A Dagenham teacher has been banned from the classroom after he failed to report a child sex abuse video sent to him on Facebook. Vevekanand Singh, 50, was sent the Category A sex abuse video of a child on April 19, 2019, but did not report the incident to the police, his school or Facebook.
Mr Singh worked at Hunters Hall Primary School from September 2016 to October 2020 and was arrested on suspicion of possession of an indecent image on December 31, 2019. The police decided that no further action should be taken in relation to Mr Singh’s arrest on April 17, 2020, but he was referred to the Teaching Regulation Authority on January 6, 2020.
An investigation on behalf of the school was also carried out, and during his investigation interview on May 21, 2020, Mr Singh stated that not reporting the video was “a bad decision and a bad misjudgement [sic]” and it was “his deepest regret not informing the necessary people”.
A Category A image is the worst kind of child sexual abuse photo.
In a later written statement in February 2020, Mr Singh reported that all the messages between him and the sender had been deleted, including any presence of the person’s Facebook.
He said he “assumed that everything had been deleted because of the image and that this was being dealt with in the appropriate way by Facebook” and “the police”. Mr Singh further stated that “in retrospect”, he acknowledged that this was a “mistake in judgement”, and he should have contacted the police, “even if only to protect [himself] from any involvement”.
My Singh said he received the video from an acquaintance from his home country of Guyana, with whom he “occasionally exchanged casual bits of news regarding Guyana”. Mr Singh further stated that he was “extremely shocked and confused” when he received an image involving a child which was “of very poor quality and looked very old and historical”.
Whilst Mr Singh said the image was “completely unsolicited”, he stated that his “instinctive reaction was to get rid of the image, so [he] resent it back to the person who had sent it” to him. The panel did not consider it a reasonable position to believe that an image would be deleted if it were sent back to the original sender.
An unnamed witness said she had seen a screenshot of the messages between Mr Singh and the sender of the video. She said it showed someone had sent the child abuse video to Mr Singh, and then, in his reply to the message, she said Mr Singh redistributed the same video back to the sender the next day.
His alleged reply read: “This looks like one little child”, adding, “Being f*****”.
He denied sending these messages, however, saying that he was “not a person who uses this sort of vocabulary”, instead he believed he “made a comment something along the lines of ‘this seems to be a child involved being molested’ [sic]”
Mr Singh denied not reporting the video and messaging the person, but the panel deemed that these allegations were proved based on his and the witnesses’ statements and police reports. Mr Singh did not turn up to the hearing, so the facts of the allegations and whether he was guilty of misconduct were treated as not admitted.
In a written statement, Mr Sigh said he was “unprepared for how to deal” with the circumstances as “no safeguarding training had ever covered any event of this kind”. The panel noted this was contrary to the information the panel had seen regarding the safeguarding training provided to staff at the School.
He also said that he was not aware that forwarding the video back to the person who sent it to him amounted to redistributing material.
Because these allegations were proved, the panel found this to amount to serious misconduct and so handed Mr Singh a prohibition order with a provision for a five-year review period. This means he is banned from until until a review overturns the prohibition order.
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