A two-week trial for a woman charged with 28 child abuse offences against nine of her children and stepchildren has ended with 25 guilty verdicts. Photo / NAD
A two-week trial for a woman charged with 28 child abuse offences against nine of her children and stepchildren has ended with 25 guilty verdicts. Photo / NAD
A woman on trial for ill-treating, neglecting, and abusing, nine of her children and stepchildren, has been found guilty of most of the charges against her.
A jury took about four and a half hours to return guilty verdicts to 25 of the 28 charges faced by the woman, who had been on trial for two weeks in Kaikohe District Court.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will be sentenced later this year.
In evidence against her, the children said their mother and father – who has already been jailed for his part in the offending - regularly subjected them to verbal and physical assaults, starved them as punishment, and deprived them of basic necessities - nappies, sanitary products, and schooling.
The family's squalid living conditions at various Northland locations, included descriptions of a cockroach infestation, "dog poo on the floor", and rubbish at one house stacked in a shed where some of the boys slept.
When benefit "pay" day came, the money disappeared instantly on drugs, the children said. Their parents would abandon them for days at a time, leaving them to care for the baby.
There was never anything to eat in the house so the children had to steal food.
If they did not do chores, they would be made to stand against a wall and smacked if they moved.
Their mother's physical assaults on them were varied, happening mostly when she was "out of it", "angry", and "coming down from drugs", the children said.
She would forcibly punch them or hit them with a stick, sometimes an axe handle, once while she was wearing boxing gloves.
The jury found the woman guilty of ill-treating and neglecting eight of the children but not one of the older boys.
She was however, found guilty of a representative charge of assaulting that boy with intent by giving him numerous "hidings".
She was also found guilty of a further six charges of assault with intent to injure involving three others of the children, a charge of assault with a weapon (a stick) and a charge of injuring with intent to injure arising from her deliberately burning one of the younger girl's fingers over a flame.
The woman was found not guilty of a further charge of assault with a weapon, involving one of the boys who said it was actually his father who hit him with the pole described in that charge.
Closing the Crown's case, prosecutor Ally Tupuola said the mother's conduct during the offence period (2016 - 2019) formed the requisite pattern of behavior to prove the charges of child abuse and neglect. Her actions were deliberate and persistent. While proof of the charge only required a likelihood of suffering, injury, and adverse effects to health, in this case those features actually existed.
Her conduct was a major departure from what could be reasonably expected.
She failed in her duty to protect the children from injury because she regularly smoked drugs around them, hit them, ignored them being hit by their father, verbally and physically abused them, and exposed them to drug use and constant domestic fights between her and their father.
Tupuola said the jury's task came down to who they believed - the children or their mother, who had elected to give and call evidence.
The children's evidence had a ring of truth and their accounts of what happened corroborated each other's.
The boy's concession as to who hit him with the pole showed he was being truthful.
Defence witnesses were in her view dishonest, Tupuola said.
The woman's nephew was caught telling a lie from the witness box.
The woman's sister claimed to have regularly visited the house and found no concerns but her evidence was not put to the children and none of them mentioned her visiting.
The accused tried to downplay the offending and blamed it on the children and their father.
Tupuola said Crown evidence from clinical psychologist Dr Yvette Ahmad about the reporting patterns and behaviours of abused children, was important.
Northland defence lawyer Martin Hislop at Kaikohe District Court. Photo / Sarah Curtis
In his closing address, counsel Martin Hislop said the family was struggling and their situation was not ideal, but it did not reach the threshold for the charges of ill-treatment and neglect.
These were not children locked in a house, controlled by a tyrant mum who decided if they got to go to school or not.
The family was not living in the middle of nowhere but 'a normal household' in the heart of small towns with plenty of other people around. If the offences really happened, they would have been nipped in the bud a lot sooner, Hislop said.
He noted the Crown had not produced any independent witness – "no teacher, social worker, or tutor" -to support the children's claims.
The jury was told the children increasingly visited an aunt but she had no concerns about them being assaulted or starved.
She admitted using drugs but that only took the Crown case so far, Hislop said.
She was an honest witness. She could have denied ever touching her children but she admitted slapping them. However, she did not assault them in the manner for which she was charged.
* Six of the children left home of their own volition in early 2019, one of them after running away for a fifth time. The other children were taken into whanau care later.
