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 suppose they didn’t go into the extreme images because if he was getting a life sentence anyway there would be no point putting the poor jury through that too

He probably was fairly safe in solitary when he first went in, but eventually they have to integrate them. That's when they get their karma.

Tonight, when I'm sitting eating my steak, with a nice glass of wine, It will give me comfort to think that they're now cooped up in basic cells, eating mass produced prison slop, no home comforts, hopefully shaking with fear. Most likely feeling very sorry for themselves. This will now be their everyday and I pray it's as miserable as hell. They fucking deserve it.

Do we know if he has any time on remand to be taken into consideration and if there is a minimum term?

One or both of these bastards will have abused other children previously. Not a doubt in my mind. The school where that sadistic sicko worked must be freaked out!

He has to serve two thirds in prison and the rest on licence.
Don't know about remand time.

No let them get attacked, raped and abused by their cell mates

Had the social workers gone back to court to remove Preston, and the medics had described his injuries as accidental, I think the court would have taken the word of the medical professionals. Social work is evidence based - if other professionals are saying the injuries were accidental, that would have “trumped” the social worker wanting to remove him.

Social workers do not work in isolation.

Nurses, doctors, the police all believed what Varley was telling them, yet the only person to be named is his social worker. It’s no wonder there’s a recruitment and retention crisis. Which leads to unsafe caseloads. Which leads to children being harmed.

The hospital in fact did report concerns on Preston's injuries

That were then accepted as accidental after Varley showed them a video of a toy box falling on Preston.

What nobody knew at the time was that the video was weeks old and couldn’t have caused the bruises.

I watched that and thought the toy box seemed to miss his head completely.

They would have been remanded during the trial , in prison

It’s heartbreaking what happened to that poor baby , but I’m pleased that Varley got a while life tarif. Well done to the judge.
Varley will live a miserable life in prison - he’ll never come out.

As for him being a risk in prison - it took 23 years for Huntley to get murdered by another inmate. But lots of life sentence prisoners have nothing to lose- so let’s hope this evil bastard lives in fear for the rest of his days !

The other piece of garbage- will
he serve 25 years or a half of that sentence?

Two thirds

So just over 16 years in reality, with almost a year served on remand already.

I read the grandmother wanted to take the child but the breast cancer diagnosis made her have to stop everything at a time when SS were accelerating things. If they had allowed Preston to remain with his foster carers while the grandmother sought treatment he would still be alive.

So true. Although I think if it wasn't little Preston it would have been another poor baby. Would they have been allowed to choose the sex of the baby when adopting or did they just get lucky? (in their despicable minds)
I am also haunted by the thought that another baby or babies could be going through similar abuse right now unnoticed at the hands of parents (adoptive or natural)

Yes I feel upset by it too and have young children. I just dont know how anyone could treat a baby like that. I was talking to my mum about it yesterday and saying how I can't understand how someone can come from a totally ordinary background and turn out to be such a monster, it's just so hard to even try to process. I keep reading about this case then wish I hadn't. I just can't imagine how anyone could have even half of the cruelty those two had toward that child. Just so awful and hard to process

So he’ll be out before he’s 50.

Edited to add that I hope that they are in different prisons.

I have been thinking this. How you can just hand over a baby to strangers - and leave him alone with a strange man for days on end? And the person's sex is relevant - men are statistically more likely to harm than women and related men to harm a non-related child. If we lived in more community - with other people around - they might have picked it up, but that's not easily created as a safety layer. 100pc convinced more will come out about the perpetrators' previous crimes.

This will be happening elsewhere - I've read stories of solo men who get a surrogate to give them a baby. They will not all have good motivations. It's effectively buying children and needs far more oversight.

When I was growing up an elder at our church would get young boys to stay with him from India - I remember seeing one after a service one day, and the look on his face has stayed with me for decades. Years later it came out: he was a pedophile. They can hide behind good intentions for years. But even for me as a child something rang alarm bells at the time that I didn't understand then.

Did the perpetrators let Preston's family see him? It sounds like the foster parents were blocked. Both would be huge red flags. We need to make adoption much more centred around the child's needs not the parents. It sounds like the SW was focused on supporting the parents not the defenceless baby. Devastating.

We need to listen to something like a foster parent's gut feeling. That is a huge red flag and doesn't come out of nowhere. The system has been way too trusting.

This is a good idea in theory, and I agree completely that the foster carers concerns should have been listened to here. They knew Preston and they knew something wasn’t right, without evidence little can be done so I’m not sure what the answer is.

In general, it is recommended that foster parents don’t visit for a while after the move so that the child is not confused and disrupted. It doesn’t apply in Preston’s case because he was so young, but many children in care go through multiple moves before being adopted, if they’re adopted at all. A child I knew had 14 placements - it’s so disruptive and damaging to them. It would be even more disruptive if they had multiple ex foster parents and family members wanting to see them when they were being settled into the family that were going to adopt them.

Ultimately, when the child has moved in to foster to adopt, the previous foster carers role is over. Some do go and visit after a few months once the child has settled, some make contact at birthdays and Christmas, some don’t make any further contact at all.

I can see why the foster carers being refused visits didn’t raise any red flags by itself, but their concerns should have been taken into account.

I think the thing that stands out to me is the lack of information sharing and joined up working. As I said before, nobody seemed to have full oversight; each agency was just looking at their own piece of the puzzle. If everything had been put together earlier - the foster carers concerns, the injuries, the text Varley sent to his friend, checking the date on the video of the toybox falling, the 999 hang up call being followed up - things could have been different.

I agree totally. I think we are too quick to blame SWs and make them scapegoats but this case is far more complex than that with numerous missed opportunities.

For instance did the Police speak to the Nurse who reported concerns before they decided not to visit?

This is what I’m interested to read in the SCR. There will definitely have been failings, both on an individual level and systemically, and we all hope there will be one key moment that we can learn from to prevent this from ever happening again, but there won’t be. There are some evil people out there who are determined to abuse and kill children, and are very skilled at hiding it. The red flags are so much easier to see in hindsight.

I’ve read some really awful things said against the social worker, and I don’t think everyone realises how limited our powers are. We can’t force entry, only the police can do that. We don’t have any powers to remove a child, only the police and courts can do that. We have to present evidence in court, not gut feelings. I think, from what I’ve read, the social worker is probably guilty of taking things at face value and not exercising professional curiously but you can see how it’s happened.

Multiple A&E visits - medics state accidental injury.
Foster carers not being allowed to visit - can be normal when settling a child, and entirely the adoptive parents choice.
Preston being non-verbal due to his age and unable to tell anyone what was happening.

We would all like to think that we would have done something differently and saved Preston, but I don’t know if that’s the case in reality.

That social worker would have been laughed out of court if she had told the judge she had a gut feeling but no evidence, or that she thought the injuries were non-accidental, but the medics disagreed.

I keep turning it over and over in my head, but I don’t know what the answer is. It’s just so sad.