“For the first nine months of his life Preston was a happy and healthy child but by the end he was a broken shell. This was due to the sordid and wicked acts of Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley.”

A Horrific Campaign of Abuse

The child was serially abused physically and sexually. Video footage played to the court showed Varley, who was convicted of murdering Preston, refusing to let the child sleep. Another video showed the child suspended from his cot by the neck, his protruding tongue blue, and a substance dripping down his cheek. In the trial, it was put to Varley that this substance was his semen. The child’s death, the coroner declared, was caused by suffocation after an unnamed object was inserted into his mouth.

The evidence of sexual abuse, aside from the horrendous implication above, was overwhelming. Varley had photos on his phone of the child’s intimate areas. A bruise on the baby’s bottom was assessed to be the result of a bite. Video footage of the killer and his infant victim in the bath showed Preston “preoccupied” with his own genitals and those of his adoptive father. Hanging across the trial was the never quite articulated but always strongly inferred thesis that this grown man had killed his adoptive child by orally raping the infant so forcefully that he suffocated the boy.

Varley’s co-defendant, for his part, was not accused of murder. His crime was one of tolerance and inaction: the court ruled that he either knew or inferred what his partner was doing to their baby, and turned a blind eye. “Allowing the death of a child” was the verdict of the jury.

Major Questions for the British State

Questions now, of the most serious nature, arise for British social services and their child protection department. Britain is a country rocked in recent years by revelations of how the authorities have turned a blind eye to safeguarding issues when political sensitivities arise. The grooming gang scandal, for example, arose per official reports because for many of those employed by the state to protect children, doing nothing was preferable to making any inference that there might be a racial element to the targeting of white British girls by gangs of Asian men.

In this case, involving a gay couple, a pedophilic crime and a dead baby, the obvious and evident question is whether a blind eye – perhaps a willfully blind eye – was turned again.

There were, after all, multiple opportunities to intervene to save Preston Davey, even in the short 115-day period in which he was transformed from thriving child to a haunted, gasping baby that could not be saved from death. He was brought to hospital on one occasion with a broken arm – an injury that the state’s pathologist assessed could not have happened accidentally. The child had multiple bruises on another hospital visit – again assessed by medical experts as inconsistent with normal life for a toddler. Toddlers, the state’s pathologist observed, simply do not move fast enough to bruise themselves so much by bumping into things.

When social workers visited the home where baby Preston was being tortured, they missed key evidence. Neighbours had heard the couple shouting. A call to emergency services had been made, and then suddenly terminated. The child was persistently injured or sick. Nothing was done.

Parallels to a Devastating American Failure

Across the Atlantic, a case with some parallels shocked the public last year.

In 2011, Zachary Zulock was the police’s prime suspect in the rape of a 14-year-old boy, though never formally charged. Nevertheless, the authorities in Georgia entrusted Zulock and his husband William with the care of two young boys with special needs from a Christian orphanage. The judge – sentencing the pair to a century behind bars – found that the men adopted the children for the specific purpose of sexually abusing them. The children were raped, photographed and even offered to other pedophiles for their gratification and for a fee.

In both cases, the glaring failure of the authorities is the same: children were entrusted to the care of dangerous men and glaring red flags were ignored. In both cases, the public might well suspect – though authorities will deny – that a certain eagerness to accommodate LGBT couples by officialdom played a significant role.

Nor are these the only two cases where this pattern arises. In Germany some years ago, a 38-year-old man was convicted of serially abusing his child, whom he had purchased from a surrogate mother. The „Stop Surrogacy Now“ campaign has a harrowing thread of similar abuse cases, all with an identifiable and consistent pattern.

The Preston Davey case is all the more distressing because the child need never have been placed anywhere to begin with. Baby Preston was unfortunate enough to be born to a mother who was in prison – herself convicted of murdering a man when she was aged just 14. Preston’s grandmother had cancer, and was unable to take him, so the child was placed with loving and successful foster parents who doted on him and were happy, they said, to keep him for longer.

It was the British state, and the British state alone, that rushed to take Preston Davey from a safe environment and place him in the hands of a monstrous child abuser.

The Difficult Conversation Urgently Needed

The question here is not, of course, whether gay people should ever be permitted to be parents. The more pertinent question is whether cultural shifts in Western society have induced a certain blindness in the authorities when it comes to the suitability of individual gay couples to become adoptive parents – whether there is, for instance, an unspoken assumption that all gay couples are the same as the archetype portrayed by Mitchell and Cam on the iconic US sitcom Modern Family.

Were these men afforded a certain benefit of the doubt on the basis of their sexuality? Were red flags that might have been raised had a straight couple been involved, reflexively kept lowered?

These are difficult and sensitive questions. But given the horror of what happened to Preston Davey, it is incumbent on the British state to find out, and incumbent on all of Western society to learn the lesson.