Nine years for starving a baby to death

[PropertyFlipper]

I’m struggling to see the justice here. This sorry specimen will be out in five years no doubt. Devastating.
Teen mother, 19, bursts into tears as she is jailed for nine years

Would also be interested to know why the father wasn’t on trial for abandoning the child…

He wasn't legally responsible for her and there's no report of who the father even is. He may not know she existed.

There are some key failures here - if she had left the child 11 times before i cannot understand how she was in supported housing and this happened.

I often feel the public are too hard on professionals as it can be virtually impossible to correctly predict which child needs removing and get it right every single time.

But in this case.....i think there are some people who need to have some answers.

The standard should be a life for a life.

@hehehhehe

No one - mother or father - need be involved with a child theyve created if they dont want to

I disagree. Men shouldn't get to choose no involvement if their child is with the mother. If this child's father had stepped forward and taken responsibility this single mother might have managed better and a tragedy averted.

It's not as easy as you think to have a child taken into care either. Social services will always look to "support" the mother parent to keep the child with them as a first option.

The standard should be a life for a life

Yes, you definitely retain the moral high ground by insisting it's wrong to kill people, and punishing transgressors... by killing them.

I can't even fathom the thought of what would have gone through the mind of that poor child when they realised they were alone and mum was gone, what they would have done in those 6 days alone :( I feel so utterly heartbroken to think of any child in that situation.
Makes me want to just hold my daughter so tight.

A sad story, I’m thinking there was a huge failure by social services, she had left her child several times leading up to her death and no one did anything? They were housed in a flat for women at risk by social services yet no one was keeping an eye on the child the months leading up to her death? She obviously wasn’t capable of looking after a child, this child was put through hell leading up to her death.

I’m not sure if the sentence is too short as we don’t know the mothers mental health or her background (only what we are told in the media) but of course what she did to the child was disgusting and horrific but I would like to know why social services didn’t remove this child when it was clear she wasn’t a capable parent.

If the mother was in care the question should then be what did she learn in care? Was she abandoned for days or left without food.
It looks like she reached a certain and was sent out into the world with little idea of how to handle life

It's such an awful case and it's absolutely nightmarish to think about what that poor baby suffered.

It sounds like there were capacity issues on the part of the mother. According to the news reports, she broke down on returning and finding the baby unresponsive. That doesn't sound like someone who didn't care at all but like someone without the capacity to properly link cause and effect and foresee what would happen to the baby if left for days.

Definite failures by social services, it says her daughter didn't even have a social worker and slipped through the net :(
Harrowing reading.

@hehehhehe

No one - mother or father - need be involved with a child theyve created if they dont want to

I disagree. Men shouldn't get to choose no involvement if their child is with the mother. If this child's father had stepped forward and taken responsibility this single mother might have managed better and a tragedy averted.

You can disagree all you want but did the father even know he had a child,? I have read countless threads on here where mothers to be are told not to put the father on the birth certificate so i wont have any rights

What does this comment from Verphy Kudi's Father mean?

Her dad Muba Kudi said his 'heart is so broken' after the death of his granddaughter.

He told the Daily Mail: "My heart is so broken. My daughter was missing. She had been missing since the age of 14."

This case is tragic for everyone involved.
I suspect the biological father was unaware of the child's existence. My heart weeps.

@Upamountain43

There are some key failures here - if she had left the child 11 times before i cannot understand how she was in supported housing and this happened.

I often feel the public are too hard on professionals as it can be virtually impossible to correctly predict which child needs removing and get it right every single time.

But in this case.....i think there are some people who need to have some answers.

This!

@TonkinLenkicks

I cannot imagine the torture that child went through. It’s horrendous.

In one of the articles it said 1/4 of social worker posts were vacant. How the hell can social workers do their jobs if there’s so many vacancies?

This isn't true. I was a social worker in Brighton when this happened. Obviously I couldn't comment on this case even if I knew anything (records get locked as soon as anything like this happens) but I assure you there were nothing like that number of vacancies. The most likely situation (and this is hypothetical, not specific) is that she had done just about enough to get social services to close the case then started seriously neglecting her more while there was no oversight. The supported accommodation she was in is very low support. Please remember social workers don't have crystal balls and people who seriously hurt their kids can and do do so with very little context or warning at all.

This case is a prime example of how dangerous the underfunding of social and care services is. It's not just not helping vulnerable children it's endangering, and in this case costing them, their lives.

There's no way it should have gone unnoticed that she left without the child and didn't return for days. "supported" living should have been supervised living and the investigation into why it wasn't is, imo, likely to be pretty damning.

@Soubriquet

I just wonder how…naive (?) she must have been to think fucking off for 6 days to get pissed, meant that her child would starve and die.

I mean, did she think the toddler would grab herself a sand which whilst mum wasn’t there?

I also wonder how neighbours didn’t hear a young child crying because she must have been scared, hungry, and poorly.

This person was a care leaver themselves. They had also suffered horrendous abuse - which is how she'd become pregnant.

From the age of 14, this mother was going missing from school and was a victim.of sexual exploitation. She had her daughter at 16 but would have been pregnant at 15 (Asiah was 20 months old when she died as her mother was out celebrating her 18th birthday).

The idea that they'd have the slightest inkling of what a normal parent does is ridiculous.

The neighbours were others in similar situations. It was a supported living establishment for young mothers.

This is an all-round tragic case. The sentencing remarks havent been published yet but to my mind 9 years sounds proportionate in the circumstances.

The father was likely another teen who possibly didn't even know he was a father and whilst it's really shit to ignore and not get involved with your child, it's a big bit different from knowingly leaving them to starve on their own.

If a message exists where she has told him this and he didn't intervene then yes, he is as guilty but otherwise the blame doesn't sit with him.

I suspect the biological father was unaware of the child's existence. My heart weeps.

Odds are the biological father was her rapist.

It is an awful case, and I agree 9 years doesn't seem long enough - that child really suffered. The mother's background may have been a consideration, as well as her guilty plea, what needs to be considered going forward is why the child was not considered to be at risk and why they were not on the radar of Social Services. No winners here.

The staggering thing about this one is that the 11 occasions she left the wee one alone were all in a two month period before her death.

If people knew this was happening a lot in a short space of time how was it not picked up on? Who stepped in on those occasions and how was it discovered?

There's always been something really odd about this case.

@CandlesBlanketsandTea

It's almost unbelievable that this happened. I'm surprised none of her neighbours heard the baby crying. This is truly horrendous and it appears it wasn't the first time. God that poor baby.

I think the worst thing I read about this case is that the baby had learnt not to cry when in need or distress, as no one came to her aid. So even though she possibly had the means to attract attention, she had learnt not to bother. It is utterly heartbreaking

@LocalHobo

What does this comment from Verphy Kudi's Father mean?

Her dad Muba Kudi said his 'heart is so broken' after the death of his granddaughter.

He told the Daily Mail: "My heart is so broken. My daughter was missing. She had been missing since the age of 14."

This case is tragic for everyone involved.
I suspect the biological father was unaware of the child's existence. My heart weeps.

It either mean she ran away at 14 or that when she was 14 she changed so much she wasn't who she was befote. (And presumably the father felt could do nothing to prevent her behaviour.,)

Thats not an excuse @Lockheart, as she had somehow got her daughter to 20 months without previously starving her to death so she must have had some idea that her daughter needed feeding more than once a week.

Do you think she thought it would be ok? I'm incredibly confused at the thought process

It’s a truly shocking and horrifying case. You would have to think she must not have the mental capacity of an adult. What did she think she was going to come back to? I suspect she was very seriously abused herself.