Should the father of the 4 Hoath boys also be charged with manslaughter?

And she has to live with that. I doubt any custodial sentence comes close to that.

No- the children paid the ultimate price- they died.

She didn't want to kill her children.
She didn't want to harm her children.
She loved them.
She took pride in them.
She did the day-to-day care for 4 tiny children mostly on her own while living in poverty.
She managed to hold down a job for much of this time.
All while in ill health herself.

Her fault lay in making a huge error of judgment, while in sole care of her children which led to their deaths. The court made it clear that this error was so serious that she was criminally responsible.

It ought to have been possible for social services to work with someone like this to protect the kids properly. She was capable of being a good mother, wasn't abusive and wasn't abusing substances.

Twice? They were two sets of twins.

Same with Logan Mwangi's father. No interest in him when he was alive, all over the news weeping and fretting when he died.

I wonder if Madeleine McCann hadn't been kidnapped, but a fire had taken hold, and all 3 of those children had been killed, the Portuguese would have prosecuted?
I think they would have done.

I feel compassion for her. She asked for help and it was not given.
She left the children alone and disaster happened - and she'll be punished.
The McCanns left their children alone and disaster happened - and they never had to answer for their actions.

I wonder why?
Race, wealth, education, 🤔😔

Yep, our was considered to be very difficult to place because he is a boy and he’s south asian. Where as our daughter wasn’t as due to girls being more likely to be adopted it is also more likely potential adopters wouldn’t mind her being south asian.

The other salient points here is that they were boys and they were black. They would not be sought after in adoption terms. And that’s how it is before anyone roasts me for pointing that out.

The bar removal is rightly high, unless abuse or neglect is extreme we know outcomes are better when a child remains with at least one biological parent. Children also aren’t taken to be put up for adoption, adoption is the absolute last resort, so firstly any member of the birth family they can find will be considered first, while this is going on the children will be in an emergency foster placement, due to their ages and the number of them it is almost guaranteed the sets of twins would be in different placements. Once no one is identified as able to provide care from the birth family fostering is the next step, again it is almost a guarantee the twins would be split up. The children would then have regular contact with their birth parents, this set up would continue unless a birth parent was deemed able to parent independently, or if after a very lengthy process it was decided they are never returning to the parents care. But that still doesn’t mean adoption, it will then be decided it adoption is beneficial, or if they’re better off remaining in foster care for the rest of their chidhood. In either scenario you’re not going to find a placement for all four children.

Do women with experience of domestic abuse (which could very easily have been at the hands of her ex) tend to have as much of a choice about these things?

Having read the sentencing remarks it's clear that the father was pretty fucking useless- far better at conceiving children than actually providing for them. He may not have killed his children but he's not the victim here.

Of which she'll serve around 4.5 Im not arguing it should be more but that's not a lot for 4 child deaths.

That is a very good point re the McCanns, and also involved twins.

She should've kept her knickers on.

To the people saying the children should have been removed from her care - it's so hard to get a court order to remove children.

There is also a real lack of foster carers.

There are thousands and thousands of women living like this up & down the country - single mum, poor housing, no money, mental health issues.

She popped out to Sainsbury's, thinking the boys would be fine. And had she not left the candles lit, they probably would have been. Many parents do this sort of thing. The McCanns are also guilty of this.

The parents in these two cases paid the ultimate price of course.

They probably would have had to go into a care/foster placement first and there are very very few.
I was speaking to a Social Worker about a child last week and he said that the childs (difficult) living situation was better than any care place he could put him in. There were no suitable Foster spaces for him in the entire country and only a couple in group homes that would not be the best thing for him

I agree. There is a division of culpability here.

She is responsible for their deaths in that she left them alone, without an adult, and they died because of her actions (both in leaving them alone and in creating the fire risk they faced).

But it's interesting that she was cleared of neglect. The jury accepted that she loved her children and was generally doing her best to care for them in the circumstances that she and they found themselves in.

So who bears the blame for those circumstances then? Social services? The dad for not practically and materially supporting his kids sufficiently? The wider family? The benefits system? This was a women who, despite having poor health and four young children to care for, also worked part-time until the lead-up to their deaths. She was coping with a lot and, for a while, she was doing ok. And when she started struggling and stopped doing ok, she reached out for help that wasn't there.

She's rightly been held to account for her responsibility for the death of her children. But the process of accountability shouldn't stop there. The role of those who were responsible for the children's neglect - the dad, social services etc. - also needs to be examined. Because the mum was cleared of neglect - it wasn't her who neglected her kids, according to the law.

Who should be held responsible for the neglect that these children suffered?

Ok thanks for the correction @freeatthemoment

I agree. I’d be on my knees trying to look after four young children on my own, so god knows how a woman already suffering mental health problems would cope. The father should bear a lot of the blame.

It’s two births so she won’t have but even so it will have been a huge, huge financial burden and she will have struggled. And do we think the father contributed a penny, students at the back?

I imahine she had benefits capped at two but had four children to pay for. Probably no car, so had to juggle shopping and four toddlers every time she needed food in.

My personal opinion is that she is deserving of both pity and compassion. But perhaps that’s a bit too uncomfortable

I agree with this. Society criminally punishing and solely (legally) blaming the struggling mum is just scapegoating.
It’s a much wider social culpability than hers.

I disagree with that.

By all accounts, the boys were loved, she was present and available for the first very nearly five years of their lives. She was there.

I remember some years ago now that I did something at work which retrospectively I now can’t quite believe I did but at the time my head was such a mess I was doing all sorts of things. As it was, nothing came of it which was pure luck really.

I am not saying nothing further should happen. But I do think that further actions should be borne with compassion and common sense. I also disagree the boys ‘should not have had any contact with her.’ That would have been far more harmful than the alternative.

I suspect what happened was she was living in near poverty. I don’t have twins myself but I remember reading a thread on here and someone linked to the statistics re the extra costs associated with twins, and she had two sets, one year apart.

So she was living in near poverty and I know myself when you’re living in awful conditions there’s little incentive to keep things clean and tidy because it just looks awful anyway. And then things break and don’t work and it’s either a crap landlord or she’s worried about kicking up a fuss because it’s London and hens teeth or she’s just so depressed and exhausted. Or all the above. And gradually the lights go and things stop working and it’s a mess.

The problem is that becomes your ‘norm.’ And you just stop seeing it.

And then this happens and it was awful and it was wrong but there is no fucking way this poor woman should have been left with two two year olds and two one year olds in lockdown with no respite or relief. I’m not surprised she did awful things to try to cling on to whatever tiny bits of sanity she had left. I suspect the fact the boys weren’t attending nursery or school was a sign of things massively deteriorating.

Oh I completely agree, a lot of people only care about poor children when they’re dead. They wouldn’t dream of doing anything to actually benefit children in need.