AIBU to question adoption checks after this safeguarding failure?

Mother's are statistically more likely to murder newborns and children under 5.

And what happens to the hundreds of children each year currently adopted by single men or gay couples?

In fact maybe we need to look at it another way.

If we’re going to say off the back of one case, that gay men should not be allowed to adopt, then perhaps we should also say that women with PND should have their children removed, given the fact that so many of them end up murdering them.

You can’t have it both ways. If one incident means all risk should be removed, then that should apply to any case where a child has come to harm, including things like mental illness.

As soon as a risk factor is introduced then the child should be the one considered.

So if a man is more likely to abuse and you say men shouldn’t be allowed to adopt, then you have to concede that women with post partum issues should have their children removed for their safety.

No? Didn’t think so.

What change?

*cesspit

I wouldn't want to watch that footage (I assume things like Preston having 'boo' shouted at him) either, but it's astoundingly, mindbogglingly hyperbolic to say that watching it would make someone as disturbed as the convicted rapists in this case.

I know more people who have been abused by women than men. I.e. by parents.

I come from a background of disability, and where plenty of people have been disabled by their mothers.

And the difference is that usually when a man murders a baby we call it murder. When a woman murders her children the bleeding hearts call it mental health issues.

That’s just nonsense. Any social worker I’ve known fears a child in their caseload coming to harm, more than any accusation, and are trying to balance the risk of that with many other factors. I’m not saying poor practice isn’t an issue here, it could be, but we have to look at the systems these workers are trying to practice in as well, and how skilled abusers are at deceiving - it’s literally part of the mechanism of abuse.

And you watched them?

I mean tattle life is a complete sesspit where I imagine plenty of people got a kick out of watching those kinds of videos. And none of them should be freely available to view anywhere other than in a court setting.

Anyone who chooses to watch that kind of footage is just as disturbed as the sicko’s who carry out that kind of abuse.

Actually, the stats I shared further back in the thread show that statistically speaking, men are far more likely to murder their children than women, despite the fact that women do the vast majority of the childcare.

Who is dividing people into simply evil and not? I'm certainly not doing that.

But I really find it hard to believe that someone could suddenly realise, in their late thirties, having never had the urges before despite being around children and babies, that they want to sexually torture one.

It's bizarre to believe that someone could just 'become' a sadistic, paedophiliac sexual abuser overnight, because one has been around a fretful baby for several weeks.

Plenty. In the past few years the vast majority of children murdered by a parent who have been in the news have been murdered by women. Their mothers, their mother’s female partner, there was also that other case of the woman who murdered the child she was intending to adopt.

What I find most disturbing in these discussions is that people fixate on the sexual abuse side of things when they look at statistics in order to bring down men.

And yet there is plenty of evidence that women abuse children equally if not more than men in other ways.

And what about this child’s mother. Maybe if she’d been a suitable carer in the first place none of this would have happened.

This is about so much more than how it all ended.

Do you have a source for this, because (forgive me, I’m not personally accusing you of this) there are an awful lot of false rumours and claims about this case.

No. It’s a tabloid view of things to divide people into simply evil or not.

I have no idea what Varley’s previous tendencies were but given there was nothing to indicate that he had a sexual interest in babies, it is possible he didn’t, until he did.

It is also possible he did and it was premeditated; I don’t know. But apparently this is also indicative of a warped mind at work.

Weird AI OP

It's a 'tabloid view of things' to think that someone who engages in paedophiliac sexual sadism must have always had an 'interest' in it? How so?

I don't think people are 'born evil', no, but they are shaped by their earliest experiences, their brain chemistry, and so on - people don't just flip a switch halfway through life and go from being an entirely normal expectant father who has never had any interest in paedophiliac sexual sadism, to doing the horrendous things that man did.

Sleep deprivation, exhaustion, anger, loneliness...none of those things would drive a normal person with normal sexual predilections to sexually torturing a baby within weeks of adopting him.

I would expect that the man likely adopted Preston with the idea of 'sneakily' and 'subtly' abusing him without 'going too far', and that the anger and resentment he felt caused the sheer brutality that eventually caused him to be found out with Preston's death, but wasn't the reason for the sexual abuse. Nothing else makes sense.

I read the first paragraph @OtterlyAstounding and I couldn’t read the rest, sorry.

I don’t think my mind is abnormal but who knows, maybe it is. I think people can be triggered by seemingly random things and then a sort of horrendous tendency which has lain dormant until that point flies out.

I’ll bow out now: the whole thing has disturbed and upset me more than I can put into words on here and I don’t see the above point as massively controversial, unless we want to believe people are just evil, born that way and hide it until they can’t, which is a rather tabloid view of things IMO.

It’s less about the rigorous pre adoption checks and more about safeguarding. It would have been impossible to identify risk in those who had never offended before, they should however have been flagged up with the hospital visits etc , that’s where the failure is.

If you think it follows that an average man (or woman) without existing predilections in that direction might react to feelings of anger and resentment by viciously and repeatedly sexually torturing a baby, I am sincerely worried by the way your mind works.

I think everyone could understand (not excuse!) neglecting the baby to get away from the stress of looking after him, or hitting/shaking the baby to 'shut him up', but there is a vast, vast gulf in between 'angrily making the baby be quiet/abandoning him to get away from him' and 'repeatedly using him as a sexual torture object'.

Anyone doing that in this situation (AKA, in modern middle class Britain, with a baby they've adopted) was clearly already a sexual sadist by nature, and didn't suddenly turn into one out of nowhere within days/weeks of adopting a fretful baby. It's really extremely disturbing that you think (a short spate of) anger and resentment could trigger that reaction in an otherwise normal individual.

I'm also not sure why you're hoping the jury made a mistake? It seems painfully obvious from expert testimonies and evidence what happened to Preston.

Well no, it’s not a ‘whoops’ @OtterlyAstounding is it? Tbh, while I do recognise that wasn’t your intention that seemed to suggest I was making light of this case which of course I’m not.

But I don’t think that it was premeditated in the way that others are suggesting. Anger and resentment sometimes comes out in physical aggression and sometimes and more rarely I would say in pent up sexual aggression.

I hope the jury made a horrible mistake tbh but that’s also unthinkable.

In what way? The trial was happening…

He was one when he died and would be four now
What has been happening for the last 3 years?