uphold the most basic level of reporting.
“They failed to notify us, they failed to document the trauma he endured and in doing so, they have failed us in the worst possible way,” he said.
In a statement, an OAC spokesperson said the provider accepts that it could have “handled this incident better”.
“We want to acknowledge the significant impact this incident has had on the family involved and would like to offer our sincere and heartfelt apologies to them for the distress they have endured,” the statement said.
“The justice system has run its course, and we welcome the fact that the individual concerned has now been held to account.
The spokesperson said OAC had sought to “strengthen our processes, training and systems” and had also “engaged independent experts to regularly review our practices”.
“We will continue to cooperate fully with authorities and support the affected family. Our thoughts remain with them during this incredibly difficult time.”
Magistrate Daniel Reiss said that while the nature of the sexual touching against the victim was “towards the lower end of the scale”, the fact Tong had offended against a child under his care was an “aggravating factor” in the case, as was the fact the victim was a “vulnerable, very young child”.
Reiss said it was unclear whether the offending would have a lasting impact on the child victim, but he acknowledged it had had a “very significant impact on the parents”.
Tong, who arrived at court wearing a baseball cap and face mask, sat quietly throughout the hearing, assisted for much of it by an interpreter. He had submitted to the court a letter of apology and regret as part of his pre-sentencing submissions.
Tong’s lawyer submitted to the magistrate that Tong had “a lack of understanding of the seriousness and wrongness of this action” but that he now “deeply regrets the actions and realises the wrong he has done”.
The court heard that Tong had arrived in Australia in 2013 from Vietnam, where he came from a large and supportive family, that he had studied to receive a certificate III in childhood education from Tafe and was generally hard-working and well regarded by those who knew him.
The magistrate reflected that “appropriate touching and handling of children would be covered in that [Tafe] course” and that the good character reference submitted by his sister as part of pre-sentencing submissions was mitigated by the fact that “people who know you wouldn’t have thought … you would have been capable of offending in this way in this case.”
