Career in focus: Detective Leading Senior Constable Kellie Mervin

Despite being the longest-serving member of the Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team (JACET), Detective Leading Senior Constable Kellie Mervin has no plans to work anywhere else.

Even a six-month secondment working in another unit halfway through her 13 years at JACET just affirmed for her that protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation is her mission in life.

Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin first applied to become a police officer straight out of high school but didn’t end up joining until 16 years later.

“When I was 18, I was waiting to do a typing course as part of my application but then some reporting hit the media again about the Hoddle Street killings,” Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said.

Two years earlier, in 1987, a man used semi-automatic rifles and a shotgun to kill seven people and seriously injure 19 on Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill in one of Australia’s worst mass shootings.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘That's a lot to deal with, that's grown-up world stuff’,” Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said.

“So I made a decision to withdraw my application because I just didn't think I was worldly enough to understand those concepts.

“I'd grown up in a really supportive family and I had been sheltered from anything remotely like Hoddle Street so I just didn’t feel prepared to deal with stuff like that as a police officer.”

Overseas adventures

She then spent the next several years working overseas as a nanny for a number of wealthy families, which included travelling with them back and forth between Europe and the United States.

Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said those nannying years opened her eyes to the fact that people are shaped by their upbringing and backgrounds, and that understanding and empathy can go a long way.

“It also really made me appreciate the friends and family I had and the much more simple life I had grown up with,” she said.

“One of my jobs was working for part of the British royal family and I came away from that thinking that life is much happier for average people earning average money.”

At age 27, she moved back to Melbourne and started studying a course in welfare, where she took her love for helping children and did placements at Parkville Youth Justice Precinct and in child protection in Cheltenham.

“When I finished my course, I got a job at child protection in Dandenong and that was it for me, my career was sorted because I thought I was going to save the world there,” Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said.

“Child protection workers work incredibly hard and they’re amazing people who have to make big intrusions into, and make big decisions about, other people’s lives.

“But I only lasted 18 months before my rose-coloured glasses had come off and I realised I wasn’t saving the world, I was just ticking boxes.

“I know I made a real difference in some children's lives but I had become pretty disillusioned.

“But I just sat up one morning and went, ‘Oh my god, the police force. I’ve forgotten that I always wanted to become a police officer.’

“I then remembered all the times working in child protection where we would work closely with local police and I used to pick their brains about their job and I'd just look at them in awe.”

Joining Victoria Police

So, at the age of 34, she successfully joined Victoria Police as a recruit and her first posting out of the Victoria Police Academy was Brighton Police Station.

When comparing her first few months on the Brighton divisional van with those of her squadmates, who were working in the likes of Sunshine and Broadmeadows, Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin realised her experience had been much different in such a wealthy part of Melbourne.

“I’d hear about all the jobs they were going to and then think about how my first job at Brighton was responding to an incident at a cinema,” she said.

“Someone had apparently opened the choc-top wrapper too loudly during the movie and the person sitting in front of them turned around, pulled the ice cream out of their hand and threw it at them.

“So I had to go speak to that person for assault.”

But Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin soon found more action after moving to Melton Police Station.

“In my first week at Melton I went to something like three affrays, fights where people in caravan parks were bashing each other up with baseball bats,” she said.

“Definitely no rustling of ice cream wrappers going on there.”

It was at Melton she got to see more of the work of detectives and decided the investigative route was for her.

She eventually landed a job at the Sexual Crimes Squad.

“That’s where I thought to myself, ‘This is what I'm here to do, this is where I belong’,” she said.

“I thought I was going to save every rape victim in the world but then came to realise that's not the way the Sexual Crimes Squad always works, because sometimes you put a whole lot of work into a matter and the victim chooses to withdraw or it doesn't end up at court for any of a number of reasons.”

But her squad shared an office kitchen with Taskforce Astraea, which was created in March 2012 to identify, track, and investigate online child sexual exploitation and internet predators.

When she had a lull in Sexual Crimes Squad work, Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin asked if she could take on one of the Astraea investigations.

She was given the matter of a school teacher who had been downloading child sexual abuse material and she knew she had finally found her place in Victoria Police.

“It's investigative work that is making a difference by actually disrupting someone that could possibly be causing harm to a child,” Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said.

“We are creating a difference in the world by actually protecting children and going after the people who are hurting them and holding them accountable.”

Finding her niche

Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin permanently joined Taskforce Astraea in 2013, which then combined forces with Australian Federal Police officers in October 2014 to form JACET.

JACET exists to combat child sexual abuse material and child exploitation through identifying and rescuing victims, targeting offenders online and more.

“I had realised that, when I was doing child protection, it was difficult for me because those situations aren’t always a black-and-white resolution or ending to an incident,” Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said.

“I’m a very black-and-white person who says, ‘These are the rules and you need to follow the rules’.

“Being in JACET has meant that I can have that welfare and child protection focus, while also being very consequence-based when it comes to the offenders.

“When it comes to someone ruining a child’s life for their own sexual gratification, I find that so appalling.

“In my interviews with offenders, I can be pretty forthright because I won’t let them get away with downplaying what they’ve done.

“They can say whatever they want or tell a story that makes them feel like they’re validating their behaviour, but there always comes point where I say, ‘That's a good story, but now we're going to talk facts. This is what you have done. What have you got to say about that?’

“It's very important for us during an interview to find out if they’re contact offending (physically offending) against a child that we’re not aware of and, when we bring that up, they’re always incredulous, ‘How dare you put that to me. I'm not a monster. I would never do that’.

“But then I tell them, ‘You are doing that. Whether it is actual contact offending or it’s an image of a child being sexually abused, it's happening to someone's child and you're encouraging that by your own behaviour’.”

Combatting contact offending

Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin is the only JACET member remaining from the Astraea days and, over that time, she has seen an increase in investigations that uncover actual contact offending against children.

“A job might start out as a child abuse material possession job, but after we do the arrest, we’re finding some form of contact offending more often these days,” she said.

It is in those contact offending situations where she knows she can make the biggest difference.

In one investigation in recent years, a man in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs was initially arrested for grooming offences after JACET’s covert online operatives had engaged with him online, but Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin and her colleagues then discovered child abuse material he possessed.

They managed to identify a young teenage boy from the material and discovered the man had sexually offended against him physically.

“When we spoke to that boy about it, he said he'd never told anyone about what happened and that he had tried to kill himself afterwards,” Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said.

“He had been living out of home for a few years and wasn’t going to school but after we intervened, his mum called and said, ‘He came back tonight and he’s living at home again’.

“Any time we’ve spoken to him and his family since, they’re thanking us and praising us.

“Those moments are worth absolutely everything in this job.”

Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin said she never wants to work anywhere else, or to even seek promotion.

“I love my job and I know it is where I can do my best possible work, so if I were to become a sergeant, I know that Victoria Police and the community wouldn’t be getting the best out of me,” she said.

“I actually had a six-month break from JACET and worked with another taskforce in 2020.

“It was great to do something different but when I got back to JACET, I got a job involving a school teacher that was offending against his young male students.

“I was successful in my application at night court to have him remanded, and it was 9pm, I was walking back from court by myself carrying all these folders and I was virtually skipping down the road.

“I just said to myself, ‘You've made the right decision. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing’.

“Everything I have done through my life just led me to finally get this job where I'm helping children, I'm helping families, I'm getting something myself from doing this job and it's making a difference.”

If you want to learn more about the work of Det Ldg Sen Const Mervin, she appeared in the Police Life: The Experts podcast episode titled “Social media sextortionist exposed”(opens in a new window).(opens in a new window)