Former teacher guilty of sexually abusing and murdering baby boy he wanted to adopt - CPS

To be honest reading about this is so horrific it makes me feel numb . I’m not sure there is any punishment out there good enough for these evil disgusting people .

But it's very unlikely that the only suitable family they could find were two men.

Plus from some of the videos that have been doing the rounds, one of the men (the teacher) seemed a highly unstable man.

The same thing happened with Pride in Surrey. There were so many red flags with the founder, Stephen Ireland, including him dressing up children in bondage gear, but the authorities, including the police, schools, the BBC and foster care in Surrey, ignored them all because they didn't want to appear to be homophobic. He was allowed to run a phoneline using his own mobile phone for vulnerable children to call him. The result? He kidnapped, drugged and raped a child.

He was sentenced last June. Also during Pride month.

The media largely ignored the story.

Yes you are right on this. There are plenty of people caring for grandchildren into their 70s, not all full time but for significant stretches. I've seen it a lot with friends who become grandparents late in life. One at least has had three lots of cancer and significant surgery, she adores her grandchildren and once recovered she has gone back to looking after them as often as she is needed.

Perhaps she asked verbally, e.g. at a case meeting, not in writing, and the person making records of the meeting didn't record the request.

I can tell you from personal experience that social workers are horrific at minutes and records of meetings. (I am not a social worker which is presumably why I am an acknowledged Queen of comprehensive, relevant minutes and meeting records.)

It would have been waiting for grandmother or looking for a suitable adoptive family.

How do we know that the only other option to the grandmother was the two men?

Correct me if I'm wrong but Preston's birth family and possibly his foster mother were in Oldham. At least that's where he was taken into care. He was adopted by these men in Blackpool, a fair distance away. Putting to one side why, out of a huge chunk of the country's potential adopters a baby (highly sought after by families seeking to adopt), he was given to two men, Blackpool is stuffed full of children's homes. The LA had to pass a law to prevent planning permission being given to even more. The area is also one of the most economically deprived in the country. I suspect the social workers are run off their feet, underpaid, burned out and not sticking around. Other organisations, the NHS, etc. that deal with 'looked after' kids are probably also run ragged. Perhaps stuff that would raise a May Day's worth of red flags somewhere else is just 'Tuesday' in Blackpool.

In the article it says that Oldham council have no record of the granny asking to keep Preston after her cancer treatment was finished. Why are they saying that?

My brother used to work in the prison service, his was mostly sex offenders, the majority of the offences were against children. Unfortunately they’ll probably end up in a prison like this, hopefully they won’t and will get the punishment they deserve!

No it doesn't, and if I was social services/the judge there is no chance I'd have waited and hoped on granny over looking for a permanent adoptive family.

My brother was a facilitator in a prison that was mainly for sex offenders, mostly child sex offenders. I honestly don’t know how he did it, he’s retired early as he’d simply had enough. His opinion is that you can’t rehabilitate these people, they’re truly vile and in his opinion shouldn’t be allowed to walk the earth ever again!

I can't say I'm the biggest fan of relying on other prisoners to dish out real justice but I hope to god they pick up the pace with these 2. I will raise a glass to whoever torments them on a daily basis in the same way.

I feel physically sick - that poor child.

@AzureStaffy

The statistics show that over 98% of sexual offences are committed by men. Your mother dsunds like a nightmare but she was far from the norm for women. Women who commit these crimes are outliers statistically.

You implied safeguarding was an issue and clearly you’re wrong, as we know she has a grandchild in her long term care.

Also Preston was not murdered this year. She’d be early 60s at the time this was going on. Adoption is a massive leap before offering support to gran and wider family to keep him.

It was their anger and rage at Preston for behaving like a baby.

They expected a living doll they could sexually abuse and then put to bed for the night, and he cried. Their abuse made him cry more, so they got angrier They didn't form any emotional bond with him, so they didn't empathise with him when he was suffering, no matter how extreme. There was nothing there internally, no conscience, no empathy, to prompt restraint. The only limit they could have had was fear of external intervention, and they already knew they could talk rings around social services. If Preston was still alive, he's probably still be with them now.

I don't intend to idealise biological parents, because biological parents do abuse and kill their children. But any kind of emotional bond towards the child on the abusing adult's part will act as a brake on the adult's most violent impulses. The abuser will take a longer period to reach lethal levels of violence, or never reach that level at all. As we now know, JV had no brake and he exerted no limits on his rage. In fact, he seems to have wallowed in his rage.

Just to say that his foster parents didn't fail him at all, so it's not "every single person". He at least experienced love and a healthy, nurturing environment with them for the first nine months of his life.

Pretty much everyone else though...

Whose actual JOB it was to protect him. I mean, ultimately, it was the State that chose to place a non verbal child in an environment where he goes from being happy and healthy and ends up horrifically sexually abused and dead within four short months because multiple red flags were missed, he wasn't properly monitored by those very people who are expected to do so. That is a huge responsibility and heads should roll.

No one has sat there and thought "sod him being with family, I want to give some gay men a baby for woke points."

I don't think many people are suggesting that, just something more insidious in the institutions safeguarding and servicing society at the moment.

Beyond heart breaking that every single person who was meant to protect this child failed him in the worst possible way.

The two disgusting men who adopted him deserve whatever comes there way. They are absolutely the worst of the worst. Unsurprising to hear once again the systematic failings of police and social services. So many people complicit in this poor babies suffering.

If you were trying to find a family for a baby and your choices were a woman in her 60s with cancer, who had already had their own child removed from their care to be placed in a yoi for torturing and murdering someone

You have missed a couple of vital parts of that story. The first is that her daughter murdered someone as a teenage decades ago and she was imprisoned, not taken away from her mother for poor parenting. The second is that granny already had his sister.

You might also mention that survival rates are really good for breast cancer these days and that her prognosis is good, I think, and she has a life expectancy into him being an adult. Also that the delay in handing him over would only have been because she would not be allowed to lift him for a couple of months.

Changes the picture a bit, doesn't it?

@Fillies4DeclanRice and @Imdunfer he was not with his gran because the court, for whatever reason, ruled her out and chose a care plan of adoption. Social workers then had to try to find adopters.

Courts won't wait indefinitely for family members to be able to care for a child and legislation is clear that delays should be avoided and permanence secured. Family is first choice but cases can't just stay in court waiting. For a child of his age they won't finish on a care order in foster care and just hope gran can do it later on. I don't know gran's situation and we only ever get one side in these cases because social workers can't go to the press and say "actually, they were ruled out because x,y,z."
Gran would have had to be assessed and approved - for kinship care like an SGO it would have had to go to a panel for approval and if she was very ill that likely wouldn't be approved.
I am not saying that is right, just that every involved is bound by legislation, process etc.

No one has sat there and thought "sod him being with family, I want to give some gay men a baby for woke points."

But 'granny' would be 4 years older [she's currently 66] and coping with 2 children not one

Well granny already had a grandchild placed with her so that argument falls apart.

Very similar to many cases
where someone flags something isn’t right
and are told to shut up stop being racist homophobic or whatever the latest buzz word is

I’m sure a school teacher was told to shut the fuck up and not be racist with regards to her feelings on the guy who killed the little girls in Southport

And I think mental health workers were told not to admit , go softly on the guy who stabbed the students and the man in Nottingham because he was black

If you were trying to find a family for a baby and your choices were a woman in her 60s with cancer, who had already had their own child removed from their care to be placed in a yoi for torturing and murdering someone OR a couple in their 30s with good jobs, a nice home, one of them a well respected and well liked teacher, great references, childcare experience, loving and supportive families, passed all checks and vetting, which would you go for?
Especially given that the baby is going to need a permanent home for the next 18-20 years and it's unknown if he will have any developmental or behavioural issues as he grows up but had a very shaky start in life.

Whether you agree or not the law is that prospective adopters cannot be discriminated against due to their sex, so the social worker couldn't have ruled them out on that basis.

I’m really surprised how few people on here understand the role of social workers. They don’t decide to take children - that’s the courts role. And (ime) courts are very reluctant to remove children from a home. They give awful parents way more chances than I would!

I think it is disingenuous to suggest that social workers don't decide to take children and to blame courts for that.

The people who decide the child needs to be taken are the social workers. If the social workers had not decided this then the case would not be in court.

The court are heavily influenced by the experts in court who are the social workers or people brought in to support their case. They rely on them for the information about the child's situation. The court does not visit the child at home or see them interacting with their parents outside court.

The case is in court because social workers recommend removing the child and take it to court to get permission to do that.

The courts sometimes don't agree that the social workers have presented sufficient evidence to balance the harm caused to children by removing them from their parents with the harm that moderately abusive parents are doing them.

There is just no way social workers decided they’d rather give Preston to a gay couple than have him stay with the birth family. “Wokery” had nothing to do with the decision to put him up for adoption.

But they did make that decision. The "foster for a few months"/"granny with his sister" arrangement was put to them and they rejected it in favour of giving him to a gay couple.

I am unconvinced that this has nothing to do with political correctness.