Baby Preston Davey - Content warning concerns CSA (added by MNHQ)

[Sadmamma35]

I’ve just read about baby Preston Davey and I cannot stop thinking about him. I have a 13-month-old of my own, which is probably why this has hit me so hard — I can really relate and my baby is my everything.
I’m crying as I write this. Why does it hurt so much for a baby I’ve never even met? Has anyone else felt this way?
How do you cope with the negative thoughts that follow when you read something like this? 💙

That’s so sad but I can also from my career attest that such stories are not uncommon.
I honestly don’t think it’s a done deal that a jury will reach a guilty verdict here.

It’s worth considering that had this all been premeditated it would have been much easier for the couple to buy a baby via surrogacy from an Eastern European country.
As far as I know this would require zero checks and if you have the money is open to anyone.
As well as the ethics involved this to me is an absolutely terrifying prospect that needs addressing.

I think it should have been possible to compare the number of visits, reasons, etc. to a&e during the months he was with his foster mother and the visits after he was placed with those two execrable pieces of filth.

I disagree that the privacy of adoptive parents should be considered more important than the safety of completely defenseless babies and children.

It is well known that the presence of a boyfriend or partner or new husband of a mother, who is not the biological father of her child, poses a risk to babies and children in a home, and the reasons for this include jealousy, lack of connection with the victim, as well as predeliction toward domineering, coercive and abusive behaviour. Adoptive parents have to start from scratch with a baby or child who very often carries a burden of trauma or chemically induced issues.

I want to emphasise that I am not saying that all adoptive parents are potential abusers, but the circumstances of adoption have the potential to bring out problematic behaviour in biologically unrelated individuals.

And let us not forget that the babies and children are voiceless and completely at the mercy of the adults in their lives. Their interests should always come first.

I predict when the serious case review is carried out it will find, along with all the other SCRs, that all of the agencies involved failed to communicate with each other and so things were looked at in isolation rather than as a whole.

Multi-agency working is absolutely paramount when it comes to child protection, and it’s still not happening. I understand WHY it’s not happening, but we’ve got to do better.

I think that as much as there are many problems with the adoption system in the UK suggesting that adoptive parents are more likely to seriously harm the children they adopt because they are not biologically related is patently untrue.

To my memory there was the case of Elsie Scully-Hicks (one parent convicted, the other not) Leiland-James Corkhill (as above) and this case, which is as yet undetermined.

In that time, we have had Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson, Darcy-Leigh Jefferson, Finley Boden, Jacob Crouch; they are just some of the names that spring to mind. According to this document, it averages at sixty three deaths every year. These are not done by adoptive families. Yes, some have stepparents involved and instigating the deaths but that means if anything increased vigilance over stepfamilies, not adoptive ones.

I said earlier in the thread that adoptive parents just want children. They absolutely should not be treated as criminals because of this isolated, awful case.

Not anywhere have I said that the privacy of adoptive parents should be considered more important than the safety of babies or children.

You most certainly didn’t.

I disagree too. Even Weekly checks to his body could have prevented this

Could they? He was examined and there were plausible explanations at the time.

I don’t know! I really want to believe these poor babies are protected. I follow the court case and it says there that his bottom was abnormal. If a social worker does a body check, s/he might have noticed it. I just can’t say “oh well that’s the way it is”!

I’ve just read about poor Elsie after reading your post. I don’t know if I don’t remember or it just hadn’t come to my attention at the time. Such an horrific murder of a baby. I hope her murderer is having a truly awful time in prison.

Social workers aren’t medical professionals though and if the injuries were internal (very big if; I hope not) it’s unlikely they would have noticed.

Sexual abuse of children happens, but I can’t think of another case where the parents were prospective adopters. My personal view is that increased monitoring of people wishing to adopt is unlikely to make any children safer but is likely to turn people away from adopting. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

Social workers aren’t medical professionals. Would a social worker know how to definitively tell if a baby’s bottom looks abnormal because of nappy rash or an upset stomach or sexual abuse? Also, social workers are incredibly over stretched. Their case loads are ridiculous already without adding on full body inspections of every adopted child into their caseload.

Plus that’s more intrusion on the part of adopters and how long would it last? Until the adoption order goes through, in which case maybe adopters might accept the intrusion temporarily. Or permanently in which case I think a lot of adopters would accept that and children would suffer because of a seriously reduced pool of adopters. And more children are abused and murdered by parents/step parents/other relatives than adoptive parents, but there aren’t calls to inspect every child for signs of abuse on a weekly basis.

So are you recommending full body checks, including genitals, for just the children of adoptive parents? Can I ask, who would you suggest would carry these checks out? At what age would these intrusive checks stop? Also, where would be the therapeutic services to help said children in the aftermath of such ‘full body checks’ with being systematically physically and emotionally abused by services? Come on, this is getting silly now! The two defendants have not been found guilty. There has been a comparatively infinitesimally small number of children killed by adoptive parents.

You are forgetting all the middle class parents who have killed their non-adoptive children.

Not at all. My “D”M was violent and abusive although nowhere near this level and also a HCP. I’m only too aware of how easy it is to hide in plain sight.

But we are talking about children who have been killed by their parents. You are clearly still alive. I’m sorry that you are an abuse survivor. Please don’t conflate adoption with child abuse.

I’m not actually sure what you’re on about. I haven’t done at any point.

What is an unacceptable number of adopted children murdered then?

These children are extra vulnerable and of course the checks should be thorough and frequent.

I don't know what traumatic probing you have in mind, but nobody should assume that a bruise is just a bruise, and the baby or child should be observed interacting with the adoptive parent so frequently that he or she gets used to having that visitor there.

The aim would be to make sure the parents know they are being closely watched.

Social workers should be trained to identify signs of sexual abuse. Surely a huge part of their work involves children who may be victims of SA? If they are not trained, then why not?

The point about increased levels of scrutiny of adoptive parents and more thorough checks of the babies and children is that these families are known and can be tracked and therefore monitored. If even one vulnerable child can be saved by so doing, then it is surely worth it and surely no responsible adoptive parent would object to it.

The long litany of prominent fatal cases of horrific abuse is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many more children who survive and carry the scars for their lives. The list also reveals the ineptitude of the agencies involved in monitoring those children and their families.

It would be a gross breach of adopters' human rights...

I personally think it's a gross breach of a baby's human rights to wave them off with people who seem ok on the surface and just believe every plausible story about toddlers and bruises and broken limbs and changes in behaviour. But heyho...

Yes of course adoptive parents should be thoroughly and even invasively scrutinised. This is because babies and small children often cannot speak for themselves.

It would likely be far more effective to apply that level of scrutiny to the families of children on child protection plans, given they are at significant risk of harm but still living at home. But to do so would involve so much resource it would be completely unachievable.

I don’t think they were ‘waved off’ @mathanxiety . They underwent extensive checks as all adopters do, but since the checks don’t read people’s minds (and I honestly think that’s the only thing that would have saved Preston in this instance) they weren’t sufficient

This case is absolutely tragic but some comments are suggesting that adoptive parents abusing and murdering the children they seek to adopt is a regular occurrence; it isn’t.

It will be interesting to see what the eventual outcome of this trial is.