Another male nursery worker

Should two male staff be able to do intimate care on babies together?

A big problem is that the staff didn't raise any concerns, even though they thought he was creepy and behaving inappropriately.

Did they think it was none of their business, not want to make complaints about a colleague, or not want to get involved in something that could bring the inspectorate and police into their workplace?

They really let the children down.

Staff who work with vulnerable peoole and children have got to take more responsibility for their well being, minimum wage shouldn't be an excuese to have no sense of responsibility.

It's not about "not hurting mens feelings", it's that complete separation of men and young children is totally impractical.

Banning men from working in nurseries, for example, is not a proportionate measure. It would be wide open to legal challenges. It could have further consequences for the field of medicine, teaching etc.

It's not going to happen.

A better measure would be to mandate staff working in pairs so no employee is left alone with children in their care, however the problems with that will be much increased staffing costs and fees which will be passed on to parents.

There is also the question over childminders and male adults who may be in their home. If similar mandates are applied to them, it would probably force many out of business.

As others have pointed out, there is already a recruitment problem in the sector and I don't think I need to point out just how high costs already are. There is little room to increase wages or staffing numbers.

A lack in available childcare / a steep rise in fees would force many couples to have one parent stay at home (and let's face it, it's going to be mostly mothers), and that's to say nothing of how single parents (again, overwhelmingly mothers with primary care responsibilities) will be affected.

So @stickydough would double what nursery workers are currently paid. That's insane. And I can't see that it would stop abusers entering the nursery system either. Arguably it would be an inducement. If you're throwing that kind of money around then it would be better spent on a decent, manned CCTV system in nurseries. Is there really a problem with having CCTV of nappy changing? Staff routinely see what's under the nappies, and the footage wouldn't be kept. Perhaps there should be live cameras but no recording, as otherwise there would be a risk of someone gaining access to the footage and publishing it online.

In many of the headline child abuse cases it turns out that the mother is a single parent who has a new, or longer standing, boyfriend. And single mothers are often actively targeted by men with a sexual interest in children.

The images of some of those Australian child abusers show them to be young men who you might otherwise have thought looked pleasant and 'caring'. A shocking report.

I don't think anyone is suggesting a child's father shouldn't provide care, just random male strangers who want to work with babies.

Agree with PP that pay is a factor, lack of people willing to do the job. Ripe for exploitation by paedophiles and makes this happening more likely.

And the fact is the low pay and lack of staff means that if you're expecting top notch safeguarding it's probably not going to exist.

Add to that a fear of speaking out against powerful personalities and the risks of speaking out such as loss of job and bad reference (vs not a lot of benefit or protection).

Those who say safeguarding should prevent this happening. Well clearly it doesn't, for all the reasons above.

The last safeguarding training I attended every single example given had a whistleblower who had nothing to lose by raising a concern - a student doing work experience with a Uni place to go to, a taxi driver, not one example was a person who might lose their job for speaking out against a senior member of staff and / or a popular member of staff. I did point this out, but nothing will change.

I can’t read this article. Even the headline made me cry.

The risk of a child being abused is 20 times higher if a single mother moves her boyfriend in.

Of course males in these settings increases the risk.

The sooner we are more comfortable in hurting men’s feelings over increasing the risk posed to children the better.

In my earlier list of jobs that attract sexual abusers, I forgot to mention medicine and nursing, and, in particular, paediatrics. Here's a recent paediatrician convicted on child sex abuse offences:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15535647/Former-head-drugs-regulator-faces-struck-medical-register.html

If you google, there are quite a few of them.

This has been discussed on another thread in depth.
The U.K. is very much in its infancy when it comes to male recruitment in contrast to Australia for example. Below is an article which discusses how and I quote

Paedophiles have infiltrated Australia’s $22 billion childcare industry by exploiting lax regulation, piecemeal oversight and glaring staffing inadequacies, a major Four Corners investigation has uncovered.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-27/childcare-centres-paedophiles-abuse-four-corners/105926324

The U.K. is headed in the same trajectory as Australia with the increased recruitment of men in early years. It’s common sense, if men make up 98 percent of the CSA conviction rate logic dictates that CSA will rise with their continued recruitment.

I mean we can see it in the news, happening. Every month there is a new story like the one you posted.

Whats more concerning is that the article above talks about how pedophiles actively target these settings because they’re predatory by nature.

Men should be banned from working in nurseries because that is the only way you can truly mitigate this risk any alternatives are just wishful thinking.

This is totally my experience too, back when I worked in a nursery. Quite often the ‘big personalities’ go along with camp / OTT / flirty behaviour, which can also add to a reluctance to speak up about anything which seems dodgy.

For those arguing for more cameras, how does this work for nappy changing?

Another thread here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5488316-again-nursery-worker-raping-2-year-olds?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

Completely agree, male primary school teachers/after school club workers/scout leaders etc - great role models

looking after babies and toddlers is a no from me

It’s not all men. I trust my DH/Dad/brothers with my DC, but it’s the fact that men are so overwhelmingly more likely to carry out CSA than women that makes it a risk I’m not willing to take

My daughter works in a nursery. She says the big problem is the cliques that form between staff members, who will tend to cover for each other if one of them makes a mistake, say, but they also trust each other implicitly and will never question what one is doing. And the men who work in childcare are often really popular - they can be dominant personalities and she says staff either keep a distance or are totally all in.

It really comes down to management not allowing this to happen, but like another poster said, they are so short of staff, so all sorts of things aren't addressed. There is a membervof staff at my daughter's nursery who is constantly late and nothing is done about it because she is so desperately needed for the numbers.

whenever this discussion comes up on forums, people are frothing with rage at the idea that men might have an ulterior motive for wanting to work with non verbal infants. Like the swedish rape survivors who are encouraged to forgive their rapists because they’re asylum seekers who might not know how to respect women, we’re encouraged to gaslight ourselves in the name of diversity.

The difficulty with saying you'd never send your child to a nursery with male staff is it assumes that (1) staffing remains static for the entire time your child is at the nursery and (2) that if the staffing changes you have options to immediately find alternative childcare with no male staff. Our child's nursery had no male staff when we viewed it whilst pregnant, and no male staff when they started at nursery over a year later. Three years after that, there are now male staff working in the nursery (albeit not in child's room). Waiting lists for almost all nurseries in our area are over six months for our age group and longer for babies (and any nursery with a shorter list probably has significant quality issues), and we have full time jobs that we can't afford to quit if we want to continue to eat food and pay our mortgage.

Are most people in a position to completely upend their careers and financial security because their nursery has recruited a male member of staff, with no suggestion that the specific individual in question is dubious?

Though if you look at the males of other species, they certainly do not get involved in caring for offspring that are not their own, whereas the females of many species do care for the offspring of other females. And some male creatures are a positive threat to not only their own offspring, but also to the offspring of other males.

I would never, never send my child to a nursery that had male workers. I would never hire a male babysitter. I've no issue with male nurses, as long as I can request a female for very intimate care, and I've no issue with male teachers. My children's primary had male teachers who were wonderful. But children can speak up. Babies can not. Frankly I'm amazed any nursery would take the risk of hiring a male.

I can’t even bear to read the article today, sometimes these things are just too much. I was on the other thread a fair bit - think it might still be going, and it’s quite disturbing how many people seem to understand the relative risk.

I think a radical but wonderful solution would be to have a total overhaul of early years work, with Nordic style expectations of childcare workers’ qualifications. So all childcare providers to be educated to professional level, and paid on a par with teachers and psychologists. It wouldn’t remove all risk as we clearly still have abuse in schools, but it would remove the ease of which opportunistic abusers could just seek out the easiest environment in which to attack the most vulnerable children.

Plus the understanding of the statistical risk posed by men must be built into day to day nursery protocols, and good men would understand and accept this. So greater supervision and less independence for them. This would be something less ambitious that could be applied now.

I do agree that in a utopian world where MVAWG isn’t a thing, then it’s beneficial for young children to experience men in caring roles. But in our current system of total failure to eradicate that risk, the benefits in no way outweigh the risks.

The sentences for this kind of crime aren't anywhere near long enough, they're effectively a slap on the wrist. Some blokes have had no sentence or a greatly reduced one because of their career. The victims don't seem to matter in the great scheme of things.
He doesn't just need a custom dual sentence, he needs psychological "help" otherwise he'll reoffend.

If you have a man who is sexually interested in children he will seek out wherever he will have easy access to them, like a nursery.

This is absolutely true, unfortunately. And obviously it's not just nurseries, it's schools (especially boarding schools), sports coaching jobs, the priesthood, Boy Scouts troops, youth clubs, children's homes. All those need really stringent safeguarding in place.

"If we build it they will come"

If you have a man who is sexually interested in children he will seek out wherever he will have easy access to them, like a nursery.

It's no different to women's prisons allowing men in and suddenly rapists identifying as trans to get access.

We need to be honest and accept that there are some careers that are not suitable for men and some that are not suitable for women. But we currently live in a society where we think everyone can do everything.

Surely we can think "men working in nurseries are much more likely to be abusers than the woman there", and even take that as far as "no men should work in nurseries", without going as far as "it's weird and unnatural for men to want to care for small children and so any man who says he does must be a predator in disguise".

Saying that liking to look after toddlers in normal for women but absolutely freakish for men is as bad as most other stereotypes about the roles of the sexes.

Saw this on the news last night .. sad to see previous colleagues report they thought something was off as he was very possessive of certain children , I’d like to think that was a red flag in itself . I pray that those children are too young to remember and do not have any physical or emotional trauma , cannot begin to imagine how their families feel. Would never condone violence but … yes I would .