About a year after the birth of my first child I considered hiring a nanny. I placed my details on a well-known website which allows you to lay out what you want from a caregiver.
Within days I had been contacted by a young man looking for work. I read his details with interest. He looked like a lovely, normal, quite geeky guy.
But immediately my mind went to: ‘But why does he want to spend his days looking after another person’s young daughter?’ And the picture of his glasses and ruffled hair suddenly looked very different.
I never replied to him, and maybe, had I given him the time of day, I would have found a wonderful, charming young man, to whom I would happily have entrusted the care of the thing I love most in the world.
But it was a flat no.
As a new mother, did I want to employ a ‘manny’ (as they are called), to look after my child? No! And would I send my tiny daughter, now aged just 16 months, to a nursery in which she would be looked after alone by a male worker? Absolutely not. And I’m not the only one. Parent or not, the news this week of yet another child sexual abuse scandal at a nursery made chilling reading.
The idea of trusting, vulnerable, innocents being abused by the very person charged with looking after them – their parents having placed their children in their care in good faith so that they could go to work – is both heartbreaking and enraging in equal measure.
On Wednesday, Vincent Chan, a male nursery worker at Bright Horizons, a reputable chain nursery recognisable to thousands of parents across the country, pleaded guilty to 26 charges of sexual offences against children, as well as the taking and making of pornographic images.
Those included five counts of sexual assault of a child by penetration and four counts of sexual assault by touching.
He also admitted 11 counts of taking indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of a child, and six counts of making indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of a child.
The youngest was just three.
In a particularly sick twist which will be an extra sucker punch to the stomach of every parent with children in a nursery, he took many of the images and videos on the iPad specifically given to staff to update families about their little one’s day.
The very device that should have been relaying to parents those mundane but ultimately comforting updates – details of how much they have eaten, badly shot pictures of them clad in painting jackets smearing primary colours across tables, even the minutiae of when they went to the toilet – was instead used to document his abuse.
Reading the horrible list of his crimes, I can’t have been the only parent who questioned the nursery’s decision to hire a man.
I am not a ‘man-hating feminist’, as I will inevitably be accused of being. I love men. It’s a cliché to say when defending a controversial opinion, but many of my closest friends are male.
I am married to an excellent one, and I absolutely believe that children at all ages need to be surrounded by positive male role models.
I also have huge admiration for friends and people I’ve met, some divorced, who have taken the step of hiring a male nanny.
It’s crucial for young boys and teenagers to be surrounded by examples of positive masculinity – and I think it is also important for girls to be around them, too. Teaching young women what a good man is like, is vital.
But when I took a straw poll of men in my circle about hiring a man to look after their child, they agreed with me. And my husband does, too.
Here is why.
According to the latest figures published by the Ministry of Justice, the overwhelming majority of defendants – 99 per cent – in child sexual abuse prosecutions were male. By comparison, female defendants in the same category represented just one per cent.
Chan, who will be sentenced in January, is just the latest man entrusted with the care of young children to have been found guilty of sexual abuse.
Last month, Thomas Waller was convicted for raping and sexually assaulting one boy and sexually assaulting another child in his care at a nursery in Surrey.
Waller was just 17 years old at the time of his offending. What was the nursery thinking when it hired him?
I hate myself even as I type this, but what normal teenage boy wants to work in a nursery? What caregiving institution doesn’t hear foghorn-level alarm bells the minute they apply? Not least, because who trusts a 17-year-old boy to do anything without proper micromanaging.
Within weeks of somehow obtaining a job, Waller had raped one boy and forced another three-year-old to engage in sexual activity while taking them to the toilet and supposedly supervising them.
Not all male caregivers are sexual predators, of course they aren’t. And I will be reminded, rightly, that women abuse children, too.
Who can forget the repulsive, gargoyle-like face of Vanessa George staring blankly from her mugshot, after she was arrested and eventually jailed for filming and distributing videos of herself sexually abusing 30 children at Little Teds in Plymouth, Devon.
But the reason we don’t forget her is because, ultimately, it is much rarer for a woman to be the abuser in these horrifying cases.
And it makes it somehow more horrifying that it is a woman, because women – by nature – are the birthers and, should be, the ultimate protectors of children. There is a reason children are told to look for a friendly woman if they find themselves lost in a crowd and need help.
The childcare system is in crisis. The numbers of available places are falling at an alarming rate. Parents are told to put their names down at a raft of nurseries the minute they find out they are pregnant if they want to secure a much sought after place.
After suffering repeated miscarriages, some at a late stage, I didn’t want to do that.
It would have been too sad to have to tell them I didn’t need that place after all.
And thankfully, I am now in the incredibly fortunate position of having a team of brilliant women charged with the care of my daughter while my husband and I go to work.
The holy trinity of mother, mother-in-law and childminder.
My prospective ‘manny’ still emails me now. He appears to still be looking for work, and my heart slightly breaks at the thought that he is probably just someone who loves children, and for whom it would be a dream to spend all day in their company.
But perhaps there is something that just doesn’t feel right for other parents, too.
Frankly, for me, it’s just not worth the risk.
