Constance Marten case — I feel the police have some responsibility too

They can't win, whatever approach they take, someone will always say they were wrong.

What are they supposed to do if the mother won't leave the abuser?

I havectwo adopted children and know lots of adopters. Mothers prioritising their partners over their children is a huge, huge issue in adoption.

Try reading the files on what happens to the children in these situations.

The dad likely takes all the money for drugs and booze, leaving the family starving. My two girls nearly died from starvation.

The birth parents would go out drinking and lock the children in cupboards.

My girls are in their 20s now and still have to deal with the effects of what happened to them.

Often services get the abuser to move out just for a new one to move in.

Social services have to prioritise the children.

Btw in answer to another comment about adoption, there is a new emphasis on ongoing contact with birth family. But even when I adopted 23 years ago we had letterbox contact 3 times a year. Part of the problem is that adopters often don't want to do it (often for good reasons as it can destabilise home life and it is hard to deal with someone who caused so much damage) - it is one of the reasons adoption is declining in popularity and people are turning to surrogacy instead.

Have you read about these parents?? Gordon is a violent serial rapist who threw his pregnant wife out of a window. Marten is in thrall to him to the point of allowing her newborn to die in a freezing tent. They are manipulative and entitled to the point of dragging the court case out for years, he fired all his lawyers, represented himself and stood on the stand for days proclaiming himself a victim of the state. She is giving media interviews from prison about how the microwave food is a feature of abuse. When she has allowed her own newborn to die and left her body in a used shopContinuing to allow these people access to their children would absolutely not have been in the children’s best interest, heartbreaking as that is.

Sorry OP, I think you are hopelessly naive.

They were already in a chaotic mess before they were even aware that the police were looking for them. They had travelled as far as Harwich before they knew the public were looking, travelling in taxis after the car had blown up, no equipment, no plan - and let's face it, their PLAN A intention, made before Victoria was even born, so leave out the post natal new Mum sentiment, was to leave Victoria with a people smuggler found on Gumtree while they established themselves in Ireland or elsewhere, and then after 6 months get people smuggler to bring Victoria to them.

Meanwhile the police are seeking a woman with a newborn, who has had no medical checks or attention, in the company of a violent rapist and assaulter of police women , who was known (by them at the time) to have pushed her out of a first storey window and then refused to allow paramedics into the house when she was in agony with a ruptured spleen and kidneys.

They said at one ppint in court that they considered handing themselves in when they were in London - but took the conscious decision to buy the tent instead.

The police started out 'softly softly'. Her Father made a compassionate appeal.

Can you IMAGINE the furore the police would have faced had they not looked and done everything they could to find them?

God forbid, OP, you, or any of us, ever find yourself in a decision making position of this kind.

This 💯

No, she had chances to keep her child but repeatedly didn’t turn up for contact. The decision to permanently remove them would have been made based in their best interests. Their father raped a woman and threatened to kill her young children, and then pushed Marten out a window while pregnant. Theres probably more we dont know due to press having to respect privacy of their children.

It's really distateful the aristocrat thing. As if we should care more/ be scandalised because she had some posh relatives.

I feel very sorry for her other children who had a terrible start in life and I have limited sympathy for the fact she kept having them to be honest.

Please read all the articles so you understand the back story on this pair

The parents didn't turn up for the supervised visits anyway so would be unlikely to remain in touch during an open adoption I suspect. In one of the articles I read today it said the older child told her nursery worker 'mummy and daddy cancelled again'.

I can only assume the OP had read hardly anything about this case before starting this thread.

Both parents deserve extremely long sentences.

Those poor children.

Don’t work well for whom? There are a number of adoptive parents in this thread including myself. My kids would be dead if left with their birth family. Adoption has given my children the chance to have a life, to be loved and cared for, to thrive in all kinds of ways. It is working well for them, with lots of therapeutic support to overcome the harm done to them.

It may not work for the birth parents, but giving them repeated opportunities to traumatise their kids and undermine their new life isn’t in the children’s best interest. Sometimes ongoing contact can work well, it often doesn’t. I do think there needs to be better support for parents who have their children removed but not at the cost of those children.

No, the police aren't responsible for 2 parents who yet again chose to prioritise their relationship over their responsibility to their children.

A mother who willfully treated her children like shit, abandoning a new baby to go and visit her rapist violent thug of a partner isn't one I waste my sympathy on.

I thought the same reading it. I am sure there’s a paranoid psychosis order there of some sort whether cannabis induced or post partum.

As a semi-grizzled hack, I would say to you that when there is a missing child, the media and police work together. The media will be told more than they publish to ensure they do not put the operation at risk by inadvertently publishing something which risks safety. The media will also publish things which the police think are helpful.

In this case there was a tiny baby in the hands of a couple of deeply antagonistic, unstable people. The police will have taken advice from psychologists. It seems likely the advice will have been - nothing you do will persuade them to come forward, best do all you can to get to the baby as fast as you can.

I think it’s deeply unhelpful (and unfair on the police) to be an armchair general in a case like this. There were no easy answers. Sometimes in real life there’s only the least worst option.

Exactly they knew for more than we did about the danger that baby was in. I have no sympathy for ‘mums post natal hormones’. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Exactly this.

I guess if she was lying for him and lack of other evidence, CPS would have found it hard to secure a conviction.

But despite this, she [the judge] formed the view that it was Marten who was the "dominant personality".

Would be good to know how the judge formed this view.

They were desperate to get the baby away from the violent rapist as soon as they could. The neighbours heard Constance screaming before she was pushed or jumped out of the upstairs window when pregnant. The police believe it more likely she was pushed. He didn't call an ambulance and dragged her back inside. She was screaming "Help me help me" and he refused to let paramedics in. The baby was at risk with him around.

Having read about their behaviour during the trial. The only people who have responsibility for this is themselves.

She needs to be locked up until she reaches menopause .. she’s an absolute danger to any of her children.

Her parents had looked at fostering the children, but were so worried about her & her partners behaviour, that they didn’t think they would be able to keep the children safe, and away from them. … which is one of the reasons they were adopted out.

Some children are just better off away from their birth parents.

Well, hopefully the lesson for you has been to do some research before you post opinions apportioning blame.

👆This.

I think the Police did everything they could reading the articles. The only thing is they could have issued a national Missing Persons maternity alert in December 22!but it probably wouldn’t have made any difference given they weren’t accessing any services anywhere.

I absolutely agree with this

But the parents were encouraged to have contact with their children. They didn't turn up for the contact sessions.

Speaking as someone who has a child in their extended family who's bio dad is constantly cancelling at the last minute, the effect on a young child of that repeated cycle of hope and then disappointment, over and over again, is devastating.

But the final nail in the coffin of my having any sympathy at all for Marten is the fact that when Gordon was released from prison, she immediately travelled to see him, leaving her newborn alone for 17 hours. Even without all their other failures, and regardless of her mental health, that is the behaviour of a narcissistic, unfit mother. There is no way she could ever be trusted to care for a child.