No fault
The Green Party is perhaps beginning to grasp that there’s a problem.
The Green party has announced an inquiry into how the father of a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership was allowed to remain her election agent 18 months after he was charged with raping and torturing a child, offences that led to him being jailed last week.
The party said Aimee Challenor, who has insisted she did not know the full details of the allegations against her father, David, had been suspended pending the results of the independent investigation.
It’s a no-fault suspension, they say.
Several Green members have expressed alarm after it emerged that officials took no action to suspend David Challenor or restrict his activities in the party until he was jailed for 22 years for torturing and raping a 10-year-old girl in the attic of the family home in Coventry.
David Challenor’s first court appearance over the allegations took place in November 2016. But ahead of his trial, which began this month, he acted twice as his daughter’s election agent, at the 2017 general election, and in May’s local polls.
It’s not a parking ticket, or embezzlement, or failure to pay the license fee. It’s the torture and rape of a ten-year-old girl. It’s not very “green.”
One party figure said they were “agonised, horrified and furious” at the apparent safeguarding failure, and hoped the Greens, a party that remains heavily localised and largely dependent on volunteers, would learn lessons from this.
Which part were they aware of? The torture part, or the raping part? Why did neither of those lead to immediate denunciation and disassociation? Even better judgement would have been to withdraw from the leadership and candidate roles completely. You can’t claim to represent a party of love, compassion and respect, while living in a tiny house where that sort of thing was going on long term without loosing the credibility and mana required to hold public office. fairly or not you become tainted and that’s that. If you don’t have the judgement to recognise that, you don’t have the judgement to do the job.
Rob, the problem I have with that part of their statement is that there is no chance on Earth that Aimee wouldn’t have known what her father was arrested for and charged with. Unless the police went totally against procedure, both Aimee and her mother would have been interviewed at length, and would have been shown and asked about the sex, bondage and torture equipment from the attic; about the adult-sized babyware; about who he took up there and when; about any noises, screams, etc. they may have heard.
Aimee would (or should) also have been interviewed by members of the specialised sex crimes unit, and would almost certainly have been asked if her father had ever behaved violently or sexually towards her.
Even if her father had refused to tell them why he was arrested and what he’d been charged with; even if neither Aimee nor her mother had attended his court hearing to hear the charges put to him, and even if the local media had not reported on the case (keeping strict anonymity for the protection of the victim), Aimee simply had to have known what he was being accused of and charged with just from the basics of her own interview(s) with the police. There were too many clues for her not to have been able to work it out.
I really hope that she was merely lying about knowing rather than keeping quiet for other reasons. Family loyalty wouldn’t cut it in a case like this, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the woke rule against kink-shaming wasn’t at least a factor in her decision to keep secrets.
What A of S said. And don’t forget the likelihood that the victim was a family member.
Some well-sourced gossip for yall: Aimee has close friends in the “adult baby community.”
Did my comment not make clear my cynical disbelief?
So we have an adult male playing at being (dare I say “identifying as?”) a baby. Does anyone agree that he actually is a baby now? Could he be legally recognized as a baby? Why is this not the case? Yet he actually once was a baby, and may retain some dim memories of his infancy. Why then could he not be a “trans baby?” He should have as much right to this status as all those cis-babies, all those natal babies, and all those assigned-baby-at-birth persons. It’s perfectly clear that all issues of daycare and child abuse should rightly centre these trans babies.
For bonus parallelism points he’s even already done awful, hateful things not usually done by the group of persons he seems so desperate to pose as/join/become, and done it to someone who is at least still a minor (if not actually any longer an infant)…
Rob, you were very clear. My follow up was just me being wide-awake at 4am and trying to get my head around her ridiculous plea of ignorance.
I can sort of understand the Green party being unaware of the circumstances since in cases involving children in particular the names of the accused are rarely made public until after conviction/acquital, so the father’s name wouldn’t necessarily have raised flags in background checks.
To be clear, I was not responding to you, Rob, at all. I was sort of adding on.
My point was that of course Aimee knew.
And the Greens, if they really didn’t, should have known. Coventry Pride barred the elder Mr. Challenor from volunteering for them soon after his arrest–back in November 2016.
Wait, if he was charged, how was he not in jail? Bail? Or was he working from jail?
Kristjan, he would have been released on conditional bail until his trial. The conditions would have included no contact with the victim. Bail isn’t automatically granted in such cases, and factors such as likelihood of re-offending during the bail period or if the accused was considered a flight risk are considered before granting bail. That he was his wife’s sole carer would have played to his advantage during the magistrates’ deliberations.
@AoC Ah, thanks for clarifying.