After his employers hired a convicted paedophile to work at the same place as him, a guy who survived and assisted in exposing one of the nation’s most infamous child sex offenders is currently facing a tribunal struggle.
Former Celtic youth coach and serial abuser Jim McCafferty, who served as both a kit man and a coach for several youth and junior teams, was the target of Stephen McGuinness’s accusations.
At the age of 14, Stephen was the target of sick McCafferty. While he was playing for the Netherdale Boys Club, a young club from Motherwell, he tamed and abused him in a minibus.
Stephen, like other victims, has been left to fight the demons that can stalk sex assault survivors for the rest of his life.
According to the Daily Record, he was shocked to learn that his employers had employed convicted paedo Marc Roberts-Allday to work in the same office as him at the London-based Telent Technology company, where he had spent 13 years.
Even though Roberts-Allday was serving a suspended jail sentence for his crimes, Telent employed him just seven months after he was found guilty of child porn offenses as recently as April 2021.
“Telent’s position is that I was fit to work, so I should be at work,” stated Stephen, 56. But the truth is that, after everything I’ve been through in my life, I wasn’t prepared to work next to a pedophile.
“They wouldn’t give me the assurance that this guy would never come across me at work, which was all I wanted.” They argued they had a duty of care for him – but what about me?” Stephen claimed that his line manager supported him and that he had initially vowed to never again come into contact with the pedophile.
However, he was taken aback when he discovered that he was working in the same office in July 2023.
He said: “That was it. I realised I couldn’t rely on bosses to protect me from this, which triggered all the destructive memories.”
A psychologist has backed up Stephen’s claim that this would clearly trigger his PTSD responses and render him unfit for work.
But Telent stuck their guns – sacking Stephen after declaring him fit for work and offering a “derisory” settlement of £1,000 to him ahead of a tribunal date in June.
Consultant clinical psychologist Dr Fraser Morrison wrote in a report about Stephen: “The nature of Complex PTSD is that these are expected to continue to fluctuate over the course of his adult life, as has been the case to date, with no expected date of full resolution.”
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