How is this not murder?(upsetting)

[OhToBeASeahorse]

A mother has appeared in court today charged with the manslaughter of her toddler.

She left her, alone, for 6 days.

How can this not be murder? I don't understand.

This story has got to me - the absolute cruelty of her as a 'mother'. And the social media culture of posting pictures of her looking like a loving mother, where clearly she must have been anything but.

If you read that DM link .... the mother rang 999 apparently when she found her in the flat ... the YMCA rang the police a few days later. Weird. Surely the hospital/police etc would have rung the police if the toddler had been left alone for six days and they turned up.

@BigSandyBalls2015

Indeed. I think there is more to it all, which by no means means I am excusing the mother or think her in anyway a blameless victim.

Regardless of SS involvement or not, supported accommodation of vulnerable people which includes safeguarding with a child on the premises must mean that some sort of monitoring is in place, and that the monitors would have been involved from the get go when the tragedy unfolded.

Murder is an intention to kill or cause GBH.
If she no intention to cause either it’s not murder.
Murder carries a mandatory life sentence where as manslaughter carries a maximum life sentence.
Whatever she has been charged with I hope she gets a sentence that reflects the crime

How unbearably sad. That poor baby must have cried and cried for someone to come. It’s just too awful to think about.

I don’t understand how she wasn’t under the care of a social worker. Born to a young mother who was clearly vulnerable and unstable - it’s insane that a closer eye wasn’t being kept on her.

@ZoeCM

I think some people have watched too many films, to be honest. I doubt she was coerced into abandoning her baby by human traffickers who allowed her to mix freely with the other party-goers, yet also magically prevented her from using a phone or begging someone to go home to feed her baby for her.

The most mundane explanation is usually the correct one. I suspect that, like many teenage mums, she resented being stuck at home with a baby while other girls her age were out socialising. So she left the baby alone to go out partying without bothering to arrange a babysitter. She had fun and didn't want to go home - so she just thought "sod the baby" and didn't.

Yes, it may be a complex case of human trafficking and hypnosis. But it's much likelier to be a very sad case of someone having a baby before they're mature and selfless enough to care for it.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a year older, with a preschooler and have felt that resentment, though I'd never harm my child as a result

Don't know why some people find it so hard to comprehend that this may be the case.

@Stratfordplace

All the posters who profess the need to understand the actions of a mum who leaves her 20 month old baby alone for 6 days, a mum who has left her to starve to death, so that lessons can be learned.

I’m sorry but I’m sick of excuses being used for this abuse and neglect that leads to the death of these poor unfortunate babies. There have been many cases over the years and always the same “lessons will be learned”, etc., studies could have been done over and over. We even hear that if no one pleads guilty it’s impossible to prove who is responsible for the abuse. In criminal law there is Conspiracy but no such laws protect these children.

I don’t care about “pitch fork” jibes and other insults. I think the only way these parents will stop abusing their children is if they know for certain they would not leave prison for many years, until their youth is well and truly gone. At the moment they don’t fear the system.

I want the children protected from these parents and I don’t care what people with vested interests say.

I agree with you, absolutely, having been that child and lucky enough to survive. The pity and "understanding" for the mother is sickening.

@thedancingbear as I pointed out earlier in the thread, it's quite possible for some of us to have "more than two braincells to rub together" and also recognise that this is an abhorrent crime from a monster and that, no matter how your childhood was, it is ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE for leaving a baby girl alone to die of starvation and dehaydtation, terrified. If you do not understand how there is nothing jn the world that could ever make this "understandable" then I think your moral compass is scewed. And I say this as someone who endured an horrific childhood. NOTHING explains it, NOTHING makes it understandable. It is pure evil.

@Parkermumma07

Murder is an intention to kill or cause GBH. If she no intention to cause either it’s not murder. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence where as manslaughter carries a maximum life sentence. Whatever she has been charged with I hope she gets a sentence that reflects the crime

An adult human can survive 3 days with no water. A baby, maybe 1-2. She left the child for SIX days. The outcome was a certainty and therefore absolutely intentional. Unless she had a level of intellectual debelopment below that of the average 5 year old who knows this. In which case I doubt she would have been allowed to look after her child alone.

All of these excuses made for her are absolutely appalling. Please consider what that child went through, the terror of being left and her mummy never coming back and dying alone and not understanding any of it.

The mens rea for murder is malice aforethought @OhToBeASeahorse.. So can see how this would fall short.

Even my just turned 7 year old knows that humans can survive 3 days without water as we’ve spoken about it in the past (not about this case of course) he learnt it at school. So of course she knew what would happen. Sickening how many people have fallen over themselves to try to defend her

[quote MistressoftheDarkSide]@BigSandyBalls2015

Indeed. I think there is more to it all, which by no means means I am excusing the mother or think her in anyway a blameless victim.

Regardless of SS involvement or not, supported accommodation of vulnerable people which includes safeguarding with a child on the premises must mean that some sort of monitoring is in place, and that the monitors would have been involved from the get go when the tragedy unfolded.[/quote]
I agree. I don't understand how a baby can be left alone in a supposed supported accommodation unit for 6 days. I agree there's more to this. I'm not excusing the mother. What she did can't be excused. I can't even imagine how anyone could do what she did. That doesn't mean social services don't also bear some responsibility for what happened. They surely have a duty of care to a baby in one of their mother and baby units? Why wasn't there better monitoring? I've been in supported accommodation (a refuge) and everyone, adult and child, was checked in with regularly. There's no way staff would've left it 6 days especially with a very young child.

It wasn't a mother and baby unit.

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but has anyone watched her video on youtube? Made after the baby died? Shes talking as if shes some wannabe influencer, seems confident and happy and articulate. I know it means nothing but I had been kidding myself that maybe she had some kind of mental incapacity that made her do what she did, but it appears not what the fuck happened??

@millenialblush I haven’t watched the video of the mother but I am watching the video of the mothers sister. I feel for the girls family.

@WaterBottle123

Incredibly sad. However can't help thinking the write up would have been different if she was white and might have referred to mental health issues etc.

The way it has been reported is due to her being black. She obviously had issues that we don't fully know about- away from her family since the age of 14, in a unit, who knows how she got impregnated. But the white lady who actually deliberately killed her SN child (which I made a thread about, as I felt she was massively failed by services and the deadbeat dad) had a completely different reporting in the media. I accept there are differences in the mums' situations, but one gets reporting about services that failed and led to the child's demise and the other gets her partying reported, barely a mention of what her situation was. That is because she is black in my opinion.

Her own video is posted on her channel veeldn diaries - utterly weird

^The way it has been reported is due to her being black.
She obviously had issues that we don't fully know about- away from her family since the age of 14, in a unit, who knows how she got impregnated.
But the white lady who actually deliberately killed her SN child (which I made a thread about, as I felt she was massively failed by services and the deadbeat dad) had a completely different reporting in the media. I accept there are differences in the mums' situations, but one gets reporting about services that failed and led to the child's demise and the other gets her partying reported, barely a mention of what her situation was.
That is because she is black in my opinion.^

I do think it is true that, had this been an older, middle class white woman (involving a series of weddings or a business trip), then the press, and various MN posters, would be bending over backwards to find some kind of mental health causation, some kind of male coercion - anything to explain the scenario other than she was simply a 'monster'.

But when it's an 18-year old black woman, certain posters say that her actions must simply be the result of 'pure evil', and no other analysis is necessary or possible.

Mumsnet remains really instructive, as always.

@Mookie81

I think there is definitely a grain of truth in that, sadly.

Again, not making excuses, but what we're being told by the media is a snapshot only, and open to manipulation and interpretation.

Still bugged by the apparent lack of support in the supported accommodation tbh.

In answer to the "how could she party knowing her baby was dying" I can only speculate - I wonder if she did think that someone was going to babysit and it went horribly wrong, and for some reason, like lack of concrete evidence of the arrangement, it's way too weak to be remotely considered a defence, or, like some people who do terrible things, well documented, she has actively blocked it out because guilt and shame can do that.

She did call 999. Why didn't she, if she had the wherewithal and connections to party in various locations around the country, just go to ground? She must have had some inkling that exposing herself like that would end this way, with all the surveillance and social media "proof" being bandied about? Or maybe she is cold and calculated and felt that she'd be out in the cold in her community and hounded down once people knew what had happened?

Again, not making excuses, just trying to fathom how this has been allowed to happen, because if multiple agencies were involved with her, and she was in "supported" living accommodation, even without a SW or a Care Plan in place, and even if she had been an exemplary mother up to this point, the whole situation is an utter tragedy. And yes, I can't bear to imagine how it was for that poor baby.

Diminished responsibility can be a partial defence to murder, I'd think someone who has been away from home since 14 , is living in a mother and baby unit and had a child on a child protection plan may well have underlying trauma and mental health issues.
I used to work in a related field and it is awful that no one in that unit realised that child was alone. The point of them is that the mothers are not usually capable of caring for the child alone, so they monitor and support to give the mother parenting skills and the best chance of keeping the child with them. I work still in the public sector so very much know about under resourcing but this and the lack of an allocated social worker is terrible.

Apparently they were not housed in a mother and baby unit where there is support and monitoring. There was no involvement just someone in site 24/7. I don’t know how that would work.

The woman who killed her SEN child had no support I believe and smothered her child. Terrible and tragic for both but I don’t think it is comparable to leaving a baby alone for 6 days, and the sheer callousness of partying while the baby perished.

Both cases are complex and yet completely different and nothing to do with whether the mother is black or not.

I know someone who fosters babies. The mothers are incompetent (proper use of word) most often due to learning disabilities.

The young woman seemed quite competent: she boarded a train to London, she dressed very well, she was buying/selling concert tickets on the day the child died and entering beauty contests afterwards.

This strikes me as someone who has a moral vacuum. Whether this is an excuse or a mental health condition providing one i don’t know.

From that video on YouTube she is articulate appears to be confident and self assured.

Surely if the poor baby died before she left to go partying it would be pretty obvious to the ambulance and hospital staff etc that she had been dead a while.

Absolutely horrific, that poor little girl

Unless it gets spelled out what level of support was provided and how it was supposed to work, we are missing vital information IMO.

@MistressoftheDarkSide

Unless it gets spelled out what level of support was provided and how it was supposed to work, we are missing vital information IMO.

We don't need the vital information as members of the public. That's the job of the justice system and then the people who will carry out the serious case review.