A massive chunk of the news the week before last was devoted to the story of Jeremy Forrest and Megan Stammers; the 30 year old Maths Teacher who ran away to France with his 15 year old student. They've now been found safe and well in Bordeaux; Megan has arrived home and will be talking to the police in the next few days, and Mr Forrest has now returned home to face questioning and charges of Abduction of a Child.
Clearly a child protection issue here, then.
Situations like this aren't exactly unknown, and certainly in the last 10-12 years there has been huge upheaval in the law relating to child protection, which is reflected in policies and procedures of positions where adults have conduct with children or vulnerable people. It almost beggars belief that, in this day and age, a situation like this is allowed to happen. And while the case hasn’t ended as tragically as some of the situations that marked the change in stringency, it is worth looking at some of the things that could have been handled differently.
1: Safeguarding Training
Safeguarding students is the first priority for teachers. For a long time now, it has been mandatory for teachers to receive intermediate-level safeguarding training as a part of their induction. While the training and CRB checks do not have to be repeated, it is nonetheless considered good practice by government guidelines to provide safeguarding training and repeat a CRB check once every three years. The training instructs teachers on what to do in the event that a child discloses something to a responsible adult, and also includes a section about what to do in the event of an infatuation.
Mr Forrest would have got the Child Protection training as a matter of course. If Bishop Bell School had failed to provide or at least arrange for the training it would be a serious case of poor management, and the issue is far too contentious for schools to allow that to happen. The man is 30; he will have seen the high-profile cases that relate to child protection that happened within at least the last 10 years, including those where pupils form a relationship with their teacher. The outcome of such cases is rarely good for anyone.
To this end it is hard to see how Mr Forrest could not have been given the training, the warnings, and every possible signal that forming a relationship with a student and running away to a different county with her is an extremely bad idea. More likely he chose to ignore it. Online sources suggest that “love,” a rather broad term that can bring out the very best in some people and the very worst in others, clouded his judgement. However, the fact remains that he had a choice, and he made it. He made the decision to form a relationship with the student. He arranged for them to leave the country. He was looking for work in Bordeaux to sustain their lives there. This sort of thing does not get planned on a whim; what happened was his decision. Whether Megan influenced some of the things that were decided is beside the point; Megan is a minor until she turns 18, and Mr Forrest is a so-called adult in a position of responsibility. Most will therefore regard Mr Forrest as the instigator of the eloping to France.
So if we ask ourselves if more could be done to promote awareness of the inherent dangers and issues amongst professionals, we may find ourselves thinking; ‘Not if some teachers throw all that training, guidelines and law back in our face.’
2: Did anybody else know?
For a story that ends with the couple eloping to Bordeaux, it is hard to see how the relationship could have gone unnoticed. Even though there had been some criticism of Bishop Bell School over how they handled concerns over the maths teacher, the matter certainly wasn't ignored. However, it is clear that a vital piece of action was left unattended, namely that the school should have immediately contacted the Local Authority's Designated Officer who would have instigated a series of actions preventing the further mismanagement of the case.
Megan’s parents were unaware of all of this until it happened. Hardly surprising, as this is not the sort of thing you tell your parents. However in a press conference during her absence,[1] they did state that it was completely out of character for her, and they had no indication that this was going to happen.
This is a stark contrast with the school, which was aware of concerns and were investigating them. In fact it directly contradicts a statement made by their headmaster Terry Boatwright: “The school, in conjunction with the local authority, Megan’s parents and the police, had been investigating the concerns when this happened.” So if they had been in contact with Megan’s parents about a concern, how is it that they knew nothing about it?
It is possible that some of Megan’s friends at school were aware she was planning on running away.[2] Should they have come forward to tell the school what was happening, perhaps putting a stop to it before it happened? Perhaps, and in some cases they said that they had,[3] but on the whole it appears unlikely that these rumours would have come to anything. Even if Megan had told her friends she was planning on running away, her friends may have disbelieved her simply because they do not want to believe she would do such a thing. Former pupil Shanice Dolan said that she knew some people who had crushes on teachers but nothing that would come to this.[4] So student infatuations with teachers weren't exactly unknown; what reason would they have had to believe it would go as far as this?
Mr Forrest’s parents have told the press that their son had been in a bad state for a number of months, and that they were disappointed that the school did not step in and do anything about it.[5] Whether these implicit mental health issues are true or not, and whether they gave rise to what happened, it should be remembered that a teacher’s work is largely unsupervised. It is unlikely that any of Mr Forrest’s colleagues would have noticed any problems, so unless Forrest himself went to his managers and said “I’ve got a problem, what help can you give me?” the chances of the school knowing about any mental health problems were slim. Given the nature of the problem and the fact that it involved a relationship with a student, it is hardly a surprise that Forrest did not turn to the management of a school for help.
3: The Police
Sussex Police have been doing everything in their power to bring Megan back safe and well, and Mr Forrest to justice. However, once it became knowledge that they had arrived in France the responsibility of tracking them down was shared with the French Police. They had a different approach to the investigation because of the different laws in their country: As the legal age for consent in France is 15, which Megan is, the French Police were treating it as a missing person enquiry rather than an investigation of child abduction. While no police force would take either matter lightly, it should come as no surprise that a missing person enquiry would not get the same level of attention as an investigation of child abduction – and by itself would not have been enough to arrest Mr Forrest, as it is not a criminal offence to go missing.
That being said, it was from CCTV footage and witnesses that Megan and Mr Forrest were eventually found. Mr Forrest would have known what kind of attention he would be given in the United Kingdom were he to run away with a fifteen-year-old girl, and that knowledge most likely contributed to his decision to go to France in the first place. Arguably, then, an investigation of child abduction would have forced them to make another move; it may have taken even longer to find them than it did. Ironically a less heavy-handed approach to the enquiry would probably have done more for the mutual benefit of all concerned.
Of course, all this becomes irrelevant once the European Arrest Warrant was issued, which means that Forrest could be arrested in France for a crime he committed in England. While the terms of the European Arrest Warrant means that he cannot be charged for any offence other than Child Abduction unless he voluntarily agrees to do so[6], it is nonetheless conducive to the fact that Forrest is now in custody and is awaiting extradition to England. It was a curious juxtaposition that on the same day Forrest was apprehended under the European Arrest Warrant, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland declared that his government intends to pull out of many of the European Policing and Crime measures – including the European Arrest Warrant.[7]
Sussex police have been guarded on the subject of enquiries into concerns raised about Mr Forrest before their disappearance; concerns and suspicions had been raised as early as last February and even though the school refused to comment on the matter, it has been reported that Mr Forrest was due to be suspended on the day he and Megan went missing. The school are not obliged to directly involve the police in any investigation unless the people under their care are in danger or a criminal offence has been committed, and the school’s own policy would dictate whether or not to contact the police regarding the concerns about Mr Forrest. We would however wish to restate our previous point: school should have made its concerns known to the Local Authority Designated Officer.
However, one point that is a little puzzling is the matter of the return tickets. Mr Forrest had pre-booked the ferry tickets to France to leave on Friday and return on Sunday, and the investigation was ramped up when it became apparent that they hadn't returned. They will have had their reasons for waiting, but surely disappearing off to France with a 15 year old girl will be cause for some concern and investigation regardless of whether or not they intended to return. Why didn't they act straight away?
4: Border Control
A quick note about this, as the ins and outs of border control are far beyond the scope of the point that this article is trying to make: Could the border controls for England and France have done more to check who was going in and coming out of their country?
In the case of England, the answer is no. They are not obliged to check on the identity on anybody leaving the country; only the ones who are coming in. The only reason I can think of that they would have checked on either Megan or Mr Forrest was if the alarm had been raised, someone on border control happened to receive the message that Megan had gone missing, and associated one of what must have been a large number of people coming through that day with Megan’s description; possible, but not likely. Remember, it would not have been common knowledge at that point that they planned to leave the country, so they had little reason to suspect that they would try. Ironically, the last confirmed sighting of Megan and Mr Forrest was when they boarded the ferry…
The French authorities are obliged to check on people coming in to their country. This either happened or it didn’t, and until either party says one way or the other, we will never know which it was. However, if the French Border Control checked on the identities of every passenger coming into the county, it would be all they ever did; it’s not hard to imagine that the couple could have got away without being checked. And even if they had, Megan was travelling with Mr Forrest’s wife’s passport. Megan and Emily do look something alike, and several people have been quoted to have said that Forrest looked younger than he is, and Megan older than she is. It may have been enough to fool the authorities into letting them through.
To conclude, then, despite the best intentions of border control in both countries, it is unlikely that they could have done anything more to prevent this from happening.
5: Social Networking
Social networking, as most professionals now know, is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand it is great to be able to keep in regular contact with people, talk to them outside of their normal working hours, and as Facebook in particular has over a third of the entire population of the internet on it, the opportunities for marketing are vast.
On the other hand there are clearly some problems with it when used in any capacity, particularly professionally. As communication is often limited to text, tonal inflictions on messages can be easily misinterpreted, giving the wrong message and potentially causing offence. Writing is considered a pre-mediated act and once something is made in writing, it is very difficult to convince people you didn't mean it. Also, having the wrong sort of person in contact with you can lead to some very awkward questions being raised.
It is now common knowledge that Mr Forrest was communicating with some of his students on social networking sites, and particularly Twitter.[8] A lot of it was to do with the students coming to see Forrest’s band perform live, so Megan was not the only one. However, the nature of some of the messages between Megan and her teacher, for example: “In late-June, after Megan tweeted: “I just want to runaway forever,” Mr Forrest wrote: “Me & you. :-) Let’s just run away[,]””[9] would have set alarm bells ringing in even the least cynical people, if those messages were in the public domain rather than private. Whether any of the actual arrangements to run away were made on Twitter I don’t know, but the social networking site was certainly conducive to the development of their relationship that lead to the incident. If the right questions were asked about either Megan’s or Mr Forrest’s on-line conduct, the situation might have been resolved before they left for France.
With a substantial amount of attention on child abuse, paedophilia and how abusers might use the internet and social networking sites in order to do it, the inherent dangers of adults being in permanent contact with minors are obvious. If an adult has the contact details of a child, he leaves him or herself open to allegations of abuse – which, even if proved to be untrue, will come up on any future Criminal Records Bureau check. While there is no specific law saying that adults can’t be in contact with children through social networking sites, it is considered good practice for organisations who deal with children and vulnerable adults to forbid on-line social contact as part of their policy. It is not known at this point whether this was the case with Bishop Bell School. Some organisations like Universities or Higher Education Institutes – which isn’t quite the same thing as the issue at hand as their students are usually above the age of consent, though they are still open to allegations of abuse of position – maintain email contact or a social network-style contact with students, but this is most often done over their own secure servers on which on-line conduct can be monitored and any concerns investigated. If anybody in a school is in contact with a student over email, it should be done in this manner.
To this end it is perhaps a little surprising that nothing was done about Mr Forrest’s use of social networking. The messages between him and Megan were often private, but there was open contact on social networking sites with some of his other students, both present and previous, for some years. This conduct is not generally regarded as acceptable for a professional in Mr Forrest’s position, and, had it been investigated previously, might have brought the issue into prominence before he ran away to France with Megan.
Megan’s conduct on-line raises the same question that has been asked to parents since the advent of the internet: Do you know what your children are doing on-line In this case, clearly not; neither parent suspected anything nor had they seen the messages between Megan and Mr Forrest, the situation would have been quite different had they done so.
Parents are encouraged to monitor the on-line conduct of their children, but very few parents would find such a task easy. It is one thing to restrict access to a computer that the whole family might use, but many children have computers or laptops in their bedrooms, and in the last few years we've seen an increased use in smart-phones and tablets. Short of running a permanent monitoring trace on all of those devices, or simply not allowing their child to use them, it is hard for parents to monitor their children’s use of networking. Apart from anything else, a child would often find such stringency intrusive, invasive and quite hostile. The environment that this would create may influence a subliminal or even forced decision that the situation is better ignored than managed.
It is quite a frightening thought, really. With an electronic device that is rarely out of reach of children, your child could access anything that is publicly available and talk to anybody in the world. How much can and should be done to monitor its use?
6: Mr Forrest’s Protestations that he ‘ Hasn't Done Anything Wrong.’
Sorry Jeremy, but yes you have. You've done many wrong things on a number of different levels, not least of them:
- Forming a relationship with a student half your age, and more importantly for whom you had responsibility as she is legally a minor and under your supervision,
- Running away to France with said student, where different laws on the ages of relationships apply,
- Disregarding the rules of your workplace and the safeguarding training it provided, bringing your school and a number of your colleagues in to disrepute,
- Ignoring the media messages going out for the last decade which should have indicated to even the least observant individual that there was no way this was going to go unnoticed and un-investigated,
- Effectively cheating on your wife in order to do this.
Given the happy fact that cases like this often end in tragedy, it’s hard to see Mr Forrest as a villain in the same light as Ian Huntley, Julian Levene or Josef Fritzel. His own father has been saying that while he is not a violent or evil person, [Jeremy’s parents] have been worried about him for some time; he is in a bad state.[10] He didn't intend any harm to come to Megan and was apparently convinced they were doing the right thing; a bold thing to say in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. More likely, then, he made a severe lapse in judgement and behaved extremely irresponsibly towards his friends, family and the students he had responsibility for. Does that in any way excuse his actions? No. I think I can almost guarantee that nobody in the United Kingdom is going to take this lightly.
Mr Forrest will, however, have this hanging over his head for the rest of his life. He has been quoted to have said that he will not fight extradition so he can come home to be “near to the one he loves.”[11] Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. He’s facing a charge and indisputable evidence of child abduction; he’s not going to get away without doing at least some time. His wife wants nothing to do with him, and he can pretty much forget about ever being a teacher again. So that’s his marriage, career and relationship over before he will even be allowed outside without supervision. Even if he should be granted anonymity, the whole country knows his face; he’s going to have to start his life all over again.
Jeremy Forrest also wants to tell his whole story. The tale of this entire incident told from the point of view of its instigator will make for very interesting reading indeed, and will most likely raise as many questions as it answers. On a personal level, one question to which I am looking for an answer is: Is it possible to feel pity for the man? We recognise that it would be difficult for the parents of children who could potentially be put in this position to feel the same way, but nonetheless, there are a lot of factors that contributed to this situation. It would be a sensible course of action to examine these factors in order to fully understand why it happened.
Conclusion
It is hard to know how much more could have been done for either Jeremy Forrest or Megan Stammers to prevent this unfortunate incident from happening. The school had taken appropriate measures by delivering safeguarding training and were supposedly investigating concerns. It is unlikely that anybody else knew they were planning to run away, or if they did, they didn’t believe or report it. It is possible that mistakes could have been made by the Police and Border Control, but their decisions were made for a reason and given the circumstances, they were bound to get a few things wrong. And whole books have been written on the potential dangers of social networking for all concerned.
Mr Forrest himself remains something of a mystery. With the reports emerging of a bad state of mental health, plus the fact that he is still pining for a relationship that cannot exist with his student, it can be suggested that the man is not in a good place at the moment, nor was he when they ran away. However, this could, should and in some cases was recognised by his friends, family and a great many others, not least of them Mr Forrest himself. Confidential help does exist, but he chose not to seek it, and it has not been reported that anybody close to him suggested that he should do so. Instead, he formed an illegal relationship with Megan, made and executed a plan to run away to France which he must have recognised he would never get away with. As Megan is a minor, Mr Forrest will take responsibility for this and the consequences will be deserved. But maybe he needs some form of help that the British Judicial System is unable to give.
As part of our commitment to maintaining our understanding of safeguarding issues, DY3 Solutions will be attending the Child Protection Conference at the end of October. It provides an annual update in terms of legislation, practice and case law. We will be very interested to see how this case affects the climate of safeguarding, and whether it will influence any change in policy and law. We will keep you updated with any relevant information.
Matt
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