What lessons will be learned?

Adoption, surrogacy, and the abuse of vulnerable children

Many men don’t abuse children, and some women abuse children. But the overwhelming majority of adults who abuse children are men. When men are in sole care of children, they are not necessarily going to abuse them . But it is a huge risk factor.

Failure to address this basic safeguarding risk lies behind horrific crimes that appeared before two different English courts this month.

The abuse and murder of Preston Davey

On 18 June, Jamie Varley was given a whole life sentence at Preston Crown Court, following his murder and sexual abuse of a baby, 13 month old Preston Davey. Further charges relating to extreme pornography found on his phone were not pursued because that was judged to be ‘not in the public interest’. Varley’s defence lawyer had argued for a lesser sentence, on the grounds that Varley had been a brilliant teacher, and that his motive for harming Preston was sexual rather than an intent to kill. Varley’s partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, was given a 25 year sentence for allowing Preston’s death, child cruelty, and sexual assault of a child.

Preston, who had been adopted by the couple, died in July 2023 after four months in their care. During his short life with them, he suffered 40 traumatic injuries while pornographic images and videos were made of him. He died of suffocation, the result of ‘an object’ being stuffed into his mouth (no prizes for guessing the likely ‘object’). Varley used his mobile phone to video Preston struggling for breath before he died. The trial judge ruled that members of the jury would be excused from jury service for the rest of their lives, because the videos and images they were shown were so horrific.

The British Surrogacy Centre

On 22 June, four days after the judgement in the Preston Davey case, another male couple, property developer Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and his husband, Scott Drewitt-Barlow, appeared in Chelmsford Crown Court charged with multiple sexual offences, including rape and paying for the sexual services of a child. They were remanded in custody, pending a full trial scheduled for January 2027.

Much of the press coverage of this case has emphasised the Drewitt-Barlows’ fame as owners of a football club. Less attention is given to their more sinister involvement with a surrogacy agency, The British Surrogacy Centre (BSC). This was founded in Essex by Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and his first husband Tony Drewitt-Barlow, a couple who themselves had acquired children born via surrogacy.

BSC specialises in finding egg donors and surrogate mothers, mainly in the USA, for male couples and single males, mainly from Britain. It is not clear at this stage how many of the victims of sexual offences committed by Barrie and Scott Drewitt-Barlow were clients or employees of BSC, or were children whose births they had arranged and profited from.

Surrogacy, Adoption, and men’s abuse of children

Surrogacy is a business that routinely exploits women and children and turns eggs, sperm, and wombs into commodities. It is wrong, particularly when it involves an international trade in gametes, embryos, and babies to avoid the light-touch regulation that applies in the UK. Attempts to take away the limited rights that surrogate mothers have in the UK, as proposed by another male couple that I wrote about here, should be resisted. And from now on surrogacy should be banned, regardless of the class, sex, or sexual orientation of the would-be commissioning parent/s.

Opposition to surrogacy on social media often includes the question ‘Why don’t they adopt?’. This question is usually based on a false assumption that all children awaiting adoption have been unwanted, abandoned, or orphaned, so that adoption can only be good.for them. Adoption in the UK has, thankfully, moved on from when it was used to punish unmarried mothers, but forced adoption is still present when national boundaries are crossed. Almost all UK children who are adopted nowadays are in the care system because of concerns about their safety (although sometimes when a woman reports abuse her child is taken from her and the abusive partner/father is allowed to remain).

Placement of children from an unsafe home background into the care of loving adoptive parents will, in most cases, be in the child’s best interest. But that depends on adoption agencies taking appropriate steps to ensure that the adoptive parents are suitable. Those steps were not taken in Preston’s case.

Preston’s mother was in prison, serving a life sentence for murder, when she gave birth to him. Understandably, Oldham Council placed him in emergency care with foster parents. Preston’s grandmother, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, hoped he could stay with his foster parents until she was well enough to adopt and look after him. Instead, Adoption Now, acting for Oldham Council, placed Preston with Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley, despite concerns about their suitability that were raised by his foster parents.

The trial judge suggested that Adoption Now and Oldham council did not query Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley’s suitability as adopters because they may have been taken in by the couple’s superficial charm and professional status. Preston’s grandmother suggested it may have been because Adoption Now and Oldham Council feared being accused of homophobia if they turned the couple down. What is most likely is that they simply ignored the greater risk when adopters are exclusively male, whatever their social class or sexual orientation (it has been known for two heterosexual male abusers to pose as a gay couple because they believed this would improve their chances of being approved for the adoption of children they would be able to abuse).

Adoption Now is an agency that specialises in providing adoption services for local authorities. It emphasises inclusiveness, welcoming applications from single people and ‘our LGBT+ community’ (it doesn’t reveal who it understands the + to include). It doesn’t stop at being ‘inclusive’ - it positively targets the ‘LGBT+ community’ and especially males within it. In June 2024, less than a year after Preston’s murder, it said ”The focus this year needs to be on increasing the number of LGBT+ applicants and understanding the barriers to single males seeking to adopt as out of the 9 approvals of single applicants 8 were female.”

Learning lessons

Children’s Commissioner Rachel de Sousa has declared her determination to fix the system that failed Preston Davey. “We need determined curiosity across the child protection system”, she writes. “A curiosity paired with the confidence to ask difficult questions and not be brushed off. Then that curiosity needs to be backed by a robust, reformed system that promotes authorities working together, information-sharing, accountability, and learning lessons.”

‘Lessons must be learned’. How often has that been said in response to yet another particularly severe child abuse case? And how seldom have those lessons been effectively acted upon?

A number of suggestions have been made as to what should be learned from the Preston Davey case. For the Children’s Commissioner, it’s a need to establish a Child Protection Agency. Other suggestions have included a need to end the prioritisation by local authorities and adoption agencies of alphabet ‘inclusivity’ over children’s safety, and a need to establish regular post-adoption checks.

Jean Hatchet proposes a simpler solution, based on the reality that males pose far greater risks to child safety than do women - adoption agencies and councils should not allow children to be cared for solely by unrelated men. “The stark reality is that these two male strangers should never have been allowed to parent Preston,” she writes. “Not because they were gay, not because they were insufficiently screened (though they clearly were). But because they are men.”

I imagine there will be resistance to Hatchet’s proposal, on the grounds that it counters the patriarchal assumption that men’s entitlement to children should be protected at all costs.

It’s time to put children’s safety and wellbeing first.