Nursery worker held in child abuse enquiry...

[MsFox]

Link

Again

My thoughts are with the families involved.

Just watching this on the news.

Just saw it too.Every parents worst nightmare.Poor child and poor parents

It's dreadful.

The decision to send a child to nursery (for some parents) is hard enough already.

Terrible.

Also, we need more males in childcare but this is going to perpetuate (sp?) the myth that there is something suspicious about men wanting to work with children.

It is importtant to remember that the nursery fell short in it's ofsted inspection for it's safegaurding children proceedures

horrendous. poor children and families.

The last arrested nursery worker - if I remember rightly - was a female. Mother of three wasn't she? So I don't buy the part about being suspicious of men. Just says that all organisations with close contact with children have to be very careful about who they take on and be vigilant at all times.

But in this case it is a man, depending on how much publicity it gets, I think WherecanIhide may have a point.

A positive thread about men working in nurseries

I feel the media should not be reporting this case at this time... he has not been found guilty by a court, so under UK Law is innocent until proved guilty. (Sure he might be guilty but equally he might not be. It's up to a jury to decide, assuming it gets that far through the legal procedures.)

More I feel should be done to stop the reporting of things like someone being arrested/charged in an ongoing police investigation. It isn't news... it doesn't help you, me, anyone unconnected with the case to know about it. Saddens me to find out the media have now published his name. It's going to be harder now to convict as a jury may find out things about him prior to it going to trial.

Same goes for the murder case in Bristol, we don't need to know who has been arrested, especially when they subsequently let them go. Is it in the public interest for the public to be told?

"It isn't news... it doesn't help you, me, anyone unconnected with the case to know about it. "

Yes it is news when a person is charged with a crime and it is usually considered in the public interest to publish the name of the person arrested. Putting a case in the papers might encourage witnesses to come forward that otherwise wouldn't. There are restrictions on what can be published once the case is sub judice.

tbh I am surprised there hasn't been more about this on here.

According to sky news he has been charged with rape.

Nannynick on some levels I do agree with you re not naming suspects when arrested, but I had a conversation about this with a lawyer friend of mine the other day and he made the valid point that if someone is named then possible other witnesses/victims may come forward which otherwise wouldn't be the case.

if this man is guilty of the crimes he has been charged with, then there needs to surely be a serious review into the conduct of the nursery he worked at, in, to establish just how it is that someone was able to commit these crimes in such a setting.

I just read about the rape charge on the guardian website. Absolutely at that. My DS is only 4 months old, so it's a while before the issue would come up, but I'm actually starting to feel scared of sending him to nursery school when he's older.

It's not just this case and the similar recent one of the paedophile woman in Plymouth, there's also that incident where two nursery workers were caught on cctv bullying a little boy who was in their care

It's extremely rare for things like this to happen, I know, but it still frightens me to death to think of DS encountering people like this, when he's still far too young to stand up for himself or even to be able to understand what's happening to him.

absoloutely awful. i can't bear to think of what that poor child might have gone through.

nannynick i don't see why this shouldn't be reported anymore than another crime. we hear everyday of "2 men have been arrested following a series of burglaries" or similar.

This is so so awful, those poor children . The parents must be going through hell waiting for information.

Does anyone else find it shocking that the man accused is only 20 years old? Obviously the accusations are shocking enough but I have a 20yo brother and I still think of him as a baby, I just can't imagine someone of such a young age doing something so evil

sick
makes me sick to the stomach
but I'm with wherecanIhide about men in childcare.
I saw a terrible thread on here not so long ago that was really negative about men in nursery child care.

"Does anyone else find it shocking that the man accused is only 20 years old?"

Actually, him being very young might have impacted on why he didn't fail the CRB check (assuming one was done, of course) i.e. hasn't had time to come to the attention of the police yet. Beyond that it's shocking that anyone, any age, any gender gets a job with small children just so that they can abuse them.

my DS started nursery yesterday and I came back (crying at handing him over) put on the news and saw this. Awful. The only thing I will say is I was really upset at leaving DS and literally threw him at the carer and ran out. I was really crying and had to walk thorough the whole nursery. All the female carers just stared and the one and only male carer came after me, gave me a hug, offered me a place to sit and reassured me. I have to be honest, I thought it was weird when I saw a male carer there but I suspect the genuine men who want to do this as a career are as sickend as we are at this news.

Nannynick - I have to agree with the other posters and for the reasons that have been said. "No witness, no justice". We need the media to that extent. What we don't want is for them to over-exaggerate things or to tell porkies so that the accused can no longer have a fair trial. Yes, the accused has not been proven guilty but there must have been a realistic propsect of conviction and then for it to be in the public interest for the Crown Prosecution Service to have charged in the first place - so there is evidence of some sort. It doesn't help if media are saying things like "rape" if it is not. I understood it to be two charges of serious sexual assault - but that comes in many guises. It is true that with too much publicity, there runs the risk that the accused cannot have a fair trial, which is a breach of his human rights.

I also agree that it is so difficult for parents to choose childcare and nursery as it is. It's very sad for the family and their child. The good thing that has been reported about the case is that it is sexual abuse against one child - I wonder how many parents of children at that particular nursery believe that or not. I should imagine people's minds are in overdrive and you cannot blame them for that. It's a shocking thing to have to deal with, happening on your own doorstep.

Yes, women sexually abuse too but women are still not frowned upon to look after children, regardless of some of them doing horrific things to children - yet for men, it makes it so much harder for them and WhereCanIHide does certainly have a valid point.

I do think the fact he has been charged so quickly though makes things better for him as the media cannot report on the case now until it comes to trial. Things are made worse when someone is still being questioned, and while no charges are brought and the media are still free to speculate at will on all the horrible details. You only have to look at the landlord in the joanna yeates murder investigation to see the damage that can be done.

wannaBe, yes, that's a good point about being charged quickly. I feel sorry for the landlord in the Yeates case. I know someone who was taught English by him at Clifton Boys School and he said he couldn't believe Chris Jefferies could do it. He comes out of the police station and has had a lot of his private life exposed - must be horrible. It's worse than not being charged in a way - unless someone else has been charged with the murder - because the finger still points for people. If it's unsolved, some narrow minded people will say - he did it, they just can't prove it. Awful for him.

Horrific case. How on earth do these monsters people get unsupervised access to the children to the point where they can abuse them so severely? It astounds me.

When DD was little, non verbal and at nursery there was never a time when she was completely alone with and Nursery Teacher not even nappy change.

ConnorTraceptive: Sky reported there had been a safeguarding issue, but action plan (or whatever its officially called) was put in place, and the nursery satisifed a subsequent inspection.

Further to my last: the Ofsted inspection reports are still available online. I can't do the link (iPhone), it's ref number EY315338 on the Ofsted site.

The date of the last report is 13 December 2010, and the setting received 2s ("good") for all areas, and there were no safeguarding issues.

ScarlettWalking - I wonder this too but I noticed at my nursery, there are these cute little toilets(!) with proper doors on them. It's a nursery for 3+ years. Wouldn't a child be with a nursery teacher then, unsupervised, if a child can't manage completely themselves? I can't think of many instances where they would be alone really.

You can have sound Ofsted reports and still not know what actually goes on in a nursery. It's where the big T comes in, where we have to trust organisations. We all want to think the best too, don't we? And that's the right attitude to have, otherwise, we would have real difficulty living our lives I suppose.

But when I worked at a pre-school the one thing that was absolutely unequivocal was that I was never to enter the bathrooms alone with a child I would have to have a senior member of staff overseeing, God forbid enter the cubicle it would never have been permitted.

I think it reflects very badly on the nursery safeguarding that these obviously lengthy assaults took place.