When the System Says “Procedural Error”

and a Mother Says “The Worst Kind of Human”

There’s a moment in every one of these stories where the language splits in two. On one side you get a government department, or a prison governor, or a press officer somewhere in Whitehall, reaching for a phrase like “administrative error” or “procedural mismatch.” On the other side you get a mother standing in a witness box at Kingston Crown Court, looking directly at the woman who hurt her child, and finding only one sentence that fits: “I think all of us can agree that only the worst kind of human would assault vulnerable babies.”

Those two registers are talking about the same event. They are not speaking the same language.

That gap… between the bureaucratic vocabulary built to describe failure and the human vocabulary built to describe harm… is, I think, the actual story here. Not the sentencing. Not even the deportation blunder, strictly speaking, though that’s the hook that got this into headlines this week. The story is what happens when an institution’s words are simply not built to carry the weight of what occurred, and a family’s words are the only ones that can.

What Actually Happened, Briefly

Roksana Lecka, 23, worked at two nurseries in west London, Riverside Nursery in Twickenham and Little Munchkins nursery in Hounslow, between October 2023 and June 2024. Over that period she pinched and scratched babies beneath their clothing, kicked children who were lying on the floor, pushed toddlers headfirst into cots, shoved another child onto a mattress, and covered a crying child’s mouth. She told police she smoked cannabis before her shifts, and at one point was seen vaping a metre away from a young baby.

She was caught because colleagues noticed something was off. Police began investigating after colleagues noticed Lecka acting unusually during a shift, before another staff member reported she had pinched several children. Detectives then went back through the CCTV, and what they found was not an isolated lapse but a pattern, repeated, almost casual, often carried out while colleagues had their backs turned or had briefly left the room.

She admitted seven counts of cruelty. A jury convicted her of fourteen more. She was sentenced at Kingston Crown Court, and the judge, Sarah Plaschkes KC, said something that I think deserves to sit on the page rather than be summarised: “At that age children are vulnerable because they cannot understand let alone tell anyone of their suffering.”

That’s the court doing what courts do well… naming the specific cruelty of the crime, which is that babies cannot report what’s happening to them. It’s precise. It’s correct. And then the sentence handed down was eight years, of which she served fourteen months before being sent back to Poland.

I’m not going to pretend that’s not where most people’s anger lands first. But stay with me, because the sentencing gap isn’t even where the language fails most badly. That comes next.

The Words Built for the Wrong Job

Here’s how the deportation has been explained, officially, so far. Her deportation to Poland was granted under an early removal procedure that sees foreign national criminals sent back home before serving their full prison term. However, British officials mistakenly used a unilateral deportation procedure instead of a formal prison transfer. Polish authorities then discovered they had no legal authority to detain her, because she was not registered with the correct criminal databases or international alert systems. The result: she was allowed into the country at Warsaw Airport as if she was a regular traveller.

Major Dagmara Bielec of the Polish Border Guard put it like this: “A Polish citizen expelled from Great Britain has returned to the country. But her arrival did not take place under any of the formal international cooperation procedures in force between Poland and Great Britain.”

Read that quote again. It’s not wrong. It’s accurate, in fact, scrupulously so. But notice what it does and doesn’t contain. It contains “procedures,” “cooperation,” “formal.” It does not contain a baby. It does not contain a CCTV frame of a toddler being pushed headfirst into a cot. It is the correct register for describing a database failure, and a woman who repeatedly hurt children for seven months has been folded entirely into that register, because that register is the only one the system has for talking about what happens to her now.

This is not a uniquely cruel feature of this case. It’s how institutional language always works under pressure: it narrows. It has to. A border guard unit cannot file a report that says “and also, separately, this is a person who covered a crying child’s mouth with her hand on CCTV, multiple times, while colleagues weren’t looking.” That detail isn’t relevant to the database error. It is, however, the only thing the parents in Twickenham and Hounslow can think about.

The Other Register

So here’s what the parents actually said, in their own witness statements, in their own words, with nobody editing for procedural neutrality.

One mother: “These children were so innocent and vulnerable. They couldn’t speak, they couldn’t defend themselves and they couldn’t tell us as parents that something had happened to them. They were totally helpless and Roksana preyed upon them.”

Another, describing the CCTV footage that the court was shown, made a detail of it that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I first read it: some of the footage showed babies reaching back out to Lecka after she had hurt them. Babies too young to understand betrayal, reaching for the only adult in the room anyway. There is no procedural vocabulary on earth that can sit next to that image without sounding obscene.

And then there’s the aftermath, which gets far less coverage than the crime itself, but which is in many ways the more honest account of what this actually cost. Parents described feeling guilty that they had sent their children to the nursery, and feeling mistrustful about leaving their children with anyone again, with some children left with sleeping issues and separation anxiety. One mother said the trial reopened something she thought she’d processed: “The early days of the trial were the worst two days of my life. Watching how relentless Roksana was in picking out a child and assaulting them again and again was horrifying.”

That’s not institutional language failing to capture an event. That’s a family doing the only thing left to them, narrating their own harm in plain English because nobody else was going to do it for them, and because the system that was supposed to protect their children had already failed once and was, as it turns out, about to fail again on the way out the door.

Two Failures, Not One

Because I want to be careful here not to write the easy version of this essay, the one where a single villain (the Home Office, immigration policy, “the system,” take your pick) explains everything. There were two distinct failures, and they’re worth separating, because conflating them is exactly how you end up with a piece that generates heat but no light.

The first failure was Lecka’s, full stop. Nobody made her vape near infants or kick a child in the face. That’s not a policy outcome. That’s a person.

The second failure was administrative, and it’s genuinely strange once you look at it closely, because it isn’t even a failure of the policy itself. The Early Removal Scheme, whatever you think of its merits, is a known, established mechanism, a procedure that sees foreign national criminals sent back home before serving their full prison term. What seems to have happened is that someone used the wrong door. Instead of a formal prison transfer, with all the paperwork and database flags that would have had Polish officers waiting on the tarmac, Lecka went through a unilateral deportation procedure, the kind used for people who are simply not wanted in the country anymore, not for people who are still, technically, serving a sentence for assaulting children.

That’s not a flaw in the early removal concept. That’s someone filling in the wrong form. Which is, in its own grim way, almost worse, because “the policy is bad” at least gives you something to argue about and change. “Someone used template B instead of template A” gives you nothing except the quiet horror that this is how the machinery actually runs, one box ticked instead of another, and a woman who hurt twenty-one babies walks through Warsaw Airport as if she was a regular traveller.

What the Institutional Silence Tells You

As of writing, I can’t find a government statement addressing this specific case directly, which is its own kind of language, the language of saying nothing at all while a story runs. That silence will likely be filled eventually with something measured: a “we are looking into how this happened,” perhaps a “lessons will be learned.” Those phrases will be true in the narrowest sense. They will also do nothing to answer the only question that actually matters to the families involved, which a GB News source put more bluntly than any minister will: “It just makes a mockery of the whole criminal system. No justice is being served, no punishment.”

That’s not hyperbole. It’s an accurate description of an eight-year sentence that became fourteen months, followed by a deportation that didn’t actually deport anyone in any meaningful, trackable sense. Lecka’s whereabouts are now unknown. There are fears she could get another job working with children, in a country with its own nurseries, its own babies, its own parents who have no idea what they don’t know.

The Point of Sitting With This

I don’t have a tidy close for this one, and I’m not going to manufacture one, because tidiness is exactly the thing the institutional language offers and exactly the thing that’s wrong about it. A clean resolution… new safeguards announced, a minister resigns, a database fixed… would let everyone exhale and move on. But the mother who said her child reached back out for Lecka after being hurt doesn’t get a clean resolution. She gets a child with separation anxiety and a system that, having failed her once, is now demonstrating in real time that it can fail her again, more or less for free, with nobody even required to apologise in a register she’d recognise as human.

I keep coming back to that judge’s line: “At that age children are vulnerable because they cannot understand let alone tell anyone of their suffering.” It was said about the babies. It applies just as well to the parents now watching a database error become a permanent open question. They understand exactly what happened. They’ve told everyone who’ll listen. And the system’s only answer, so far, is a border guard’s careful, accurate, utterly inadequate description of paperwork.

Until Next Time