To ask about your experience with male nursery staff

What an awful thing to consider. Men and women are both likely to abuse children if they are so sickly inclined.

There is safeguarding and making sure staff aren’t alone with children.

Going through life thinking everyone is danger is really sad especially if it’s just based on gender and in a safeguarded environment. The most likely place of abuse (very unfortunately) is in the hone - do people worry about their husband? Father? Uncles? Brothers? Cause if you don’t then your worry about male childcare workers is based on nothing.

Good. I would still tell her about private parts and never to sit in laps with males. But I'm cynic so I don't trust men working with children. It's a shame for the good apples but too many make nursery workers have offended so the trust is gone.

I also agree that positive male role models are a good thing; I was just inclined to address the "you're being unfair and hysterical" type responses to the OP because there's some statistical evidence that tells us about statistics relating to characteristics of the perpetrators of violent and sexual crimes

It's difficult/impossible to filter the fitness to practise register by profession never mind by sex, but a (very unscientific) Google suggests that 98% of nursery and childcare workers are women so you'd expected not just 98% of complaints to be about women, but 98% of sexual or violent behaviour complaints to be about women if it were equal. My experience tells me that's not the case across the register in general, but I don't have any figures to support that because it seems they're impossible to find either way!

Fair enough.

Given best practice these days though, I still believe that more male nursery staff is a positive.

Fair enough. Presently in England. Scottish news is very under-reported for some reason.

I Googled "Nursery staff struck off" and this was the first result

https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/glasgow-nursery-nurse-struck-after-30152324

Male sex offenders generally as I’m talking about the difference in rates of sex crimes between men and women, though I have read about male childcare workers abusing children before and not everything gets reported on the big news sites plus the vast majority of childcare workers are female. Also as mentioned there’s a major case in Australia that’s in the news at present and another poster linked to some other reports too.

Male nursery staff.

Male sex offenders specifically in nurseries or in general?

Cant recall any about nursery staff, tbh.

It’ll be wonderful and I second a PP that says for some young children it’ll be the first positive male role model they’ll encounter, which is a great thing.

Where is OP btw?

Yes she springs to my mind too precisely because sexual abuse of children by women is so comparatively rare. I can think of one other case that also comes to mind,not in a nursery though, again because of the relative rarity of it involving a woman and also because it was local(ish). Yet I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of the culprits, in the literally hundreds if not thousands of reports I’ve read in the news about male sex offenders because it’s far from rare.

When mine were little it was all female key workers in their nurseries, no men at all, so I’m not sure how I would have felt about it. However I work in early years now, have done for the last 5 years and have came across a few amazing male keyworkers, they just seem to have a special quality around the children, ready for more noise, more rough and tumble and more ready to encourage risk taking, the children love them.

we do have one child who doesn’t like either male keyworker and refuses to get her nappy changed (just over 3) but everyone else is happy.

The nursery worker who immediately springs to my mind (UK) was a woman found guilty of filming herself abusing very young children at work for the consumption of her ring. Some time ago when our kids were young.

Because the benefits of having nursery jobs open to people of both sexes outweigh the risks (as with the benefits of keeping children with their parents outweighing the risks of those parents being abusive). Not allowing men to work in nurseries is detrimental in removing a large proportion of potential nursery workers, and in giving children the benefit of interacting with people of both sexes from a young age and having role models of both sexes. If your argument is that men should be able to work in nurseries but shouldn't change nappies, I don't think that will substantially reduce risks of sexual abuse: the nappy change area in my children's nursery was in no way private.

Delivering adult and child protection training is part of my job. I often look on the regulator's website for the country where I live and work to find recent examples of malpractice to show as examples. Over the past couple of years I have noticed a significant increase in the number of male staff who have had warnings and/or conditions placed on their registration, or been struck off the register, for sexual harassment or assault of both colleagues and people in their care.

This is obviously just an anecdotal observation and I haven't measured any statistics, but in a female-heavy profession the numbers still seem heavily weighted towards male staff having these allegations against them upheld. Clearly all this does is supports what we already know about men being statistically more likely to perpetrate violent and/or sexual offences (I'd argue sexual offences are violent) and doesn't suggest that all male practitioners are a risk to their clients, but it's worth paying heed.

It also serves to demonstrate that safeguarding processes are only part of the picture; a DBS check only tells us there's nothing known about an individual; if safer recruitment was a silver bullet then we'd have no one being found to have subsequently breached professional practice guidelines or broken the law.

I couldn’t give a shit if you think it’s bigoted. It’s about children’s safety and safeguarding not men’s feelings. Again as we have already discussed men are far, far more likely to commit sexual abuse than women. Having a woman do personal care doesn’t completely eliminate risk but it drastically reduces it and that is worth doing imo.

Bloody hell there are over 1,200 children in Melbourne who are going to have to be tested for possible STDs because of a male nursery worker but it’s men’s feelings that really matter.

Fabulous experience.
Our nursery had a male member of staff and he was great, I wish there had been more.
I have a DS rather than a daughter but my friends who have daughters thought hew as wonderful too.

Well obviously no one is advocating for children to be removed at birth because that would be incredibly traumatic and detrimental and unnecessary in most cases and children need families, and someone is going to have to look after them but that is in no way equivalent to avoiding male nursery workers giving personal care to young children. Children will not suffer psychologically and developmentally if they do not have male childcare workers changing their nappies.

I never understand the argument that because safeguarding will never be perfect that we shouldn’t bother doing anything, that we shouldn’t try to improve it or that we should even do less. It’s bizarre to me. Not everything has to be perfect or fool proof to be worth doing.

The more positive male role models in childcare settings the better.

Absolutely. Lots of kids don’t have positive male role models in their lives.

If you had a little boy would you have been comfortable with a female changing his nappy? Or would you have wanted a male doing this?
a male to look after the boys
a female to look after girls.

sounds right.

Well I find that very bigoted of you. I changed babies nappies as a male nurse, as did other male and female family members. I even changed my own children's nappies when they were babies, 2 of whom were girls. I managed not to be inappropriate with any of them.
Should female nursery workers, nurses etc not be allowed to change boys nappies, in case they're tempted to have a little fiddle?

Obviously the people who spend the most time with them but I was talking specifically of their actual Father(Again still a risk but not entirely avoidable as children do have and need Fathers. They do not need male nursery workers giving them personal care). I have an abhorrence of people introducing new partners to their children much too early or too casually for this exact reason and several others and I am not generally a fan of blending families but that’s another thread.