Mother charged with neglect

[Knackeredboot]

This article has been posted on Facebook and has attracted a lot of angry comments about it from people saying the mother should be steriliser and that she's evil.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c864g0evz9jo

The crime was neglect of a baby that resulted in its death from a mother that had failed to notice that her baby hadn't woken in the night for her usual feeds due to the mothers level of intoxication.

There's no indication that the baby would usually have to be woken for feeds, just that it was the babys usual routine.

The mother was awake but drunk. But had she been asleep then would that have been considered neglect too? She checked on the baby from a distance but did not try to stir. Again, I wouldn't go into my 5mo's room regularly in the night for a close up check on them as I would be asleep also.

It says that the level of intoxication was 2.5times the driving limit which is irrelevant as she wasnt driving.

Am i missing something here? I feel like the commenters are being incredibly hard on her based on the little detail in the article. Although I'm not a big drinker I know loads of couples that get smashed on the weekend while at home with the kids.

Amen to that 🙏

Let’s pile on, let’s blame her and for that matter, the father - where was he?! At work i come across some truly vile, selfish parents and it sickens me to read a parent driving that much and not even checking on their baby.

We have to remember that there will be a lot of details about this case that we are not aware of, but the jury was.

I don't agree. Being intoxicated to the point of being unable to meet a child's needs applies whether it's wine or vodka. If she went out for tapas she would literally have been leaving her child alone.

However, I agree the public may react differently to different circumstances. But they would still all be neglect.

@ForgetMeNotRose that's my point, I think they're all child neglect, but the reactions from the public and CJS would be different.

I don't think the prosecution wouldn't have happened though, just that some people might react differently the news story.

Was it just coincidence that when Ann Diamond's baby boy died because of SIDS and she made it her mission to make the risks public knowledge, the numbers fell?
SIDS happened before vaccines, in populations that don't have access to vaccines, as does Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.

Guidance is not the law

It sounds like the prosecution is due to her being too intoxicated to adequately care for her child, they're not saying she caused the baby's death.

@ForgetMeNotRose (sorry you cannot quote a quote on the app!) I am going to respectfully disagree, in my opinion, a parent who got very drunk on wine at a dinner party and their baby died of SIDs would not be asked to use a breathalyser, and are unlikely to ever be though of as a 'suspect'. The McCann's (rightly or wrongly) were never prosecuted.

Granted, there were probably some more red flags in this case that led police/SS to be suspicious, but those 'flags' could be present in any other case that are wilfully ignored.

Again, I am not saying this woman is innocent, far from it, I'm just pointing out what I think is a discrepancy in the way people are treated by the CJS, media and the public.

Talk us through your "research". How many hours of YouTube videos did it involve?

And a lot of reading the site formally known as Twitter, I imagine.

She was the one looking after the baby
Even if the father was the worse father in the world who didn't give a damn about the baby ( and we have no evidence of that) it doesn't absolve her of of failing to meet her child's basic needs which sadly lead to the baby dying
I know some posters like to blame men for everything but women are also responsible for their own actions.

Have you ever gone for a wander around old churchyards and read the gravestones? The evidence in favour of childhood vaccinations is carved into those old stones.

There is a difference between having a few drinks (which many parents do) and being so wasted that you don’t care for your children. Leaving a baby on a sofa alone for 14 hours is neglect. Since the SIDS rate is much higher when parents smoke I think that should be a crime too though it currently isn’t.

I think it depends. It could be that the mum was visibly intoxicated or told them she had been drinking. I'm assuming they don't randomly breathalise people? But I don't know.

I have no idea why McCanns weren't prosecuted for neglect for leaving their children unattended. Could that be because they were in another country at the time? Not sure how that works.

@ForgetMeNotRose in my opinion, if mum was visible intoxicated or hungover and said she had admitted to having a few wines the night before with guests she would unlikely be tested, if she was middle class, that is just my opinion though.

I have literally just finished a criminology degree and I am perhaps reaching in this case because I have all that fresh in my mind, and there are many proven instances of the CJS being much quicker to 'criminalise' one group of people over another. At risk of derailing the whole thread I just wanted to explain where I was coming from and how the statistics show a clear bias of over criminalisation of one group of people, while others engage in the same criminal/harmful behaviour but are significantly less likely to be criminalised from the off. That is certainly influencing my judgement here and I could absolutely be wrong in this case.

Why would anyone get SO smashed whilst looking after kids let alone a 5 month old baby!!! It says in the article she put the baby to sleep on a sofa in another room
Baby could have rolled off, rolled over and suffocated which is probably what happened
Mom didnt know mom was too busy getting shitfaced
Had the baby been placed to sleep in a safe environment the risk of danger would be alot lower

But being on an unsafe sleep surface can significantly increase the chance of SIDS or suffocation so no you can’t say for sure that baby would’ve died. She didn’t check for well over 12 hours. You shouldn’t be that drunk that you don’t wake to check the child. Where the hell was the older child all that time??
are you her? You’re weirdly making excuses. Someone posted the CPS report did you read that?

no doubt someone is gonna play the it ok the kid was with the mother who has mh issues no harm done card as per

I agree.
And I am not sure why theres been such an emphasis on SIDS on this thread. The BBC article talks about the mother not realising the ‘child’s deterioration’. That doesn’t make me think SIDS but rather some breathing issues, a fever, whatever. Something that is NOT instantaneous.

Because I agree with the OP that those single events in themselves are not that unusual in many families.
From drinking, not waking up a child, not having the child in the same room than you all the time. None of it presented like this is outrageous.

So yay, probably other stuff have been going on there.

Wondering what it means for her older child too…. 😢😢

At 5 months they can roll off the sofa (my DS was rolling across the floor at that age)

That number of hours without checking? Neglectful

And that behaviour wasn't normal in my world. A glass of wine is one thing. Totally smashed another

I don't think stone cold abstinence is required. I'm a single parent and I will sometimes have a glass of wine with a friend after dinner - I wouldn't drive after a glass of wine because I'm a lightweight but I'd be fully capable of summoning a taxi (or ambulance) should the need arise, which is vanishingly rare.

I don't think stories like this need to make us afraid of drinking a glass of wine and I don't like when people get scared - surely it's obvious that getting smashed is a totally different order of magnitude and the vast majority of parents know where to draw the line.

It’s not though - would you have got yourself into such a drunken state you wouldn’t be able to look after your own tiny baby?

She deserves her punishment.

This makes me so angry

The polio vaccine came into use when I was a child. My mother couldn't get me to the clinic fast enough to get it (I was at school with a kid who wore a calliper)

Diphtheria and typhoid were killers

I suffered measles, German measles and mumps

My sister had sight problems after measles

I had to have a BCG as a baby because my dad had TB

Parents today don't know how lucky they are that their children don't have to suffer these awful illnesses and for an alleged medical professional to talk against them is criminal in my view. I hope you're not still practising

Research childhood deaths and injuries then and now.