Child abuse by couple - treatment of woman in the case disturning

[Alternativefacts]

metro.co.uk/2018/08/10/girl-raped-at-least-16-times-by-her-own-dad-can-never-be-adopted-7824538/
This really upset me. Awful case, mother as well as father involved, but then you read that .....

The male also controlled his wife’s mental health medication and contact with doctors, cut her off from her family, and would not allow her to go shopping. The couple met in a pub in England when the woman was aged just 16 and within months she was pregnant. The court was told she had in effect been sexually groomed by her husband, who had spotted and exploited her vulnerabilities.
Robin Rouch, prosecuting, had previously told the court that the family did not socialise with neighbours, the daughter was home-schooled, the garden gate was kept padlocked, and curtains at the windows closed.
Judge Geraint Walters said the husband had ‘psychopathic tendencies’ and a ‘devious, wicked and flawed personality’ that combined with his wife’s flawed personality and vulnerabilities was the ‘chemistry’ that allowed the abuse of the little girl to happen.
The woman was the one to go to the police and tell them .

The sentences? Min 12 years for the man on a life sentence, 10 years sentences for the woman .

I don't mean to over - criticise the OP - although I disagree with her point, it's all a learning curve. Hopefully she hasn't been frightened off and has had a chance to think about alternative viewpoints and why people hold them

Home education is not the problem. In every case I've heard about where home education was part of the scenario, there were opportunities from health visitors and GPs that weren't taken up. In the most oft-mentioned example of this argument, the home educated children were fostered and actually under the care of a social worker. School is not for spotting abuse. Great if it happens but it's not what teachers are there for, it frequently doesn't happen that way and it's dangerous to assume it will happen. Also dangerous to assume that parents who don't want to partake of the lamentable education system on offer in this country are under suspicion.

The woman mentioned in the OP needs to be off the streets. And she is. What's the problem.

Well the child’s mother had was 16. Three years older than my daughter. Virtually a child. He was thirty years older and he groomed and then controlled and dominated her, so yes, I I do feel sorry for her and that her sentence is unduly harsh.

I feel so sad for her predicament but she did make choices that could make her a danger to other children. That makes her dangerous.

Some fair points posted and I didn’t fully say what I meant, , Of course it is the daughter who our thoughts should be with and of course women should take responsibility for their actions.But .what degree of control did a pregnant 16 year old have in that situation with a much older controlling man, and what abuse did she also suffer as well as her daughter? No idea, having only read a newspaper article obviously but quite likely some significant abuse of her also. The two sentences seemed similar in length which does not feel proportionate although obviously hard to judge from a newspaper article. Hope that clarifies where I am coming from.

Alternativefacts - they are not similar lengths you are looking at the 10 year (max sentence) and 12 year (min sentence) terms and comparing them. In sentencing terms they are very different.

As I said originally the sentences are proportionate in my opinion

I think the sad fact is that most people who commit appalling crimes have had traumatic events in their past/ abusive upbringings/ been in abusive situations/ mental health problems. Prisons are full of such people. We don't know the man's past. He probably didn't come from a loving, secure and supportive home.

But as PP have said, people still need to be held accountable for the crimes they commit against others. Especially such an awful one as this.

I agree op. I think it can be difficult for people who have no experience of what abuse, violence or coercive control, or all three, do to someone, to understand the concept of no choices left. She was so young. Where were her family in this ?

This mother sexually abused her own daughter. That makes her a danger to children. We cannot justify this, no matter how awful the abuse towards her is. That's why social services remove children from women who stay with abusive men - as they demonstrate that they are unable to protect their children.
We must have some lines in the sand and this is one of them. Those who sexually abuse their own children should be in prison.

I do agree that she must be so damaged now that she could be a danger to children in future. Yes. But I think there should be some sympathy and understanding towards her as another abused child.

I don't give a fuck about the abuse that sexual offenders have suffered themselves, quite frankly.

Once a person has reached adulthood, their needs become secondary to those of their victims or potential victims.

Of course many of us care about the 16 year old her, but that's neither here nor there now. And many or us are working to safeguard children right now so that they are protected from the fate of this child victim and the victim-perpetrators

heartsease

I don't agree with you. A child attending school daily can be observed in a way that is never possible for a child who is out of school but has SS or GP visits. If abusing parents want to hide their child from others, they can get a leg-up by home educating

Of Course Not all Home educators are like that, and I absolutely understand parents' reasons for withdrawing from education in some circumstances. But I can be exploited

it can be exploited.

transplants
I realise it can be exploited, yes. But a lot of the thinking around this issue doesn't stand up. But yes at the end of the day it can.

I hope the daughter gets the intensive care and therapy she needs. Her whole lifetime has been spent in a world utterly reversed from what is normal behaviour. Everything about normal life and human interactions is going to have to be taught from scratch.

This case made me wonder what happened to the children of Fred and Rosemary West and whether it was possible to break the cycle of abuse and deviancy. Google brought up horrific results which I'm not going to post. It was clear that abusive and shockingly aberrant behaviour was the simply the norm in Fred and Rose's families long before they met , and most likely had been the norm for generations. Their younger children have no visibility but one of their older sons has convictions for child sex offences and Rose's nephew was jailed in 2017 for 18 years for the abduction and rape of a 12 year old.

It's usually difficult to tell from conversations from those involved what actually happened, what the motivators were and why someone did something, let alone from a newspaper article about a court case. So to say anything about how deserved her sentence was or not is sort of a matter of pulling things from the ether and pretending they tell us all we need to know.

While I see the comments about how she was groomed and abused I also saw this "The abuse eventually came to light when the husband and wife’s relationship broke down and she told police." This indicates that she had the ability to save her daughter earlier but chose to put her relationship with the man above her daughter's welfare. I do think that deserves a significant prison sentence as well as action to ensure she can never care for another child. I also note that the judged required psychiatric treatment, which would not be something they could insist on if she was released from prison, so a shorter sentence might fail to give her the support she needs.

The sentences are very different. She cannot be in prison for more than 10 years unless she commits other offences, most likely she'll be out in 5 and under licence for 6. He could be there for 30 or more, can't be out in less than 12 and when he is released will be under licence for the rest of his life (this is the sort of sentence murderers get). I don't think they are disproportionate, though I wouldn't be uncomfortable if either had been sentenced to more.

Seems the sentences cover the differences between the women’s own abuse and the man just been pure evil with the women being sentenced to psychiatric help and he is in prison.
Theres not really much to say bar maybe the judge actually got this one right.
Feel very sad for the girl and I’m sure with the right love and care she will begin to love and trust and hopefully get past things and be able to live a more normal life.
Seems akdi that maybe the first wife maybe needs some investigation too since he did this to the first daughter of the first marriage also and since he Involved his second wife in the abuse of the young girl there’s probably a high chance he involved the first wife in her daughters abuse too.

So what is likely to happen to the ten year old? Is she almost certainly a lost cause?
Is there any real understanding of how to reverse the effects of this sort of childhood or is it simply impossible?

There needed to have been 2 trials - firstly one for him sexually abusing and grooming a minor (his partner). Then assuming he was guilty of that, she would have been assessed as to whether she was fit to stand trial for the second, that of the abuse of the daughter.

Extreme coercive control results in the target effectively becoming a puppet of the manipulator. That includes being induced to doing things against their own values - in this case, a mother abusing her child. The guy has psychopathic tendencies ie is very dangerous and a master manipulator. The target, in this case, the 16-year-old girl who went on to become the mother, was groomed and abused by him to the extent that she did things at his behest - like a cult member. Also, it could happen to anyone. These guys target people when they are vulnerable (eg after the death of a loved one), not who necessarily are vulnerable - in fact often the targets are the prize. So remarks such as she must have something wrong with her are very, very misplaced. All we know is she has been very injured by his undue influence.

It's disappointing there's so much victim blaming in many comments and little understanding of the extreme damage coercive control can do. The mother sounds to be as much of a victim as the daughter. And that guy should be executed for what he has done and what he may still do - he is incurable.

This is yet another example of the justice system failing women by not being nuanced enough to take account of psychopaths and the harm they do - psychopathic traits aren't enough to warrant the diagnosis of ^a psychopath" by the MH system - so imagine what a full-blown psychopath is capable of.

Really the legal system is predicated on protecting men - because it doesn't reflect the real extent of the harm done to women by some men. The harm is downplayed or ignored - as here.

I wouldn’t necessarily agree she had the chance to report on him before been how he controlled her life totally and we don’t really have the full details on how she reported him in the end.
And obviously she would have known she’d be caught too by reporting on him so maybe she realised she needed help too ! as like others say we know very little facts from a newspaper report that is very vague and has reporting limitations because of the girl been still a child.

I agree with OP and woman
The mother was 16 when she met this man (who sounds like he was in his 40s at the time). She was a child who got pregnant and isolated almost immediately.
He sounds like he wanted a baby precisely to do what he did, given he had also raped a daughter from a previous relationship.
There were lots of times where her friends/family/the authorities (e.g. health visitor, education system) could have asked questions about this and they didn't.

I think her sentence seems harsh and I hope she is getting the help she needs.

It makes me even more angry compared to cases like in the Laura Huteson thread and the kind of behaviour that is seen as "accidental" for men. They literally get away with murder.

It seems to me like the mother was also a victim of this man. Horrible.

While I don't disagree with the point that adult women control their own actions, let's remember that we live in a society that does not make it easy for women to do so. A society where women are routinely disbelieved about sexual crimes, a society where male violence is normalised and pretty much supported by the establishment. Thank goodness the threats to the refuges have recently been turned aside, for now: but it is damned difficult to get out and very easy to be trapped lifelong with an abusive male when children are involved. Once you step in shit, it's often on your shoes forever.

Could it be framed as a public health issue? I’d be fine getting a mental health assessment done to at least rule out things like sociopathy and psychopathy? I think it’s something like 6% of men have aspd of some kind, with lower instances in women. We should at least be keeping psychopaths away from children. I’d be interested in home educating, and I’d be 100% fine with such an assessment being a required hoop I’d need to go through?

So what is likely to happen to the ten year old? Is she almost certainly a lost cause?
Is there any real understanding of how to reverse the effects of this sort of childhood or is it simply impossible?

Not exactly on point but there is the case of Jeannie.

WARNING - this contains extremely distressing detail and does not have a happy ending

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29?wprov=sfla1