Childcare worker's 'monstrous' assaults on kids captured on CCTV

Childcare worker Edwina Ling has been called all three.

Over three days, behind the doors of a small childcare centre on the remote tip of Cape York in Far North Queensland, three little boys were subjected to shocking physical abuse.

"You just can't imagine how someone can be so cruel to babies," says the mother of the youngest victim, who was just 13-months-old when Ling went on a violent three-day spree of slapping, kicking, and throwing him around like a rag doll.

The parents of the 13-month-old want the public to see what happened to him in the hope it will bring reforms.

Warning: Videos in this story include confronting violence towards children.

At one point in the CCTV she walked up and grabbed him by the head and neck.

Later, she pressed his face into a pillow.

More than 80 assaults took place over three days in late August and early September 2024, all captured on camera. The 13-month-old was subjected to 55 of them.

Four Corners has obtained the CCTV footage as part of an investigation into child safety in child care across Australia and the systems designed to protect them.

"If this had happened in the city, if this was in Brisbane or Sydney, there would be uproar," the 13-month-old's mother says.

"Why should this level or standard be allowed in a remote place?"

Laws to protect the boy mean his parents cannot be identified. But they want the public to know what happened.

"We need to talk about it. We need to have that conversation, otherwise it's gonna keep happening," the boy's father says.

He was shocked to learn the centre fell outside the National Quality Framework (NQF), the system designed to assess and publicly rate most childcare services in Australia.

"It's nuts. It's outrageous. How can that even be possible?" he says.

Four Corners can reveal 473 childcare services across Australia operate under regulatory arrangements outside the national system. They include some occasional care, long day care and services in remote areas, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-controlled organisations.

Injinoo was regulated under a separate Queensland law. It meant parents had no national quality rating to check, and some of the NQF's more detailed safeguards did not apply, including requirements around supervising sleeping children and checks designed to ensure no child was left behind on a bus.

But operating outside the NQF was only part of what went wrong at Injinoo.

The little boy's parents had no idea about the horrors that were being inflicted on their son, but there were warning signs, which were not acted on.

Former educator Lena Baragud, who worked at Injinoo, says she saw Ling being rough with children, including yanking them by the arms and legs, and refusing some of them food when they were hungry.

"Sometimes she'd just take one kid by a leg or something," Baragud says, remembering how children would retreat to the other side of the room whenever Ling walked in.

"She was horrible. She was a monster … She was the devil."

Baragud says Ling bullied her and other staff and sometimes screamed and swore. She says management was aware that Ling had problems with her colleagues, but nothing happened. She quit before the assaults.

It was not until Brancis Tamwoy-Mookaa filled in as director at the centre that the truth came out. Tamwoy-Mookaa says she began hearing complaints from the other educators about Ling.

She says her concerns deepened when Ling did not want to hand over a crying baby. Afterwards, Tamwoy-Mookaa noticed red marks on the child that looked like fingernail scratches.

On Tamwoy-Mookaa's last day, Thursday September 5, as communities across the Northern Peninsula were gearing up for a long weekend, she left a post-it note asking management to check the baby room's CCTV.

Ling remained at the centre for almost another week, and so did the little boy.

"He was very clingy … He would wrap his arms around my neck and hold onto me and wouldn't want to let go and I'd have to grab his arms off me to pass him over to Edwina [Ling]," the mother says.

On September 12, his parents were informed that an educator had used excessive force and had been dismissed. The next day they were told it was Ling and they were given details of what she had done.

"I just burst out crying. I just couldn't believe that that actually happened, and it was our child," the mother says.

"There was one whole day that he wasn't fed," she recalls being told. "Edwina had placed food in front of him, sort of taunting him with food and he was crying. He wanted to eat and she wouldn't feed him."

She remembers once noticing marks on her baby, and asking Ling if everything was OK.

"She had told me that there was another child in the room that was pinning other kids down and scratching, digging nails into them and biting."

In June this year, Ling was sentenced after pleading guilty to 80 counts of common assault and two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm.

District Court Judge Dean Morzone KC described her offending as "monstrous, cruel and sadistic" and "a gross breach of trust".

The court heard Ling had struggled with drugs and alcohol and mental health issues. She was sentenced to four years in prison but will be eligible for parole after serving 12 months.

For the families, the conviction delivered a measure of justice. But the little boy's parents say accountability should not end with Ling.

"What about the NPA [NPA Family and Community Services, the organisation that ran Injinoo] allowing this to happen too? They had a duty of care … and the regulatory authorities … making sure [the centres] were all running at standard."

Ling joined NPA in 2022 as a casual cleaner, then cook and was moved into the baby room as an educator in July 2024. She had not completed basic childcare qualifications.

Across Australia, educators in childcare services can be left alone with babies, if they are studying for their qualification.

Ling was also well connected within NPA. She was living with Josie Nona, the woman overseeing the organisation's four childcare services in the region, when she was promoted to the baby room.

Josie Nona's mother sits on the NPA board and they are related to the CEO. NPA's chair is Josie's cousin Ugari Nona.

There is no suggestion any of them knew Ling was assaulting children.

Ugari Nona insists NPA acted swiftly once the abuse was discovered, notifying parents, police and the regulator.

"We told the police the moment we found out what's happened. Before we spoke to Edwina, before we spoke to the parents, she says.

"The incident happened and it was like bang, bang, bang, bang. We had to make sure all these steps followed," she says.

After this interview Four Corners uncovered evidence that contradicts this account.

Queensland Police said NPA did not make the report that triggered their investigation. It was made on September 13 by a member of the public. By that time Ling had left the centre.

More than two years later, Ugari Nona says she has still not watched the CCTV herself.

The fallout has been profound. The regulator investigated and found serious problems across NPA's childcare services, including failures in governance, supervision and risk management. Since then NPA's four childcare services have closed, millions in government funding has been lost and remote communities have been left without services they relied on.

"They didn't get reprimanded because that was the behaviour of one person," Ugari Nona says.

"She's passed all the checks. She had a blue card. So like I've said before, you cannot perceive that side of an individual."

NPA successfully challenged the cancellation of its provider approval in the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal in July this year. The regulator is appealing.

"We're in a remote community, so it's very hard to run a childcare service," Nona says.

The $20 billion childcare sector has been in the spotlight for the past 18 months, following a series of investigations by the ABC that exposed serious failures in safety, quality and oversight.

Governments responded with tougher penalties, greater scrutiny of providers and new powers to cut Commonwealth funding to services that fail quality and safety requirements.

The 473 services, such as Injinoo, that sit outside this framework, care for thousands of kids.

Federal Early Childhood Education Minister Jess Walsh has revealed that education ministers have agreed to bring some of these centres under the National Quality Framework.

State Governments plan to bring 142 centres into the national system.

"We want to see children and services operating under one set of rules, and that being the National Quality Framework," Walsh says.

After watching the footage from Injinoo, Walsh conceded governments should have done more, much sooner.

"Not enough was done for too long," she says.

"Not enough was done by providers, not enough was done by regulators, not enough was done by governments."

SNAICC, the peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families, supports bringing services outside the National Quality Framework into the national system, but says it must recognise the cultures and needs of the communities they serve.

"We don't want lower standards for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children," says Muriel Bamblett, the organisation's chair.

"We want higher standards. And those standards do need to include Aboriginal culture and we need to make our culture visible and our kids need to be strong to be able to deal with schools, to be able to learn better."

For the parents of the little boy assaulted 55 times, what happened at Injinoo turned their lives upside down.

"We've changed jobs and relocated," his mother says.

The boy's parents are still searching for answers. Despite repeated requests, the family has never been given the Queensland regulator's internal report or full findings into what happened.

"We'd like to get that internal investigation report out there so we can have some answers and some closure," the boy's father says.

"It's not just about our kid or that one childcare centre. It's far bigger than that.

"So many centres fall outside [the system], and it affects so many kids.

"It'll just keep happening if we don't speak up."

For his mother, the memories are hard to forget.

"I would wake in the middle of the night and I'd be holding him and crying, and I just felt so guilty, like, this happened to my poor baby. How did I not know? How did I not know that this was happening?"

Watch Four Corners' full investigation into the Injinoo assaults and the regulatory gaps that remain in child care, tonight from 8:30 on ABC TV and ABC iview.