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? 💙

I don’t know this story and I will do the sensible thing and won’t read it. My heart cannot take any more pain😔

I don’t disagree with that @ItsPickleRick ; it’s more how they got through the assessments despite it being hard to adopt. It’s easy to lie, unfortunately.

Thank you for your lovely words but it's us who are the lucky ones.

I think some people are very good at hiding their true self from the outside world. Some abusers have a charming public face and everyone falls for it except the people they live with

Unfortunately so true🥲

I really don't know that this sort of awful crime is necessarily always preventable. I have a toddler and have a group chat going with other mums with kids the same age and we all have a darker sense of humour and if they're trying our patience all of us would easily make jokes like, if he/she doesn't stop tantrumming/running round and round for hours at 2am/throwing food etc soon they're being abandoned at a fire station. I know full well that plenty of parents make similar jokes. Hand on heart, not once have I ever raised a hand to either of my children, they are loved and cuddled and listened to and cared for. I had to take my toddler to A&E only last week because he just yeeted himself backwards out of my arms when I was sat with him on the sofa, and hit his head on the hard floor. So if you knew about that, and the jokey messages I had exchanged with close friends who had similar senses of humour, you might have put two and two together and make twenty.

I think it's very easy to say with hindsight oh someone should have done something, but ultimately there are some absolutely evil fuckers out there and there always have been and there always will be. And it isn't always possible to stop them.

RIP to that darling little boy.

I do agree with what you are saying, but Preston should have had an extra layer of protection around him because of his history.

Ultimately there are only two people responsible for his death, but we do have to ask why social services didn’t listen to fostoe mums concerns, and why three hospital visits for non-accidental injuries in a month were not flagged by either medical professionals or social services, and I say that as someone who works in the field.

And I suspect that some of the Rotherham thinking came into play too - reluctance to accuse two gay dads of abuse because of how it would look and how the accusers could be accused of homophobia.

Look at how the OP has felt it necessary to defend herself and say 'my best friend is a lesbian'. We are all conditioned by political correctness to tiptoe around certain issues, one of which is sexuality. I bet this baby wasn't given the protection he needed, because no one wanted to be the one to raise a red flag and say 'This child is being abused and needs to be removed from his two gay dads'.

OP - thank you for starting this thread. Currently have 7 month old baby boy on my lap sleeping and feeding. I see him in the photos of beautiful Preston. This case has hurt me so profoundly - as others have mentioned, my DH can’t engage with it being so evil but I needed to connect with someone on this. A case like this would always sadden me but now being a FTM means it’s hit harder now, I truly know the honour, privilege and responsibility of loving and caring for a baby. The abject pain and misery inflicted on Preston by these two men is evil.

I appreciated an earlier poster’s suggestion of channelling these feelings into the protection of all children going forward. What can I do personally, etc.

This. Safeguarding should never be selective. It should be objective and apply to everyone equally.
No sacred casts. (Individuals or groups/classes to whom normal rules are not applied).

It’s the absolute lack of cohesive care that I struggle to understand. How there isn’t a safety net to catch these situations at the start so the death of the child isn’t final. I understand dark humour. I have it. My youngest was sooo hard as a baby and me and my husband would joke that he was lucky he had made it through another day. But it’s humour. He also attended a&e as he was a climber and also fast but NEVER when I attended a&e would I have used dark humour then. My texts would have reflected my panic and worry and outpouring of love for my wounded baby. There would be absolutely no evidence of me finding any accident or injury on my baby remotely funny. Inconceivable . But he was not under social services and if he had attended 3 times in a relatively short space of time I would absolutely expect them to look at me a little harder. Did anyone ask these people if they had inflicted the injuries and looked at their reaction? Why are the difficult questions not asked??!

I had this too, with Baby P. My daughter was only a few weeks old when it hit the headlines, and I just couldn’t understand how a mother could allow it to happen to her child.
I still don’t.

The shameful thing about all this is that nothing has changed since the death of Maria Colwell in 1973 at the age of seven. Some I remember- Victoria Climbie, Jasmine Beckwith, Baby P, Daniel Pelka, Star Hobson and so the list goes on. Every time we are told changes to safeguarding are afoot and still we fail these poor angels who have done no harm. It is heartbreaking.

It is I agree but the problem is that any sort of measures that could be put into place to definitely ensure this couldn’t happen would be so intrusive as to actually interfere and harm family units.

I don’t totally agree with you as still all the services are not always working together as they should, Sara Sharif is a case in point and also Ellie Butler where the judge against the recommendations of police and social services returned her to family and she was killed by the father.

Thank you for giving me something constructive to think about. I needed it to help break the loop of thinking about what this poor baby went through at the hands of these monsters. I hope I can keep my eyes open and speak up if I ever feel the need to.

Also, these two were not 'just' physically abusing Preston, they are a pair of paedophiles who were sexually abusing him. But how does someone - a nurse, a doctor, a social worker - who may have worried about this accuse two gay men of paedophilia without being terrified that they will be accused of homophobia, bigotry, hatred, etc and quite possibly have to undergo suspension, internal reviews, the accusations getting out and following them around for the rest of their careers? They may be highly respected professionals, people with years of experience, a well-paid career for life, their family's breadwinner, have large levels of student/personal debt, and they would have to risk all of that to raise a red flag about two gay dads who they suspected may have been physically and sexually abusing their child. We all know what a witch hunt would ensue cf. the Darlington nurses, Jennifer Melle, et al.

It's a really hard balance. My experience of adoption checks were that they were incredibly intrusive, borderline impossible at times but I understood the purpose. They spoke to exes for example (i had to really fight for them not to speak to someone convicted of an offence against me) , my wife's estranged father, all our bank accounts, all through our med records, many many references, some of the most intrusive questions i can think of, required us to do intense volunteering (despite my wife being a teacher she still had to volunteer elsewhere). We had repeated visits for about a year after placement, when our son broke his arm we were questioned and we had to record every incident. Family and friends were shocked at the level of involvement

Once you are out the otherside it suddenly makes sense why they ask for stuff that seems odd eg big gaps from fertility treatment, you to take a year off, all your family to shlepp to training and the intense focus on support networks.

Its hard to imagine what more would be reasonable to ask ordinary couples.

Frequently people talk about it being too difficult and responsible for a shortage of adopters, which in turn increases the risks and poor outcomes associated with longer term foster care and later term adoptions

I genuinely don't know but there's a falsehood that its a some easy process that gay couples skip proper checks through being perpetrated in the media

They don’t and it’s an ongoing problem. It goes back a long way too. But a person determined to hurt a child will always be able to do that, awful as that is.

Everyone is understandably desperate to stop the thing that’s already happened happening again. This is the third case of an adopted child being murdered I can think of too. It’s awful, and seems so very cruel that they were taken from their birth mother to prevent them from harm and then this happens.

I think it hurts because I know I would have loved him and protected him. Just from the one photo, I know it.

Two men shouldn't be allowed to adopt.

I don't care that it isn't pc to say it. No child should be in a home without a maternal figure.

It wouldn't stop all abuse cases, but it would massively reduce the risk of things like this happening.

And no, I'm not saying 'All gay men are pedos'. I'm saying that the risk of a man sexually abusing a child is far higher than that of a woman, no matter what his sexuality is.

On that logic, widowed men or men who had sole custody of their children following separation (rare but not unheard of) would have their children removed, which clearly isn’t logical.

Those men are biologically related to those children, that is a protective factor (look at how much higher cases of abuse are when there is a step parent involved vs biological).

Seven year old Athena Strand's abduction and murder in the US has really hit me. I think to know her words (asking for her mother) and murder were all caught on tape just hit me differently. Possibly like Lesley Anne Downey in the 1960s.

There are some very cruel people in the world. At least Athena's murderer has received the death penalty unlike Brady and Hindley who lived far longer than their victims.

In which case, we’re really saying adoptive parents are ‘less than’ birth ones which probably isn’t a route we want to go down.

Extreme cases make bad laws. A baby was killed in 2021 by a woman who had adopted him.