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Most people who join the Queensland Police Service (QPS) do so out of a desire to ‘help people’ or ‘make a difference’.

They all achieve this in some way simply through their day-to-day duties, and most will retire certain in the knowledge they have had a positive impact on someone’s life.

Detective Inspector Jon Rouse is retiring from the QPS certain in the knowledge he has had a positive impact on the lives of thousands of children not only in Queensland, but across the globe, and has left a legacy that will positively impact thousands more in the future.

The pioneering cop who has helped infiltrate and smash international paedophile networks, driven legislative change to criminalise Child Exploitation Material (CEM), forged international law enforcement partnerships, and put the QPS Task Force Argos on the world stage might easily have become a sailor or a rock star instead.

“My parents both served in the Royal Australian Navy and I was incredibly proud of them, so I grew up in a culture of service to Australia and expected I would probably follow suit in some way,” Detective Inspector Rouse said.

“I’d considered policing when I was in Year 10, however when I left school I wanted to explore my musical aspirations and joined a band playing keyboards.

“We toured the east coast of Australia supporting some well-known acts in the early ’80s and were getting some recognition.

“It didn’t pay the bills however, so I also worked at the Commonwealth Bank. Then one day, our branch was held-up in an armed robbery.”

Detective Inspector Rouse remembers the feeling of being forced to lie on the floor, the instinct to commit to memory the robber’s clothing, voice and words, and having the presence of mind to dash outside and record the registration of the vehicle he escaped in.

He also remembers the devastating impact on his colleagues.

“Staff were traumatised and in tears. We lost one employee who could never come back to work again.

“After that, I knew I had to do something to help stop people being harmed by criminals.”

At age 21, he changed course and started a career as a police officer, graduating from the QPS Academy at Oxley in 1984.

Like all new officers, he rotated through a number of different locations to gain a diversity of experience, including Brisbane City Station, Brisbane Mobile Patrols, Ashgrove Station and Brisbane Watchhouse.

His favourite role was the Mobile Patrols, and as soon as he could he took up a permanent position there.

“It was dynamic. You were on the road the entire shift, reacting and responding,” he said.

“You could also have a permanent partner, and mine was Lance Vercoe, who retired last year.

“You form strong bonds in that job, and I’m still best friends with Lance today. We saved each other’s lives several times over.”

Both officers eventually applied to work for the Criminal Investigations Branch (CIB), and then-Senior Constable Rouse went to work at Taringa CIB, followed by The Gap CIB, where he gained his detective’s appointment.

In 1996 he was promoted to Detective Sergeant and began investigating crimes against children at the Child Abuse and Sexual Crime Group.

In 2000 he was assigned to Taskforce Argos, which at that time was focused on historical and institutional child sexual abuse investigations.

He recalled receiving a haunting phone call during these early days at Argos.

“The caller could not speak at all for the first five minutes. There was just sobbing,” Detective Inspector Rouse said.

“I waited patiently and eventually he told me his story.

“He was in his mid-50s at the time of the call. He told me that as a young child he had been placed in an orphanage run by nuns. On weekends, as a ‘treat’ the groundsman would take some of the children to the drive-in movies, where they would be sexually abused.

“When he mustered the courage to tell the nuns what had happened, he said they ‘caned his feet until they bled’ and asked how could he ‘say such terrible lies about this good man’.

“Apart from listening to his story, I soon came to realise there was nothing I could do to get justice for this man as it had happened so long ago and I ascertained that the perpetrator and all the witnesses had passed away.”

It was a pivotal moment for the detective and instilled a determination to do everything he could to proactively stop the sexual abuse of children at the earliest opportunity.

Leading a small team of three detectives, the Detective Sergeant implemented Australia’s first covert operation to proactively target child sex offenders using the internet to groom and sexually exploit children.

Detective Inspector Rouse was to devote the rest of his career to fighting this type of crime, and under his leadership, Argos forged new capabilities, skills and techniques that have been adopted across Australia and globally.

At the time this work started, the internet was considered a potential emerging threat, with no legislation, technical capability, operational strategy or training available for investigators in Australia.

Detective Inspector Rouse said the QPS leadership greatly assisted in developing the taskforce’s ability to investigate and prosecute crime in this emerging field.

“I was fortunate to have worked for exceptional leaders, in particular Superintendent Ross Barnett, Commissioner Bob Atkinson and Inspector Peter Crawford.

“They never questioned the work of Argos and consistently supported everything we did to protect children. If we didn’t have their supportive leadership, Argos would never have achieved the results it has.

“Up until 2003, the legislation to prosecute offenders for possessing images of children being sexually abused fell under the Classification of Computer Games and Images Act, which meant our officers had to take the evidence to the state government censor to be designated as illegal.

“With the support of Police Minister Judy Spence, Queensland was the first state in Australia to criminalise Child Exploitation Material (CEM).”

Detective Inspector Rouse was instrumental in the drafting and passing of new legislation in Queensland, and has been a driving force in establishing a consistent approach to child protection across Australia and New Zealand.

He gained national support for the development of what is now known as AVID (the Australian Victim Identification Database) to help police officers identify the child victims depicted in video and still images seized from child sex offenders.

Over the years, he instigated and led multiple national and international major operations targeting child exploitation criminal networks.

One of the most significant of these was Operation Achilles, for which Argos was recognised with the International Cyber Crime Gold award at a ceremony in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2011.

It was significant because it was the first time law enforcement had infiltrated, monitored and successfully dismantled a sophisticated child sex offender network.

The operation was global and resulted in the location of hundreds of children who had been sexually abused.

With CEM production and distribution being a borderless crime, Detective Inspector Rouse’s work has taken a global as well as a local perspective, forging networks with international law enforcement agencies and building capacity across all sectors of the community, both nationally and internationally.

He has delivered training to officers conducting online child exploitation investigations across Australia and 29 other countries spanning the continents of Asia, Europe, Africa, North America and South America.

He has represented Australian law enforcement as a speaker at United Nations conferences in Austria and Kenya, and since 2005, has represented the QPS at the annual meeting of INTERPOL’s Specialist Group on Crimes against Children, where in 2020 he was elected as Chair of the Covert Internet Investigations Working Group.

This 18-year partnership resulted in the Argos team contributing to work that has taken down some of the world’s largest child sex offender networks, driven the development of technology that is used globally, and removed thousands of children from sexually abusive situations.

The partnership also ensured that the QPS was the first ever state-based law enforcement agency to have direct access to the International Child Sexual Exploitation database (ICSE) hosted at INTERPOL.

Access to this database is a critical component of the work the Argos Victim Identification team does every day.

The focus has not just been international, however. Closer to home, he conceived and obtained approval for the QPS to host the inaugural Youth, Technology and Virtual Communities (YTVC) conference in 2013.

The conference is an annual event and has grown to be the largest child protection conference in the southern hemisphere hosting 465 delegates from academia, law enforcement, industry, government and non-government agencies.

Recognising that public education plays a crucial role, Detective Inspector Rouse created the ‘Who’s Chatting to Your Kids’ campaign in 2005.

Parental and public awareness of the dangers of online child exploitation was almost non-existent at the time, and the campaign remains a key QPS prevention strategy today.

Detective Inspector Rouse said he was often asked how he and his team could withstand the impact of viewing distressing images of children being abused.

“People ask regularly, ‘how can you do this kind of work?’ My response is always, ‘how can you not?’

“In law enforcement, everything we do has a linkage to trauma. Whether it’s road accidents, domestic violence or homicides, everything we do as police officers has the potential to psychologically damage us.

“I particularly take my hat off to our officers across the state and at the Child Trauma Task Force at headquarters investigating cases where children have died. Their singular 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 has happened to them.”

Detective Inspector Rouse played a pivotal role in research undertaken by the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council (QSAC) regarding the classification of CEM.

This work has led to reforms that significantly reduce officers’ exposure to horrific images of child sexual abuse, enhancing workplace health and safety for child protection officers state wide.

These reforms include streamlining the prosecution process, and adopting a nationally consistent categorisation scheme which allows the use of artificial intelligence to automatically categorise material, further reducing officer exposure.

As well as receiving numerous policing awards and medals, Detective Inspector Rouse’s work has been recognised both nationally and internationally.

In 2018, he accepted the ‘Champion for Children Award’ in New York from the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) for his dedication to fighting and investigating crimes against children.

In 2019 he was announced as Queensland’s Australian of the Year.

The same year, he took a lead role in planning for the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE), and in June 2020, was seconded by the Australian Federal Police to lead the ACCCE’s Covert Online operations team, Victim Identification Unit and Training team.

At age 60, retirement is not a choice for Detective Inspector Rouse, but a mandatory condition of employment as a police officer.

His work is not finished, however.

In February this year, he commenced at Monash University as a Professor at the Artificial Intelligence laboratory, providing strategic advice on developments in technology that will assist law enforcement agencies into the future.

He also joined the Board of Directors for ICMEC and has been appointed as an ambassador for several non-government child protection organisations including Act for Kids, Bravehearts, The Carly Ryan Foundation and The Daniel Morecombe Foundation.

Detective Inspector Rouse refuses to acknowledge his achievements as personal ones; he attributes all the successes to the team at Argos.

Asked if he had fulfilled his original aim as a 21-year-old to help protect people from criminals, he reflected that the job would never be complete.

“We’ve had an impact. From where we were in 2000 when I joined Argos, so much has been achieved.

“Our capability has grown significantly and we’ve established and maintained global networks to further our investigative capabilities.

“We’ve influenced legislation at a national and international level, and we’ve now seen many more countries criminalise the possession and distribution of images and videos of child exploitation.

“Will we ever stop this crime from happening? No, and we have to accept that fact. However, our officers will continue to do everything they can to stop it, one child at a time.

“Argos has had a fluid transition in leadership with Detective Inspector Glen Donaldson taking over when I was seconded to the ACCCE 2019. He and I have worked closely during that time and the unit will continue to lead the world.

“I’m very proud of the people I’ve had the pleasure of serving with and of the work we’ve done at Argos.

“Hand on heart, I can say we’ve made a difference in the lives of lots of children.”