UK woman starves son, forces him to clean sanitary towels for 9 yrs; faces jail

London: A mother has been sentenced by the Plymouth Crown Court for starving and abusing her son for nine long years. In one of the worst cases of abuse, the 40-year-old woman had also forced him to clean her used sanitary products and fed him just once a day, while she ate well.

According to a report in The Mirror, the mother verbally abused him, called him names and claimed that he deserved the abuse. She later tried to bully her son into blaming her husband for all the abuse.

“Frightened, scared, always scared and never a point where I was happy”, the young victim was quoted as saying to the court. A medical report told the court that the abuse had started when he was four-year-old and continued till he was 13. The emotional torture had driven the child to self-harm.

Prosecutor Ian Graham said that the boy was made to stay in a dirty house littered with cat faeces and was given ripped clothes and torn shoes to wear.

The woman defended the fact that she had hit him with a vacuum cleaner metal pipe and a metal pole, claiming that she did it just once and only because the boy “deserved it”. She also admitted to spitting on him but said that it was an act of self-defence as he had pulled a knife on her.

Towards the end of the abuse that started on August 2007 and ended on July 2016, she repeatedly told the boy to put all the blame on his step-father. But in many recorded interviews between the police and the boy, it was found that mother was solely responsible for all the assault and mistreatment of her son.

The step-father and another family member also gave statements that confirmed existing evidence.

The convict's lawyer, Michael Green, referring to a psychologist's report said that the mother suffered from an untreated form of personality disorder, which had not been diagnosed before.

He further added that she needed help from the community mental health team and that she offered an early guilty plea, considering that this was her first conviction.

He continued that she had great difficulty looking after herself and looking after the child made things all the more tough for her.