Professor Janet Melville-Wiseman explains why we need new narratives to empower professionals to identify and intervene to protect children from predators.

Last week saw the sentencing of Jamie Varley for multiple offences including the murder of his 13 month old adopted son Preston Davey. Varley’s partner was also convicted of multiple sexual offences against the child and for allowing his death.

During the sentencing hearing Varley’s defence lawyer pleaded unsuccessfully in mitigation against a whole life tariff that Varley who was a teacher, was “brilliant in his pastoral role and with his students”. 

But people are not usually predators occasionally or suddenly. The fact that he was seen as good at pastoral care means he was very, very good at hiding his true nature and who he was once he got home – and that is typical predatory behaviour. Reflecting on the betrayal the children and families of those he offered pastoral care to might feel now as associate victims, it becomes an exacerbating factor.

In response to the case the Minister for Children and Families, Josh MacAllister, commented that “these people are evil, there is no other way to put it” and that they had made him feel “sick”. He also said that changes were going to be made to make sure awful incidents like this “don’t happen again”. 

An Independent Safeguarding Review is underway, and we can assume their remit will be to see what went wrong and what lessons need to be learnt to ensure this “does not happen again”.

Except it does keep happening and has happened multiple times now in the course of the last 50 years since as a society we accepted the reality of child abuse – that it happens where we might least expect it, often in plain sight, and sometimes with child protection agencies (police, doctors, social workers, family law, schools etc.) already involved. 

One of the challenges is how well we train those professionals to proactively find dangerous predators. The dominance of the anti-discriminatory imperative and uncritical narratives about ‘unconditional positive regard’ may not be helping. But perhaps the sliest problem is not that predators are “evil” – but they often look the opposite. That is what predatory people are very good at doing.  For example, the Soham murderer Ian Huntley was easily able to keep up his pretence of being a benign presence in the lives of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman during a TV interview even though he had already murdered them.

Recent messages from Josh MacAllister and government policy developments place great emphasis on early support for families, kinship care, increasing foster care, and adoption. The thinking is that children do best in stable family homes. That is not necessarily wrong, but the focus is on children not perpetrators. And sometimes those very places of care are not only high risk but also the most difficult places to detect that high risk and then to effectively intervene. Professionals in Preston Davey’s life thought they were doing the right thing and giving him the hope of a permanent loving family. There may have been reluctance to intervene and rip that precious hope away from him even when there was evidence that it was going wrong – and they may not have felt encouraged to do so.

Whatever else, we need new narratives to better empower professionals to identify and intervene with predators even if they are already valued in their roles. The focus needs to radically shift now to a focus on perpetrators – which is much more complex than simply identifying them as “evil” people who make us feel “sick”. There must be another way of putting this.

A determined message and clear signal to perpetrators that there is a chance they will be found before they do such harm would be a good start for the empowerment of statutory child protection professionals. Simply telling them how they make us feel is not the answer. There are more predators out there and at present there is high risk that they will find more vulnerable children to prey on before statutory services find them. This means each new children’s policy needs to include how perpetrators in those systems will be found and thwarted.   

It is difficult and heartbreaking work in what is often a ‘double bind’– but it needs to be done.

Professor Janet Melville-Wiseman is Professor Emerita in Social Work and spent part of her childhood in care.  She is also a member of the Association of Care Experienced Social Workers