AIBU to be horrified by this story of child abandonment?

[Bullseyebutnotthenineties]

Has anyone seen this story? Sorry, struggling to link it.
A french mother and stepfather in Portugal abandoned their/her 3 year old and 5 year old in the woods.
Apparently they blindfolded them and told them they were playing a treasure hunt game and to wait, then take the blindfold off when they’d hidden the toy/prize.
They then left them there 😢
The boys were found on the side of the road by a lovely Portuguese man, who cried during his interview when talking about the boys. They were crying for their real dad apparently
The real dad, resident in France, had informed the authorities that the boys had been kidnapped by the mother (who has custody of them) and taken out of the country. She also left her other 16 year old son at home in France.
The couple were apparently found two hours away sitting on a terrace having a coffee and pastry.
The boys had little backpacks on with a bottle of water, change of clothes, sandwich and piece of fruit in.

There are no words, those poor poor boys
What on earth could make a mother do this?

Yes this is true, really hope so 🙏

Can you do that?

Whenever I’ve read threads on here about parents unable to cope with their kids, & posters have suggested something similar, other posters have said you can’t do that.

I’ve no idea what parents who want to give up their kids would do?

Yes this. There’s nothing worse than abuse or abandonment when they are developing secure attachments.

I really don’t know tbh, but there must be someone to go to surely 🤔

This needs to be patented, printed, mounted on some good quality card, framed and sold.

I’d hope so if the alternative is doing something like this to them?

It’s awful they should be back the death penalty for people like this

Totally incomprehensible. I really hope the kids have a safe and loving family - either with dad or adoptive.

There has to be a mental health aspect to it, even if it's that the mother was under extreme compulsion from the partner. People just don't do things like this when they are rational.

I agree. Adults find it convenient to day this but it is rarely if ever rhe case. I wonder if they meant to go back in a few days once the worst had happened. Just appalling.

Brilliant post. And it reminded me of this article I read recently in the telegraph. I hope I can paste an extract below.

“Consultant psychiatrist and forensic psychotherapist Dr Carine Minne - who has worked at Broadmoor for over 30 years …

Not one of the thousands of patients she has encountered over the years, she tells me, had “not suffered something awful in utero, in babyhood, toddlerhood or in those latency years pre-puberty”. “Now, that doesn’t condone. But it gives you an understanding,” she says. “If I could do my career again, I would focus on minus nine months in utero to age three years. Because that’s when we can really do our main prevention.”

i’m not trying to draw a line between these children and patients/prisoners in Broadmoor. The parallel is simply the fact that early trauma is very significant. Children are not resilient.

Yes, "children are resilient" is something adults tell themselves. Children put up with things because they have to - they have very little power to protect themselves. These kids are going to have to live for the rest of their lives with the fact that their own mother despised them enough to do this to them.

I agree with you about it.being attempted murder, and abandonment, and I genuinely think that they should get a minimum sentence of 30 years each, in a high category jail in France or Portugal, depending on the boys nationality. If France still had the Guillotine I think that that would not be too harsh a punishment.

Crimes against children are the only times when I wish we still had the death penalty, both as a punishment, and as a massive deterrent.
Obviously, it should only be used when there is no doubt at all about someone's guilt.

Exactly. The report I read said they will struggle with feelings of abandonment for the rest of their lives. Those poor, sweet boys. I hope that bloody woman and her disgusting boyfriend go to prison for a very long time. Such an upsetting story.

Thank you! Well said! I’m sick of the kids are resilient like being trotted out when there’s so many severely damaged adults walking around due to their childhood

Agree with the other pps that are calling out the BS in the “kids are resilient” speel.
So glad more people are waking up this.

Acting irrationally doesn’t mean it’s a mental health thing, you get men and women doing daft or irrational things in the name of love all the time including sending their savings to the person half their age in Kenya/Thailand/an oil rig who they have never met.

It is more likely the very common scenario of a selfish parent putting their new partner ahead of their children and wanting a “fresh start” where they don’t exist . They often don’t want to give their child up to social services because they fear the shame of telling their family and friends they gave their kids up. So I guess they would rather spin a lie about kids being kidnapped or kids running off and coming to harm.

This story is so fucked up. Those poor children. I've thought about this a lot since I've been reading about it. My thoughts:

The first thing of note for me was, if they were abandoning the children to die, why give them backpacks with (admittedly very little) supplies? Why bother? My partner said it could be in case they were found, and the mother and SF would say the kids were lost.

But that story wouldn't wash, cos if your kids were lost you'd report that? Immediately!

So did they want them to actually die? What on earth did they THINK was going to happen leaving them there?

The more I read and think about it, I wonder if it's a religious nutjob type scenario.

The mother and SF told the kids that the "game" was to "drive away the devil".

Did they think the devil was in the children, and was this some kind of nonsensical test?? Like, if the kids made it out alive, the devil wasn't in them/was no longer in them?

Is that why they were just nonchalantly drinking coffee and eating pastries when apprehended?

Is it a bit like "Sins of Our Mother" on Netflix, where Lori Daybell met a religious nut and ended up killing her kids cos of them being "dark" beings.

I really don't know, but this one definitely doesn't seem to follow any kind of typical pattern for these kind of cases.

I only hope those children thrive in life, get the help they need, and the mother and SF get the fucking book thrown at them.

Pure evil

Maybe she's just an immature arsehole
Or incredibly cruel

The mother’s partner (I can’t bear to say ‘stepfather’) is an ex police officer who served time in prison for the harassment and serious domestic abuse of the mother of his own daughter, several years ago. He lost all parental authority and all custody rights. He wrote a book about it, called Renaissance. He is also indeed a conspiracy theorist.

Yes I think there could be some crazy, religious/conspiracy element.
Do the police/media generally release more details of what they say/why they did it?
Who are the children with now if the real dad and grandma have flown over?
All so troubling

I think they wanted them to be found but not identified, hence why the drive so far away to dump them and the back pack. However they were ok with them dying too, they never intended to see them again.

its utterly horrific.

I assume a lot will be kept out of the papers as the kids names are out there now.

hopefully whatever happens to them next they will be protected and given some form of anonymity. We don’t need to know the details really.

the internet is a terrible thing for children who are victims of crimes. I read the article about the Swiss man who murdered his wife and the amount of detail was sickening and I feel so sad for her kids who will no doubt read it when older

But surely they would know if the kids were found they would be identified? My son knew his address and my phone number at that age and both my kids knew their full names

i suspect they were expecting the kids to get lost in the woods and then were going to claim the kids were lost/kidnapped at some point. Maybe they wanted to make money out of it. Who knows.

regardless, she doesn’t deserve to be their mother anymore

I'm pleased you call it nonsense especially as it wasn't me that said it.

My earlier point was that I quite often feel uneasy with how some things are reported (presumably to imply a non existent fact) and at first sight this particular case could well fit the mould of deliberate press distortion.

If, let me suggest, the mother had a gun held to her head to force her to leave the children, that's a whole different scenario to wilfully abandoning small children to whatever fate awaited them.

As I said, so often with the Press, it's what is not being said that makes me hesitate before assuming what is being reported is the unvarnished truth.