Former teacher guilty of sexually abusing and murdering baby boy he wanted to adopt - CPS

[IwantToRetire]

Distressing content
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A former teacher has been found guilty of sexually abusing and murdering a baby boy that he planned to adopt.

Jamie Varley, 37, was convicted at Preston Crown Court of murder, child cruelty, sexual offences and indecent images relating to 13-month-old Preston Davey.

John McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, was convicted of allowing the death of a child, child cruelty and sexual assault.

Varley was in the process of adopting baby Preston (also known as Elijah) with his partner McGowan-Fazakerley. Just four months after being placed with the couple, Preston was taken to Blackpool Victoria Hospital unconscious and in cardiac arrest. Sadly, Preston could not be saved.

Varley tried falsely claiming that Preston had accidentally drowned in a bath, but prosecutors were able to prove that his injuries were consistent with his airways being obstructed.

The evidence presented by the prosecution proved that in the final months of Preston’s life, he was routinely ill-treated, sexually abused and physically assaulted – suffering more than 40 separate injuries.

CPS statement continues at https://www.cps.gov.uk/north-west/news/former-teacher-guilty-sexually-abusing-and-murdering-baby-boy-he-wanted-adopt

More from a BBC report - also distressing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyp77l79e9o

I thought there was a thread about this, but cant find one. But sorry if a duplicate.

I really only wanted to post out of respect for this poor baby and the horror of his short life.

RIP

Happy for single women to adopt? Yes.

Because the vast majority of adopters are like any parents and put their kids and their safety first.

And because the consequences of a child spending their whole childhood in care are pretty well documented - less educational and employment attainments, greater emotional and mental health challenges, more likely to be in the criminal justice system.

Choosing that outcome for hundreds of children is unconscionable.

Even by your own metrics a child is usually going to come into contact with a lot more ‘unrelated males’ in the foster system than being adopted by two men.

The website is just one way of marketing. They would have used other techniques too. I don't know what they did but I guess it might have involved advertising in lgbt+ media, attending Pride, speaking at lgbt+ events.....

Anyway, I think we discussed this before? It gives info on their focus on the lgbt+ community. Specifically it says:

A key part of Adoption Now’s recruitment drive has involved appealing to the LGBTQ+ community, including “national and local ‘myth busting’ marketing campaigns” and, in late 2023, a “Diversity Campaign” aimed at “LGBTQIA+” people and other minority groups. Despite this, LGBTQ+ couples made up 19% of approved adopters in 2023-24, down from 24% the previous year. In June 2024, Adoption Now said: “The focus this year needs to be on increasing the number of LGBTQ+ applicants and understanding the barriers to single males seeking to adopt as out of the 9 approvals of single applicants, 8 were female.”

https://x.com/LPerrins/status/2069009712893276572?s=20

A single woman who wishes to adopt becomes, by definition, a single mother and there's always a lot of concern from some quarters about stepfathers so I'm wondering why you'd be OK with that.

Sorry I am very suspicious when two men, or even one straight one, or two heterosexual males want to adopt a child.

(I see it perhaps as egocentric when gay men use surrogates but wanting to reproduce is something I understand. Also I can't be too harsh as heterosexual people don't have children for selfless reasons either.)

And to be frank I have zero confidence in professionals to have good judgement.

The difference of course between fostering and adoption is that the two adopters are usually left alone with a child after a point as they are now its parents.

Note: obviously widowed men or those whose wives have left them are not the same as they've not chosen those circumstances.

Is like with like even being compared here? After all, in the UK it's only been twenty years since same sex couples have been allowed to adopt, fostering has been around for much longer.

My partner was raised in foster care. On paper they are a success story - went to university, high earner - but they do not speak happily of their time in foster care at all. They remember it as being really unstable, they felt deeply unsettled and 'othered' - like - their foster parents might send them into 'respite care' so the foster parents could go on holiday, final decision was with a social worker but that was always someone new, they were very definitely kept outside of the 'real' family unit because foster parents needed to be comfortable with them being returned to birth parents or moved on and weren't meant to view them as their own. As soon as they turned 18 they were moved out of foster care and into a council flat which they were not ready for at all, and ended up in a massive state. They bounced from partner to partner for years, just to have some kind of emotional anchor.

Of the four siblings, my partner did very well on paper, but has had a lot of problems with their mental health, including several in patient hospital stays, one sibling is in prison and the other two have struggled a lot to find work and retain custody of their own children.

I really struggle to see how that is 'better' than those kids being raised by a stable and loving gay couple.

I'm ok with it because I don't see it as any different to any other mother who may find a different partner in the future. I don't think we can form public policy on the expectation that a 'single mother' will run off with some man who's then going to abuse her child, whether that child is adopted or not.

Just like I don't think we can consign 400+ children a year to a childhood of ongoing foster care, which we know has significantly worse outcomes across a number of metrics, on the basis of your inability to understand why two men would want to have a family.

This sounds reasonable but the truth is that half of relationships that involve 2 males are openly non-monogamous.

I attribute this to them being male rather than gay. I suspect that if every woman adopted the same attitude to sex that most men had towards it heterosexual men would be the same so not criticising them (gay men) for it.

I wonder: if only half of straight couples were monogamous would you be happy with any of them adopting?

And 30% of lesbian couples are also non monogamous. 20% of under 35s in total are or have been in polyamorous relationships and only 56% of under 35s describe monogamy as the only relationship structure they would be comfortable with.

I suspect that monogamy is far down the criteria for adopting these days. When I adopted 25 years ago it was considered extremely important - admit to an affair and that would be a massive issue to be worked through at the very least.

But that's all changed. I doubt there are many lifestyles that would raise eyebrows these days.

Part of this is down to the "anyone can adopt" strapline, which is also Gov policy.

But also, i think we have to acknowledge the influence of Pride, Stonewall etc in putting forward the view that sexual preferences are irrelevant when it comes to child rearing.

A few years ago there was a thread on the adoption board which was removed in the end - it was a research project from a UK University which claimed to have been approved. It featured a case study of a three-person set of adults who live together as lovers who decide to adopt some children. Some of us contacted the supervisors at the uni and it was removed (in the case study the three of them go to an orphanage and ask some kids if they would like to be adopted - it was full of things that don't happen). Anyway, it shows I think how the expectation is now that anything goes. Anything to get children into families.

Yes. I don’t think consensual non-monogamy is particularly relevant to anyone’s ability to parent.

Whether they’re straight or gay.

I don’t see how some made up claims from a university is proof that anything goes.

I think polyamory would be a major issue for any adoption assessor but that’s because of the prospect of the child having potentially unstable parenting relationship.

By contrast, if parents are having casual sex outside the marriage with partners the kids are never going to meet and without impacting on the core relationship between the two parents, then that doesn’t really have a bearing on someone’s ability to be a parent.

I do think that sws would be very interested in how someone's non-monogamy would impact a child but that's not the same as saying a firm no. They definitely don't want adopters splitting up, bringing men back to the house that sort of thing. They may say you can't do that going forward. But remember "anyone can adopt".

"By contrast, if parents are having casual sex outside the marriage with partners the kids are never going to meet and without impacting on the core relationship between the two parents, then that doesn’t really have a bearing on someone’s ability to be a parent."

Btw this should ring alarm bells. It means the relationship could be fragile - one partner may be controlling and demand whatever he/she wants and the other partner feels unable to disagree.

The relationship and family could be less important than the sleeping around. Sws want the adoption to be the priority.

There are issues around sexual disease, meeting people with low boundaries - the prospective adopters having low boundaries.

It's such a risky scenario. I bet most people wouldn't mention.

Up til recently you might think your lifestyle isn't compatible with parenting a young child, only now "anyone can adopt" so off you go.

What I'm about to say applies to all couples.
In theory of course a couple having casual sex outside the marriage and it not affecting anything else is OK.

There is, however, a lot of things to go wrong in reality:
Possible pregnancies (some people are bisexual so this applies to same sex couples, too.)
Sexually transmitted diseases.
Sexual jealousy.
Risk of preferring somebody else.
Risk of intimate partner violence from a non-regular partner.
The partner of a casual sex partner getting angry because they're not in an open marriage.

That list is by no means exhaustive.

Monogamy is a key feature of a stable familial relationship.
I think that's a given.
It doesn't really matter if it's consensual or non-consensual, all the above can apply.

Though such a lifestyle may be boring to some. And I make no judgement on that.

I think you’re attaching a lot of weight to a marketing slogan. The point of ‘You Can Adopt’ is to challenge myths about circumstances that used to be perceived as a blocker to adopting.

It’s not a literal claim that anyone can adopt.

But that makes a ton of assumptions. I agree SWs would probably want to probe the stability of a relationship.

The idea that open relationships are inherently unstable, or asymmetrical. Most people who practice consensual non-monogamy have fairly stringent sexual health practices and I’m not sure that someone contracting an STI has an impact on how someone parents anyway.

So yeah in that respect at least, consensual non-monogamy should not be an automatic barrier to adopting.

I just don't understand your attitude towards this.
Things like consensual non-monogamy- or what I like to refer as being open relationships- are "inherently unstable owing to various factors that have been pointed out here already.
Also, there's no controlling how a third party will react. Or a third party's wife/husband.
It's not just the couple.

A family is a unit. What affects the parents affects the child and vice versa.
They do not consist of a couple with a child there, they're a unit.

Mum has a STI, that may make her irritable. That's going to affect the child.

This idea that you seem to have that there's all this ethical non-monogamy going on is, I think, not grounded in reality.

If people don't want to be monogamous fine, to be honest it is boring, but they've no business introducing a child to an inherently unstable situation.

That should say FACTUALLY CORRECT.

your bigoted and right-wing nonsense

I disagree.

This case has highlighted the horrific risks with a lack of oversight and a lack of proper investigation once initial concerns are raised.

If more oversight prevents more cases like this, IMO it is worth any temporary stress it might cause adopted children at having visitors. And if more children are moved again, it is presumably because the adoptive parents have been found to be unfit.

So do I. What a very silly, arrogant, rude,and ignorant thing for them to say. To a poster who's been nothing but calm and polite to what has been some really quite unpleasant provocation from the same individuals in the last day or so.

Give it a rest, you two. You know who you are.

I missed this post.
Well OK so you're being consistent, fair enough.
I think that your last sentence is passive-aggressive because of course as I have explained countless times there's a lot more to it than my personal opinion.

It shouldn't be controversial to say on this section of mumsnet that men are just downright more risky than women.

Given this, I don't think my stance is entirely unreasonable.

You've come across as quite a sensible person in the main: always calm, polite, arguing fairly and non-aggressively, but since your comment about 'non-consensual monogamy' (or open relationships as I like to call them) maybe being OK in a family unit, I'm not so sure that you are that sensible about the issue of adoption at all.

They are clearly not OK. They are inherently unstable.
Even if the couple are OK, once you introduce third parties into a relationship, the potential for chaos is present.

I must come across as an old fashioned here but the truth is that I like a lot of people who have non-traditional lifestyles.

I just don't think they're necessarily compatible with family life, that's all.

Can someone please point out the bigotry and right wingness? I seem to have missed that, and I wouldn't want to accidentally align myself with people who are right wing bigots

It’s quite easy to read back through the whole thread.