To think the BBC just mispresented baby Preston's killer (and in way that was favourable to the killer) ?

[lyarlyarpantsonfire]

Really odd reporting on Baby Preston's killer just now on the one o'clock news. Despite the baby being sexually abused and indecent images of him taken and shared, the BBC presented him as a Dad who had found parenting really overwhelming and hard and had come to resent his baby.

Stressed out parents who can't cope with babies don't sexually abuse them because they are stressed. Or take indecent images of them because they are stressed.

The killer was a paedophile. That is why he abused that baby.

As his interest in having a child was to abuse it, not to care for it, it may also have been that he had no the tolerance for hard work of looking after a young child and that did overwhelm him which resulted in him physically assaulting the child.

It was such a bizarre narrative to present him as a man who had desperately wanted children but found parenting too hard and could not cope.

Instead of a paedophile.

Turns out some gay men ARE paedophiles - like these two. It’s fine to say so.

Really? So what's the point of victim impact statements, then? To allow the accused to get off on seeing the extent of the pain and damage he caused? It seems counterproductive to me.

Anyway, on topic - I agree, OP, that any mention of them 'struggling to cope as a parents' is entirely inappropriate in regards to the sexual torture. One doesn't just start brutally raping a baby because of sleep deprivation, unless one already has a predilection towards it. Violence is 'understandable' (not excusable) but sadistic sexual torture is an entirely different beast.

It sounds like justifying and excusing their behaviour, to mention that.

Varley might not be a paedophile in the narrow medical sense of the word, as clearly he's attracted to adults too, but it's also clear from his actions that he had a pre-existing sexual interest in enacting sexual torture on a helpless baby, or he wouldn't have behaved in that way. He would've just brutalised his victim without a sexual element.

I fully believe that a (subconscious?) driver of the adoption was the desire to be able to subtly sexually abuse a child, and that the sleep deprivation and 'struggle to cope' triggered the sexual abuse becoming overt and violent.

I also wonder why the two of them not currently owning devices that had been used to look at CSA, is taken to mean anything other than a lack of evidence? And absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Has no one heard of burner phones? Obviously it can't be proved in court, but surely it's quite possible that they looked at CSA prior to the adoption, on burner devices they got rid of?

I also wonder why the two of them not currently owning devices that had been used to look at CSA, is taken to mean anything other than a lack of evidence? And absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Has no one heard of burner phones? Obviously it can't be proved in court, but surely it's quite possible that they looked at CSA prior to the adoption, on burner devices they got rid of?

@OtterlyAstounding

I completely agree. I've been surprised by pp saying things like ' If they had been sexually attracted to children there would be evidence of them looking at CSA.'
Firstly, not everyone looks at porn. Its possible and indeed normal to have a healthy sex life in your imagination and in reality. Porn is not a necessity.
Secondly as a teacher, and then as someone who (in my view) was planning to acquire a child via adoption, he probably knew that looking at CSA was too high risk and incriminating so decided not to.
Or thirdly, he has just covered his tracks really well.

And I can make no sense of the fact that a man who has been convicted of horrendous sexual abuse of a baby over four months is judged not to be someone with a sexual interest in children because no one can find any CSA porn he was looking at. Choosing to prioritise that absence of evidence over the very real evidence of his convicted CSA, and so conclude he is not a man with a sexual interest in children is beyond counterfactual.

Well on topic that question has already been asked upthread and also answered

It hasn't 'been answered'. People have offered different views as fits the topic of this thread as its opinion based. You views, for example, have been strongly disagreed with by many.

Stop using the word “porn” when describing CSA, ffs! And if you need to ask why then have a good long think! It isn’t porn, it is just CSA images/CSAM. Is extremely offensive and entirely incorrect!

But that’s the point, they are not ‘taken into account’. What would that even mean since you acknowledge they don’t affect sentencing?

Which question? I posed several, none of which have been answered.