The comments attributed to Andrea Leadsom last week regarding her thoughts on the risk associated with having a male nanny, during her interview with the Times, may or may not have been reported verbatim.
They may or may not have been taken out of context but the fact is that the views reported do represent a widely held public opinion.
I know this because I have experienced almost identical phraseology in a recent local authority presentation where a picture of the child murderer Ian Huntley was displayed as part of a 'dispassionate' discourse on safe recruitment in which we (a room of 40 female childcare workers and myself – the only male in the room) were told, ‘We have done all this work to recruit more men into childcare and this (pointing to the picture on the screen) is what we have achieved – well not on my watch!'
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