Archive for March, 2014

In a case which underlined that the wishes and feelings of children will be heeded by the family courts, a seven-year-old girl (G) who witnessed her father savagely killing her mother will spend her childhood in foster care following a judge’s ruling. The deeply traumatised youngster will always have to live with the memory of seeing her father stab her mother more than 50 times. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that G witnessed the crime and suffered injuries inflicted by her father as she bravely sought to protect her mother. She was found by the emergency services, covered in blood, in the same room as her mother’s body. After her father was sentenced to life imprisonment for manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, G had lived for a while with her maternal aunt, whose own grief reaction to her ... Read more