Ban male nursery workers?

[BluntPlumHam]

I came across this article which has left me quite sick.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze665j2y51o.amp

Said 18 year old was newly qualified nursery worker who’d SA’d and raped 3 year olds.

Nurseries are desperate for workers and I have noticed through friends and families that there is now an increasing number of men entering the profession.

Men traditionally haven’t performed this role and I often find it difficult to envisage what attracts a male to this profession to begin with when we have so many instances of men who run away from childcare responsibilities.

Although men entering the profession can be a positive outcome the other very concerning outcome and on the potential rise is this.

Sex offenders will target this profession no doubt as it gives them easy access to children.

men are significantly more likely than women to sexually assault children.
Official statistics consistently show that the vast majority of individuals convicted of, or reported for, child sexual abuse (CSA) are male. For example:

• In the year ending March 2019, the Crime Survey for England and Wales found that 92% of adults who reported experiencing CSA said the perpetrator was male only.
• In 2022/23, almost 99% of individuals convicted of child sexual abuse offences in the UK were men.
• Reports to the Australian Royal Commission by victims and survivors of institutional abuse revealed that 93.9% of the abuse was perpetrated by an adult man.

So just a blanket ban on them all together ?

It isn’t my personal opinion but I do think we ought to have measures in place to make nurseries more secure and safer. This thread is to invite discussion.

Also, kudos to those brave little 3 year olds who had the courage to tell their parents because they’ve saved a lot of potential victims in the future. My thoughts and wishes for a life time of healing for them and theirs.

The DBS only shows whether they have been convicted of crimes against children in the past. It's not a guarantee that they never have or would hurt a child.

And the government have recently changed the ratios so more children per adult than before

But your logic is flawed, because that male nursery worker is also someones close family.

HTH

But it is the "same random man". Because that nursery worker is no different to any father.

Or are male nursery workers somehow different?

Logic is lost on some people . .

Are fathers "allowed" to be on their own with their children?

Vanessa George was "allowed" to be on her own with children. . . .

Higher risk of what?

Or are you suggesting that spending enough time around children turns men into child abusers?

You’re making no sense and embarrassing yourself.

Ok, let's say children are as likely to be abused by their biological father as they are by an unrelated man (I don't know the actual stats on this but I do think it's the case that statistically children are more at risk from stepfathers than biological fathers which suggests unrelated men are more of a risk).
Even if that's the case, it's practically not possible to prevent biological fathers having unsupervised access to children and the negative impact of that on both children and mothers outweighs the small risk of being sexually abused.
However, it is much more possible to prevent unrelated men from having unsupervised access to young children and particularly undressing or providing intimate care to them. Although doing so may have some negative impact on children & women, the impact would be much less than if we did it with fathers.
You are trying to compare two massively different scenarios.

Do you happen to know if fathers present the same risk as unrelated men?

Fathers - one hopes one has married and chosen a father who’d not abuse our children. Of course it happens, men are men, however it’s not the same as a random man left alone with small children for hours.

One hopes. Women consistently choose absolutely awful men as fathers. Not all sex offenders but many who are violent and abusive. Fathers are also far more likely to abuse their children than a nursery worker would but we gloss over that and make out that it’s fine.

A friend of an acquaintance is married to an actual sex offender. She’s blonde, stunning, has a large social media presence and a seemingly enviable life. But she has a child with a sex offender convicted of category A image-making. She had the child with him after the police raided his house. I doubt her many friends who seem fine to have her husband around their children know about his conviction. He’s used the right to forget to remove it from Google but a copy of the article exists on one of those paedophile hunter sites.

Men traditionally haven’t performed this role and I often find it difficult to envisage what attracts a male to this profession to begin with when we have so many instances of men who run away from childcare responsibilities.

This is an awful statement. I just came back from Spain, where it is much more common to see small kids out with just dad or grand dads. Its lovely.

A better idea would be that all areas where there are children have CCTV so that there is always oversight of what people are doing. Or if it is an area where that is inappropriate, like a toilet, you have 2 people. That is not foolproof, but should help.

Agree with all the above.

Hell would literally have to freeze over before I left my DC in the care of any unrelated man, when that care involves being permitted to see and touch my DC bits. I find it extraordinary personally how casual parents are about this. Men who would do harm to kids are disproportionately likely to seek work with young children. Men commit almost all sex crime against children statistically. Why take that risk with your precious DC for wishy washy reasons like "male role models".

The irony.

As someone whose child was at the nursery… I think I speak for all of the parents there that we weren’t ‘casual’. We’ve all been through hell over this - we don’t need to be blamed.

CCTV doesn't prevent abuse, it just produces evidence when people are caught. The reason convictions of female nursery staff for abuse/murder were all in settings with CCTV.

.

No blame or offence meant at all! Apologies. I do think there is a really unhealthy push from childcare settings and bodies for parents to accept this dynamic and there's a huge lack of awareness of the nature of sexual abuse, statistics and risk.

Because this is horrible fucking discrimination! How would you like to be excluded from a whole profession on the basis that you may, just may, be a pedo.

This is how discrimination works and I won't subscribe to it.

Look at the quote above yours just now.

someone blaming me.

be thoughtful about what you write.

I feel shit enough about it. I don’t need all of your judgement.

we live in a society where two parents need to work. We chose what I thought was an a safe and nurturing setting and my child really did have a wonderful experience. But sure, I was just casually putting them in danger.

edit - they have now edited their post but the jist was basically blame

Not all discrimination is bad. We do it all the time. Legally even. For example, if you're a blind person, you can't safely fly a plane and the passengers' right to not die in the flight takes priority over the hypothetical blind person's aviation dreams. Others might disagree, but I don't think vague aims around male role models justify the risk of having male nursery staff, given the personal care responsibilities involved and age of the children.

I'm very sorry you've had to go through that and I hope your DC is safe and had no contact with this individual. I'm just sharing my personal opinion on this topic as feel quite strongly about it. Unfortunately for professional reasons I know a lot about CSA

They did have contact with them as it’s a very small setting. They had mentioned their name. To be honest I guess I will never know exactly what happened…. As I said before, the parents never had any contact from the police apart from an email from the nursery with the crime ref number. The next I hear is a year later reading it in the bbc

Dreadful way to treat parents. You should all have been spoken to separately by police and offered support. I'm really sorry

The issue here is safeguarding. Nurseries need to have iron tight safeguarding measures so that nursery workers never have the opportunity to be alone with a child in the toilets, that should have never happened in the first place and is a safeguarding failure.

It isn’t personal, it’s to invite discussion about an important topic where men commit said crime disproportionately more than women. The stats don’t lie and there is a lot of great discussion happening in this thread, you should read some of it before going off the handle.

Given your violent response I concluded you were angry because who advocate’s to kick some’s arse over discussion.