My sister has been hurting her son

As you don’t live locally, you will be limited on what you can do. But you can do something. Could you offer financial support for your parents to have a break occasionally? Or pay towards therapies? If that isn’t affordable, you could offer to babysit when you are over again. Or take him out for the day.

My family stood by as my mother and her partner abused me and my siblings. They act surprised why we no longer talk. Anything you do to help him, will be great.

I will never ever understand it. Knowing how I feel as a mother, about my kids… I can’t imagine turning on them, whatever abuse I was going through. I’d rather be arrested for murder. Luckily my mum never turned on us either despite she was with an abuser herself.

I’ll never understand it but there’s a lot of stories about these situations so you must be right.

Please make sure that your parents are logging the visits, so there's a record if when she doesn't turn up or only stays for five minutes, etc. This could be really important in a court case. If they have a Ring doorbell which proves when/if she arrives and leaves, all the better

That is heartbreaking, poor little chap.

I think it may help to remember (this is to all on the thread as well as @Kickpot ) that as awful as what this poor wee man has been through, he has been removed from it.

It hasnt been ignored by teachers, glossed over by his family, let slip through the cracks by social workers or played down by the police.

This child will never be a tragic headline because everyone concerned did the right things when his mother didnt.

Also, at 5, while some brain wiring will have taken place a great deal of repair work can be done with the correct help. The brain also rewires heavily during adolescence and a lot can be done then, too.

Not all damage can be undone, and it depends on how severe the abuse was, but a great deal can be helped.

Thank god the boy is safe, fight to the end of your days to NEVER allow those monsters to have him back ever again

This child will never be a tragic headline because everyone concerned did the right things when his mother didnt.

couldn’t agree with @PyongyangKipperbang more.

this @Kickpot

Im so sorry to hear about this, that poor little girl. The second time I've cried about this thread today, first after the OP's post. I need to toughen up about it, I know.

Thank god there are people like you around to fight the good fight, hopefully I'll get there too in time.

Its just abominable that not only are there adults abusing children, but that there are people in positions of power putting the same children back in danger. Of course they won't see it as more abuse, but thats exactly what it is.

This information is really helpful to me, and im sure will help the OP navigate her family's awful situation so thank you.

The whole system is fucked up pal. I have professional and personal experience with child abuse, parents keeping PR etc and it’s just a clusterfuck.
These poor kids deserve so much better.

Stuff worth thinking about:

• If your nephew is going to be able to use Google/Facebook or whatever similar things are around when he's older, he'll be able to find his mother maybe without your or your parents involvement. There are good reasons for maintaining some contact between them so she doesn't become an unreal, rose tinted glasses version of herself in his mind. You'll need advice whether it should be supervised face to face contact, phone contact or letter based contact only. There are also good reasons for no contact for a bit but with a plan to revisit it before he's a teenager.

• There is hope for your sister if she can detach herself from her partner. There's a possibility she was behaving as she did because of his abuse of her. Pointing her at domestic abuse resources would be kind. But she will have to acknowledge she behaved badly towards her child and that might be too hard for her to do for some time.

• Some of the recommended things for Autism - eg. Applied Behavioural Analysis can look coercive and in historic variants explicitly included adversives to try to change children's behaviour. Do consider whether your sister might have had a genuine belief she was doing it right. Intention isn't everything and doesn't erase the consequences but is relevant to the risk she poses.

Caring for disabled children is hard* - sometimes people do snap (different from videoing abuse) - think about respite for your parents. Can you/they pay for someone to take him for a Saturday afternoon or something? Can he use wraparound care at school?

*Kinship care is the phrase you want when looking for help. The specialist charities will be able to point you at lawyers.

I'm afraid that once you know what can happen in the nighttime, you can never un-know it.

But the good, from a stable loving caring family going forward, can far outweigh the bad.

With a NT person, there's also the extremely difficult question of "why did my parents treat me so badly that I couldn't stay with them? why didn't my Dad want me?" when they get older. When the family breaks down it takes a lot of coming to terms with emotionally and mentally.

How a not-very-verbal autistic child, specifically your autistic nephew, will take it is another question. Which is why, in the strongest way, I'd urge you to encourage your parents to find an experienced therapist skilled and trained in both autism and trauma. As others have said, while they are different things, in some cases (particularly with severe trauma) the symptoms can be almost the same, and it takes a great deal of experience to know how to treat, what.

On the good side, it will help a lot that he already knows his grandparents and while this is only an intuition of mine, by now I think that blood-relationship is a subtle but powerful thing and since he's with his grandparents, that too will be on his side. Although as said, that's only an intuition of mine by now.

Advocates are purely to make sure that they have a voice and that it is heard, the advocate is not "on their side".

I have a friend who used to work as an advocate for children through Barnados (so may be worth giving them a call and NSPCC) and her job was so hard. She would have to voice what the kids wanted in meetings or in court, which was often to go home to their abuser, understandable as that is all they know. Her own instinct was to tell them that no, they were better off where they were, but that wasnt her job. Your sisters advocate will be doing the same, the advocates personal views are irrelevant.

Its literally "Ms X believes that the child would be better off with her because........"

Yeah sorry kickpot you'll find this the whole way along. My only advice is not to piss of child's social worker. Play the game so to speak. Don't say you refuse to facilitate contact with parents as they can just as quickly remove your nephew into foster care. Also get every agreement in writing. Email everything so your parents have a paper trail.. social workers have immense loads and shit conditions they'll look our for themselves before the kids.
Just keep pulling everything back into your nephews needs eg
Yes of course it's import his mum is in his life and we will facilitate this at his pace and according to his needs.
Just don't say no to anything untill your parents have legal parental responsibility..not temporary. They need to be legal guardians which is only given in courts. Untill they have that social can remove your nephew from them with zero warning or reasons. Seen it happen numerous times when birth families are difficult for social worker.

If you get Granola iOS it can record phone calls while you have them on an iPhone and transcribe into summaries. You can then email it over to her. Just tell her when the call starts that you’re recording it for your records.

Yeah of course they do because the paper trail will never be in their favour.
What I do is pretend that I'm a busy slightly ditzy person and I let then know that I take notes during phone calls. After the call I summarise the points made, queries I raised, things promised etc and then I send it to the person i had the phone call with.
Hey just for my records I'm summarising what we talked about and decided when you called me at 3pm today. Let me know if any of the details are incorrect.

And I don't know why but I always end emails with something like hope you have a lovely weekend we're taking child A to bla bla. Just letting them know somewhere nice you're going or you've done. Keeps the tone really friendly and nice especially if they share your emails with judges other workers etc.

but if they do this Then your parents have covered themselves. Doesn't even matter if the sw doesn't read it. Point is that they should be.