Nursery abuser
A nursery which employed a young man who raped a toddler failed to act on warnings from parents about his conduct, it emerged last night.
Paul Wilson, 20, took shocking pictures of himself assaulting the child, aged just two or three, at the nursery.
He also sexually groomed more than 20 young girls online, persuading them to commit sexual acts and leaving them violated and humiliated.
Last night one mother claimed she warned the Little Stars Day Nursery in Nechells, Birmingham, months before Wilson’s arrest in January.
She was suspicious of Wilson and said she disliked his presence in the nursery, but staff failed to act. In the end, she removed her child.
‘I objected to a man working in the nursery and doing things like changing the children’s nappies,’ she said. ‘He was a nice, pleasant boy, but I was a bit suspicious of him. I asked if something could be done, but they said no so I pulled my child out and looked for a different nursery.’
A grandmother of a two-year-old boy at the nursery said that Wilson was ‘always trying to take pictures of the kids’.She said: ‘He loved taking pictures all the time. The pictures were put up all over the nursery.
‘Once, he deleted the pictures of my two-year-old grandson in front of me, which I thought was very strange.
‘But who knows what pictures he was taking when no one was watching?’
Worker: Wilson worked at the Little Stars Nursery in Birmingham where he admitted orally raping the youngster
She added that staff always took the children into rooms on their own to change their nappies.
No sanction has been taken against the privately-run nursery, and Birmingham City Council has allowed it to re-open under the same ownership.
Its managers claim it has regained the trust of parents.
Incredibly, Wilson was studying to be a primary school teacher at the time of his arrest, indicating that he was trying to maximise his access to young children.
Yesterday he appeared at Birmingham Crown Court charged with 50 sexual offences over three years.
Unshaven and wearing a scruffy designer t-shirt and jeans, he pleaded guilty to crimes including two counts of rape against a child at the nursery where he worked, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and making and distributing 800 indecent images of children across England and Wales. He denied three offences.
It took half an hour to read the charges and Wilson, from Nechells, raised his head only to enter his pleas.
He was remanded in custody for sentencing later this month. Judge William Davis QC told Wilson he faces an indeterminate sentence and added: ‘The public needs to be protected from you.’
Wilson is the second nursery worker to be convicted of child sex attacks in recent years.
Vanessa George is serving an indeterminate jail term for abusing toddlers and taking photos at Little Ted’s nursery in Plymouth.
Wilson worked at Little Stars for about 18 months. Police say that checks on his background and criminal record were carried out and came back clear. After his arrest in January this year, police checked his mobiles and computer and discovered shocking images of him orally raping a child at Little Stars, where he was employed as an assistant.
The child was quickly identified and the parents informed.
Yesterday manager Stacey Spooner said there were now procedures in place to protect the children at the nursery, which reopened in March.
She said: ‘We were devastated when this happened and we have had to fight to overcome everything. We have faced a lot of upheaval.
‘That one man could cause such harm was devastating for us but we have rebuilt that trust with parents.’ The paedophile groomed his 22 girl victims, who were aged 12 to 16 at the time, by posing as teenage girls, teenage boys and, on one occasion, a model scout.
Once he had gained their trust, he would get them to commit sexual acts which he recorded on webcams before threatening to show the images to their friends and family if they refused to continue to comply with his depraved demands.
He even persuaded one girl to commit a sexual act with her sister for his gratification.
Police discovered that Wilson had created 23 false online profiles which he used to contact potential victims. He would slowly introduce a sexual element, while at the same time ‘introducing’ his victims to other people, who were in fact one or more of his online personas.
This fictitious ‘community’ would exert pressure on the children to commit sexual acts whilst Wilson filmed them using webcams.
He would then threaten to send the images to their friends and family if they refused to continue to comply with his depraved demands.
Wilson’s crimes were discovered when one of his online victims told police that he was blackmailing her by threatening to show indecent images of her to her friends and family. Claude Knights, director of children’s charity Kidscape, said: ‘This is a most disturbing case involving a persistent predator who has infiltrated himself into settings where he could gain access to vulnerable infants.
‘This case serves to reiterate two important messages. Firstly, parents must participate in their children’s online lives.
‘Secondly, following similarly harrowing cases in other nursery schools, managers must monitor and vet their staff rigorously.’
Wilson was born to a single mother, Barbara Wilson, 51, who works at another nearby nursery called Noah’s Ark. He shared a ground-floor flat with her and her partner Theo D-Souza just five minutes from the Little Stars nursery.
At the time of Wilson’s arrest, his stepfather had a link to a Facebook group called ‘Stop Abuse on Children’.
Wilson was a keen user of the internet and social networking sites.
On one, he described how he was training to be a primary school teacher and listed his favourite films as Toy Story, Shrek and High School Musical.
On another, he wrote on his profile that he ‘would love to do more work with families’ but that he did not want to ‘stop the day-to-day working with children bit of my job’.
'I was violated and betrayed'
One of the young girls coerced into performing vile acts by Paul Wilson said she felt ‘pure hatred’ for the nursery worker who made her feel ‘violated’.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he groomed her over the MSN messenger programme and web-based youth community Netlog.
He began innocent conversations with her, but gradually persuaded her to expose herself in front of her webcam.
He then told her he would send the images to her friends if she refused to perform further acts.
Groomed: The victim, now 17, said she felt shocked, isolated and ashamed
The girl, who is now 17, said: ‘I was really scared that he was going to send it to everybody else.
‘It was the choice of carrying on doing this – which I just did not want to do – or going through total humiliation from these images.’
Eventually, the teenager was so mentally exhausted by Wilson’s demands that she decided she did not care whether he sent the images out and deleted him from her MSN account.
After she discovered what the nursery worker had done to other victims, she said: ‘I felt violated – it betrayed all my trust. I felt quite stupid and ashamed that I had succumbed to what he had asked me to do.’
The girl added that she had now changed the way she uses the internet.
‘I am really careful,’ she said. ‘I will only speak to people who I know in the real world.’
Her mother warned other parents to monitor their children’s internet use more closely, saying: ‘You think they are safe, just talking to their friends, but there are outsiders who will latch on and pretend to be their friends and take them for what they want.’
