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

yes it's been found to be true in research.

https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/mar/04/the-lgbt-couples-adopting-hard-to-place-children

https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/same-sex-couples-raise-adoption-chances-for-vulnerable-children-6s6w3ghg58j

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3514879/

I'm not aware of any research about the outcomes for children adopted by gay and lesbian parents, although there is a lot out there about being raised by biological gay and lesbian parents.

There's no suggestion that Preston was a more difficult to place baby.

That gay and lesbian couples are often more open to adopting harder-to-place children is a separate fact, mentioned as the topic of gay and lesbian adoption in general is being discussed on this thread.

How awful was his own mother. She had murdered someone, was on drugs and in and out of prison What was she even doing having two kids and expecting her mother to look after them. How many more was she going to try and foist onto her mother.

Was her own mother even suitable to be bringing up children . She had bought up her daughter and look what she ended up doing. Nobody has mentioned that. The daughter she bought up was off the rails at 14.
The whole story from conception to adoption and being murdered is so scummy and vile , why aren't people embarrassed to behave like this . People are so bloody selfish.

The breakdown of the traditional family has got a lot to answer for too. If Preston's mother and father had been married or in a happy relationship this would never have happened.
People shagging around and having babies without being in stable relationships is contributing to the increase in child abuse and murder cases. I can't remember hardly any cases where abuse and murder didnt happen in a household where mum has moved a partner in recently that isn't the baby's father . Often the household has different children with different fathers as well.
How did society and people get so bad. ? Where are the child's rights not to have an unknown and unrelated man move in with them?
Until you can stop all the shagging around, divorce, single parenthood etc it's always going to be a problem.
Put children first .
Sick of hearing about scumbags address that problem
Another thing. Adoption now should be shut down and babies should not be advertised in their website with pictures and names etc . Social workers and doctors who were involved should be held accountable and named and shamed .

RIP Preston. You deserved so much more. Hope Drama queen Varley and his boyfriend never come out in prison and live in fear every day
He looked very unsuitable to adopt without all the abuse and vile stuff he was doing He was a weirdo and also very aggressive and an outright liar. Fancy putting a jury through all that heavy and upsetting stuff when it was obvious you were guilty .

I dread to think what might have happened to stolen Ukrainian children in Russia.

There seems to be an assumption that adopters all want babies, but many don't.

Those who do are often given short shift by adoption agencies and told to rethink, to be more open to sibling groups, children with additional needs, older children.

Those who only want babies will often walk away from adoption at this stage. Nowadays they can do surrogacy.

But also, those who do keep going for babies often want babies without a horrendous back story. And Preston's birth mother had murdered an old lady when she was 14 and in back to prison several times since. I believe she gave birth in prison.

And that's the part we know about. There could be all sorts in the report. Social services can't divulge it to us.

It could be that the foster carer's experience of Preston as being an easy baby is the full story, or maybe she was particularly skilled with him. But in any case, moving to a new family is highly stressful for a child. He had now lost two mums - birth mum and foster mum. You would expect him to be upset and sleep issues would not be unexpected.

And we don't know what else was going on. Often children's issues don't become apparent until they start to develop.

The case of Masha Allen. She was adopted from Russia by a peadophile. Her adoptive father SA her, distributing the photos and videos online, until she was rescued aged 13. He also starved her to stop her from developing.

This case prompted changes in adoption laws in America.

Meanwhile, 41-year-old Matthew Mancuso, a divorced father in Pennsylvania, was looking for a little girl to adopt. He contacted a New Jersey adoption agency requesting information on 5-year-old Caucasian girls, and chose Masha from a videotape. After months of waiting, Mancuso traveled to Russia to meet his new daughter. He visited Masha several times at the orphanage, took her to nice dinners, and bought her candy.

To Masha, Mr. Mancuso seemed like her knight in shining armor. But nothing could have been farther from the truth. What she didn't know was the adoption agency failed to properly check her new father's background. No phone calls were made to his ex-wife or to his biological daughter.

Her new father turned out to be a diabolical child pornographer who forced Masha to live as his sex slave. Mancuso took hundreds of pornographic pictures of Masha, then posted them on the Internet, where he traded them with other pedophiles. He dressed Masha as a young bride and forced her to pretend they were getting married. He chained Masha in his basement. He starved his adopted daughter to keep her young body from maturing. And, he forced Masha to take showers with him every day.

For five whole years, Masha says, nobody—not a single social worker—came to check on little Masha.

www.oprah.com/oprahshow/meet-masha_1/all

I do not agree with the term 'child pornography'. It's CSAM. But this is an old article.

Is that actually true though or is it just an assumption? I mean, I can see why that might be the case, but has it been found to be true in research and does it mean better outcomes for the children?

The Zulock story is absolutely horrific. Those poor little boys. That their "associates" knew about it and cheered them on in their abuse is absolutely grim.

As is that Australian report. They do indeed walk among us, and yes, i do think porn has something to do with its seeming escalation.

Sadly, we already know that unrelated males have many more times the risk of sexually assaulting children than women do. Although toddler Poppi Worthington was raped and asphyxiated (I now, after the Preston case, realise what that probably means) by her own father, and of course there is another horrific case coming through just now of Isabelle Rose Welsh, whose mother appears to have enabled/joined in with her new boyfriend's abuse, including sexual, and eventual murder of little Isabelle. Repellent.

What was it that made Preston more difficult to care for though? I get that LGB people are obviously a target market to be adopters (one of my close relatives who is a lesbian, is, has just been approved and has a very challenging now-teenage adoptive son. She had to jump through absolute hoops as well, despite having been his foster carer herself for several years.). But Preston, aside from his acid reflux, did not have special needs, and was a happy, healthy baby by all accounts.

What strikes me (and this appears to be true of multiple people who adopt young children, not just this pair of abusers) is that Varley's reactions show he was really woefully underprepared for the realities of a baby. To the point that his foster mother, who, let's not forget, has prepped over 40 children for adoption, commented on it, with surprise, which suggests she found their cluelessness unusual.

Why is a non-verbal baby being placed with someone who clearly is not prepared for the reality of a baby? I appreciate nobody is going to be fully prepared for the reality, including birth parents, until they are in the midst of it, but - what? JV's colleague said that he was adamant he wanted a baby not a toddler or an older child. So what was it that made placement with them look so desirable over and above everyone else who might've wanted to adopt Preston?

It’s not that they’re “better” but that they are more open to children who arrive with conditions that make them more difficult to care for, as well as older children.

This horrific, deeply depraved, American affluent and ‘respectable’ gay couple
William Dale Zulock and Zachary Jacoby Zulock
are in prison for life for raping and sexually exploiting ( lending out for rape and filming) their two adopted sons who were
3 and 5 when they came into their custody.

These men had been prominent campaigners for the right for gay men/so called “LGBTQ+” to adopt.

The children were given to them by a Christian Agency.

Common ground with Preston’s case is that the men seemed so wholesome and and also that perhaps the agency were too quick in their checks.

NB. I am fully aware of the very many heterosexual men (and some women) who sexually abuse children in their own families, especially if they are stepfathers, most of whom are never reported.
You can only hope that the presence of the children’s mothers helps prevent even more of this abuse from happening.
The huge rise in child sexual abuse films for pornography, including of babies, shows how many men (and also women in some cases) must be involved.

Then there was this Australian report:
www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/news/shocking-number-australian-men-sexually-attracted-children-and-teens
Disturbing research into the extent of child sexual abuse has found almost one in six Australian men have sexual feelings towards children and teenagers, and almost one in 10 acknowledge having committed child sexual offences, despite few being caught.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Zachary_Zulock

I understood that the research showed they were just as good, not better. Tbh I think it's a highly complex area - the vast increase in LGBT+ adoptions in the last few years won't have filtered through to outcomes.

This was all I could find Source: First4Adoption https://share.google/L1uhNTmXOnz11WfMB

The problem with targeting the LGBT community is that the T involves a known and significant number of male fetishists.

And it's well known that paraphilias cluster.

It really is the bloody elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, but surely, after this horrific event, it must be.

There have been several research studies about this. It’s well-proven.

This is against a background of gay and lesbian couples making up 1 in 5 adoptions nationally since 2023.

I think they were actively targetting the LGBT+ community - i would imagine that meant attending LGBT+ events, advertising in LGBT+ publications, using LGBT+ case studies, that sort of thing.

I personally don't disagree with LGBT+ adoption. I know several gay couples and single gay men who have made excellent adopters. Like I said in another post though, imo adoption is not as easy as the Gov makes it out to be and the support just isn't there if the family needs it. And I just think they have identified a group which is interested in adopting and plugged this "anyone can adopt" message at them, which imo is too simplistic, and I would say the same about any group they were to pick out eg single women, disabled people.

For those of you living in the UK there is a petition for a national enquiry, has 60k signatures so far
https://www.change.org/p/preston-davey-deserved-better-demand-a-national-inquiry?recruiter=173329&recruited_by_id=44722650-be5b-012f-fd5a-40406f61fb41&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_medium=copylink&share_id=G5ZqMHZRSt

I really think you should think about how you speak to people you don't agree with.

As it happens, someone posted the Telegraph article yesterday on this thread but it was behind the pay wall and I couldn't read it.

Later on the thread on X which I posted came up on my X feed and as it seemed to summarise the Telegraph article zi thought I would share it.

I have no idea who the woman who wrote it is. I don't personally have a problem if she is Conservative - it isn't illegal.

Anyway, the article pulled out some stats about the adoption agency's targetting of the LGBT+ community. That's what I was referring to. If they had been targetting any single group I would have made the same comments - I fundamentally disagree with the "anyone can adopt" approach and the targetting of groups they think will be particularly interested in doing so. Atm it's the LGBT+ community but it could be any group eg particular ethnicity.

And i stick by this. 24% of their business involving the LGBT+ community is IMO of interest. Imo they have seen a group of people who can be persuaded to adopt and have pursued it. I have posted before that I completely disagree with the recruitment of well meaning amateurs with next to no training and zero support - and I include myself in that category.

This was responding to:
mrsbowes · Today 22:39
I don't think one thing follows from the other. Were they actually excluding straight adopters?

If there were no other adopters to choose from then one does not follow from the other.

If there were, and the gay couple were prioritised and chosen even though the other adopters were as good or better, then the other would-be adopters were effectively excluded.

That is what positive discrimination does.

I had another go and the article must have been archived by someone else, as I wrote in my previous post it would not archive for me

https://archive.ph/w1RaK

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/19/baby-preston-adoption-agency-pushed-staff-hit-strict-target/

There definitely seems to have been a monetary incentive

The 2022 DfE review reported industry concerns that financial incentives to prioritise agencies’ own adopters led to matches that felt “pushed or forced”.

Although things may have changed in the intervening years, this is the time around which Preston was adopted.

I don't think one thing follows from the other. Were they actually excluding straight adopters?

You would think so but
I read in the link in the pp about the report on the agency that,
It found the agency pledged to focus on “increasing the number of LGBTQ+ applicants” the year after baby Preston was murdered, and to examine “the barriers to single males seeking to adopt”

From that it seems to me that the agency was targeting and prioritising a particular section of society.

edited for typo

How do you know that? Did you do a survey? Or is it what you believe?

It is illegal in the UK for anyone to profit from the adoption of a child. You are being fed misinformation here.

Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs): Charities and not-for-profit agencies (such as Coram or Adoption Matters) are paid fees by Local Authorities for recruiting, assessing, and training adoptive parents. They do not make a profit, but the fees cover staff wages and operational costs.