Nathan Bennett was employed at a nursery, caring for toddlers, when he committed 21 sexual offences against five of them. These include two rapes, two sexual assaults by penetration, 12 sexual assaults, four incidents of causing a child to engage in sexual activity and one count of ‘engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child’. Bennett was found guilty on Monday, and will be sentenced on 16 March, although his punishment will not be as severe or final as it should be.
The truth is though that these crimes were entirely preventable and a result of political choices. Men pose a vastly greater risk to unrelated children than women do
Such crimes are acts of utter evil. I am the father of a toddler, a wonderful little girl. She is tiny, perfect, and innocent, as all toddlers are. The thought of someone hurting such a child, in such terrible ways, causes me to feel a cold rage for monsters like Bennett, or Vincent Chan, a nursery worker London who committed 56 sexual offences against very young children in his care.
The truth is though that these crimes were entirely preventable and a result of political choices. Men pose a vastly greater risk to unrelated children than women do. All of us know this instinctively. If asked to choose whether to leave our child with a strange man or a strange woman, most parents would choose the woman. This is also supported by substantial evidence. According to the Office for National Statistics, 91.3 per cent of child sexual abusers were male, with almost 70 per cent of them being adults. Meanwhile, the Home Office funded Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse (‘CSA Centre’) notes that ‘almost all individuals convicted’ of child sexual abuse are men’. Indeed, ‘in 2016, just 2 per cent of those proceeded against’ for child sexual abuse offences were women. While the CSA Centre does acknowledge that surveys of victims suggest that in some settings abuse by women may be higher, the levels are still very low with ’16 per cent of those abused in residential care and 6 per cent of those abused in other institutional contexts’ saying that ‘female perpetrators were involved’. Further, it is well known that paedophiles seek out workplaces which give them access to victims.
None of this is to say that all men pose a risk to small children, or that there are not good, decent men working in nurseries. Nor is it to suggest that all abuse is committed by men. But we have no way of knowing which men are abusers until they are caught, and so the risk posed by men in nurseries is far too great.
Given this, a sensible government which cared about the safety of the most vulnerable children would ban men from working in nurseries and other environments in which they provide intimate care to the youngest and most vulnerable children. Instead, our government launched a campaign last year to get ‘more male role models in nurseries to help children thrive’. According to the Department for Education, ‘just 3 per cent of the early years workforce are currently men’, which appears to be an increase on the 2 per cent the BBC reported in 2018 asking ‘how can diversity in the profession be improved?’.
This mindset is one we see again and again in our society. The belief is that despite notional ‘diversity’ everyone is the same and everyone is capable of doing any job. This delusion is married with a hyper-individualism where we are unwilling to consider likely group-level risk, but instead allow men like Bennett and Chan to work and abuse until they are caught. We see something very similar in our refusal to ban women from working as officers in men’s prisons, despite the risk that they will form sexual relationships with inmates. This attitude is also very obvious in our migration policy. We willingly import men from countries such as Afghanistan or Eritrea, despite knowing they pose a very high risk of committing sexual offences, because we are wedded to the idea that we can only make judgements on individual behaviour.
It’s time for us to get real. Some professions should be sex-segregated. Likely risk levels mean that men shouldn’t be working in nurseries. While that might feel ‘unfair’, it’s actually a simple matter of safeguarding our children. We need a risk-based approach, not one which insists on treating everyone as an individual. Otherwise we will see more horrific crimes against toddlers by men like Bennett and Chan.
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