Mum kept baby hidden in drawer for nearly 3 years !!

[benjaminjamesandgraham]

Even Christmas day she was kept in a drawer - oh how can someone be so cruel
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1dv8ly2o

What I can't get my head round is this. If she gave birth in secret and didn't want the baby, why not take her to a place of safety, a place where she would be found and leave her? There are plenty of places where this is possible.

I expect that this child had disabilities at birth which is why she was hidden, it's hard to understand how no-one knew she was pregnant & if they did , why did they not wonder what had happened to the baby? There's a lot we don't know I think.
What's very clear though is that she massively failed this child by not giving her a normal life.

Well, yes, it is well known the baby was born with a cleft palate. The CPS says:

She has continued to make progress and has been operated on twice to rectify the cleft palate. However, she still requires further surgery.

is integrated into society, not a complete recluse, which makes the above theory a bit less plausible because generally people who think like that have lower levels of education and exposure or come from rural communities.

Do you have any idea how offensive your comment about "rural communities" is? Or indeed about people with lower levels of education.

The tragedy being that Cleft Palates are very easily able to be repaired if only the mother had flagged it to medics. Giving birth alone is no joke either. It's extremely dangerous for infection post partum

This terrible case has reminded me of the charity Smile Train to help children affected by this condition. It is often advertised on the television and to my shame I have not followed up with a donation - that needs to change. Maybe other children can be helped against stigma.

We have this for those affected in the U.K..
The Cleft Lip and Palate Association (CLAPA)

If you look up studies about attitudes to cleft palates the term “rural communities” will come up frequently as a statement of fact.

That does not mean that all rural mothers would have behaved towards her baby being born with a cleft palate as this woman did.

FFS

@IHaveNeverLivedintheCastle I didn't mean rural or low educated communities in the UK, I meant abroad in South Asia or elsewhere. I'm from that region myself hence why I said it.

Were you present at police interview and attend court case?

She has been assessed as fit to attend trial

Plenty of people in prison have MH issues/learning disabilities/personality disorders/Autism/SEN.

They all still have sentences to serve

Yes...glad you said it!

Mumsnet always like to have a man to blame, but even they are struggling in this scenario

No she doesn't?!

They will be the same ones calling for women's prisons to be closed as women don't commit 'proper' crime....just shoplift nappies and hide babies away in drawers

Well a couple of people managed to quibble about the partner's reaction on finding the child.

Why did the other children not live with her do you think? Were they grown up? Or living elsewhere?

You can't imagine the horror of the situation for everyone involved - the child mostly but also their siblings and wider family, the social worker who had to take that child, the medical professionals involved. Horrific!

How justice is 7 years is baffling. Absolutely nothing justifies this behaviour.

Why did the other children not live with her do you think? Were they grown up? Or living elsewhere?

The other children lived with her. That has been mentioned in all the reports.

@IHaveNeverLivedintheCastle thanks. I think I've misunderstood what was said in the report -

The mother wiped away tears as she described how her other children, who she was said to have looked after well, no longer lived with her.

I realise now it means they don't live with her following the child in the drawer being discovered.

Those poor poor children - all of them.

This is one of those cases where you’re shocked and saddened at the same time. Poor children, all of them including the youngest.

She didn't hide the baby because it had a cleft lip. She didn't tell anyone about the pregnancy and didn't have any prenatal care so she wouldn't have known in advance that the baby had a cleft lip.

This is just my two cents but obviously I could be way off the mark. I just think this behaviour of singling out a child to neglect is very odd, especially when the mum seemed to fit into society in other ways and didn't display any overt MH issues. Which makes me think it was the cleft she couldn't accept

She’d already taken against the baby when she ‘didn’t know’ she was pregnant. I bet she did know but was either in denial or knew too late to have an abortion. She said the baby “wasn’t part of the family” - I doubt this was because of the cleft. IMO, it’s more likely because she was unplanned and/or had a different father, and the mother felt anger and detachment towards her.

Perhaps the cleft helped with that detachment but I doubt it was the root cause.

This woman didn’t reject, abuse and neglect her child due to a cleft palate. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if you read the list of deformities she inflicted on the child due to her extreme abuse and neglect, you’d see that.

itis very hard to comprehend evil. Searching for a reason, will never work, because no one decent will be able to fathom how anyone could be so utterly cruel to a helpless child. Especially their own.

the judge called her wicked after hearing all the evidence. Evil is maybe the better word. Although it is semantics and amounts to the same thing,

Do we know how old mum was? Said on news baby was hidden from siblings.. was that her siblings or the babies siblings? How did it not cry? There’s so many questions!!

I thought she didn't realise she was pregnant until shortly before the birth. Once the baby was born, her excuse (once her criminal neglect was discovered, that is) was she didn't want the abusive ex to know she had had a baby. Also, once the baby was born she was very aware of the cleft palate.

I can't get my head around what her long-term plan was, as the child grew older and no longer fit the drawer at all; probably just leave her for a longer period of time than that 36 hours without food or water or a nappy change or any contact with another semi-human that Christmas, and hope the problem would be gone when she got back. I wish she'd left the poor baby at a church or fire station.

She not it. And she didn’t cry talk, move, walk due to the severe neglect and abuse she had endured her whole life.

The baby’s siblings - ie the woman’s other children.The other children were apparently treated well whereas their sister spent all her time shut in a drawer. The other children and partner were unaware of her existence.