AIBU to question adoption checks after this safeguarding failure?

[User05677229]

I can’t stop thinking about little Preston Davey. That poor baby boy, taken into care as a newborn, seemed happy and healthy in foster care, only to be adopted by a gay male couple and then subjected to months of the most horrific sexual and physical abuse before being murdered. How did this happen? How did red flags get missed?

I’m a mum of two, and like many of you, I’ve always supported loving homes for children who need them. But cases like this shake me to the core. I’m not saying no gay men should ever adopt - that’s not realistic or fair. But we have to be honest: the data and repeated safeguarding failures suggest that male same-sex couples (particularly for very young children) need extra rigorous scrutiny, not less.

Social workers and adoption panels seem terrified of being called homophobic. So they bend over backwards to approve placements that might raise eyebrows in heterosexual couples. Fast-tracked approvals, ignoring instincts about motivation, lack of a female parent for a tiny baby - all while birth mothers are scrutinised to the nth degree. This isn’t kindness to adults; it’s gambling with children’s safety.

Baby Preston had injuries consistent with sexual abuse, multiple hospital visits, concerns raised… and still nothing stopped it. Eight missed opportunities, apparently. That’s not just individual evil - that’s a system that’s lost its nerve.

Can we please have an honest conversation?

Better psychological and background checks specifically for single men and male couples adopting infants.

Mandatory longer observation periods.

No more rushing through to meet diversity targets.

Social workers must be protected from accusations of bias when they flag legitimate concerns about any applicant, including gay men.

Children deserve the best possible chance, not to be experiments in adult validation. Every child in the care system has already been let down once. We owe them robust, evidence-based safeguarding - not ideology.

RIP little Preston. This should never have happened.

What do others think? Am I being unfair?

Yes it was a tragedy but people have sex and become pregnant all the time and people also move in unsuitable step parent sin all the time, unless constant checks are done on everyone which is impossible children are contsantly at risk of harm

all the check in the world would only check what is recorded ie there is a history, sure background checks and doing phychological tests may make people feel they can sleep better on a night but wouldn't people just get better at hiding their intentions

A great tick boxing excercise and no I dont have the answers but like people who think Claire's Law protects by thinking it is clear so all is good, means nothing

Genuinely, what do you think is in it for we adopters then? We are not martyrs. We are people who are prepared to love the children we did not grow or birth. We are not paid - unlike foster carers - and we commit legally for life.

I said primarily.

Genuinely, as an adopter of two decades now, I would be highly suspicious of prospective adopters who were embarking on this journey in order to do good and to ‘save’ a child. It’s okay for adopters to say they want to become parents.

Men are a risk. They are a risk to women. They are a risk to children.
Placing a child in a home with 2 male carers is doubling that risk.

I have been tired and frustrated raising 3 children. At no point was I did this frustration tempt me to sexually assault them or even think about it. Its unthinkable
That's a special kind of evil. Yes evil.

Good intentions do not mutate into violent sexual assault in the face of the challenges of raising a baby. Not in anybody normal.

I don't believe that a normal man who adopted a baby with the intention of being a good father could just - whoops - slide into unrelentingly and violently orally and anally raping him within weeks (days?) of adoption, and frankly I'm horrified and bewildered that you do.

While it would still be horrific, I would understand anger, sleep deprivation, and being overwhelmed leading him to shake, hit, or neglect the child in such a way that it led to his death - but repeatedly and sadistically raping a baby is not something that a person gets into a 'habit' of doing because they're stressed and want dominance.

I think he absolutely was a sadist with paedophiliac tendencies before this, even if he'd had the self control to never indulge his tendencies before.

How many women harm and kill children?

Of course same sex couples are more likely to adopt - THEY CAN'T HAVE KIDS!

No adoptee would get through the process if they had any previous convictions so what exactly are you suggesting?

What extra checks could possibly be done to show someone with no history of abuse as a possible future abuser?

There will be a lot more on this to come out. There always is. Wait for the safeguarding revelations to start coming out from the school/parents. So yes they absolutely should have been looked into more and why weren’t they?

one thing I have seen a few times in the press was:”He started as a technician in the design and technology department and by 2023 he was a qualified teacher, promoted to head of year” smacks of working somewhere to be around kids then working his way up but unclear as seems an unusual route to become a teacher and a head of year so fast.

Of course it is. I never said otherwise. But adoption agencies are primarily concerned with finding homes for children, not children for prospective parents.

How could it be wrong in this instance?

The pathologist was wrong and the injuries didn't exist?

That the child was abused but that it was some mystery person?

That he wasnt in possession of the indecent images?

Men are far more likely to murder children, despite providing far less childcare on average.

According to the statistics for Australia, from 2010 to 2018: "Sixty-eight per cent of these [filicide] cases were murders committed by the child's father, compared with 32 per cent by the child's mother."

Women kill or sexually assault children at far lower rates than men

As far as has been reporting there were no concerns while he was teaching

My adoption checks included employment references.

They can only act on information available at the time. Lots of stuff looks suspicious in hindsight but isnt a valid reason to decline adopters.

Things ive seen over the last couple of threads raised as red flags include looking too clean, being a teacher, they house being too clean/instagrammy, spending too much time with kids, babysitting for friends/family too much and now being promoted too quickly

Realistically how would anyone get declined for those things?

Ive got no idea what if anything was missed, what there was to find before they adopted him

Poor baby ❤️

And therein is why prospective numbers are falling off a cliff and there are 3,000 children in England having a long wait for their forever homes. Altruism is not a strategy that is serving adoption agencies well. It’s okay to say that the reason that you go into adoption is because you want to be a parent. There is nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

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

In what way? The trial was happening…

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.

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.

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.

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 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.