A baby girl who was confined to a drawer in a bedroom without seeing daylight or her siblings is 'slowly coming to life from what was almost a living death' after being saved by social services
A neglected little girl was rescued after being locked away from the outside world for three years.
Her mother, now jailed for "extreme neglect", had kept the baby confined to a drawer of her divan bed, with her other children unaware she even existed. The tot was only found after her mum's partner heard her cry when he was briefly home alone, and immediately alerted social services.
The mum from Chester, who cannot be named to protect the identity of her child, would take her children to school each day before going to work, leaving her youngest alone and starving. She was void of any interaction as she spent each day staring at the four walls of the bedroom.
The tot was neglected as the family stayed with relatives over Christmas and she was only moved when the mother's boyfriend began to stay over, which saw her then locked away in another room. The little girl was found when the boyfriend returned to the house one morning to use the toilet after the mother had left. He heard a noise and entered one of the bedrooms, where he saw the child.
He left the home but alerted family members and later that day, social services attended to find the child in the drawer of the bed. The three-year-old had matted hair, deformities and rashes, Chester Crown Court heard.
The court also heard the woman did not seek medical assistance for the child's cleft palate and did not give her adequate food and water, feeding her milky Weetabix through a syringe. A social worker who visited the property said she saw the child sitting in the drawer and asked the mother whether that was where she kept her daughter.
"She replied matter of factly 'yes, in the drawer'," the social worker said. "I was shocked the mother did not show any emotion and appeared blasé about the situation." It then dawned on her just how little human interaction the young girl had experienced.
"It became an overwhelming horror that I was probably the only other face (the child) had seen apart from her mother's," she added. The child's foster carer revealed that the youngster also heartbreakingly wasn't aware of her own name.
Their statement read: "It became very apparent she did not know her own name when we called her." Sion ap Mihangel, prosecuting, said: "She was kept in a drawer in the bedroom, not taken outside, not socialised, no interaction with anybody else."
He told the court the child had a developmental age of nought to 10 months when she was first taken into hospital and was significantly malnourished and dehydrated. Honorary Recorder of Chester Judge Steven Everett said: "The consequences for [the child] were nothing short of catastrophic - physically, psychologically and socially."
He said the infant was an "intelligent little girl who is now perhaps slowly coming to life from what was almost a living death in that room". In an interview, the woman told police she had not known she was pregnant and was "really scared" when she gave birth.
She said the baby was not kept in the drawer under the bed all the time and said the drawer was never closed, but told officers the child was "not part of the family". She told social workers she had an abusive relationship with the child's father and did not want him to find out about her.
The woman pleaded guilty in October to four counts of child cruelty, reflecting her failure to seek basic medical care for the child, abandonment, malnourishment and general neglect. Senior crown prosecutor Rachel Worthington, of CPS Mersey-Cheshire, said: "This child has never had a birthday present, a Christmas present or anything to recognise these days. She's had no interaction with any of her siblings. She hadn't known daylight or fresh air and didn't respond to her own name when she was first found."
She added: "The motive behind the mother's behaviour is still not clear, but that is not the role of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Our job is to bring the person responsible to justice. That has now been done and it is the profound hope of the CPS that the victim in this case recovers sufficiently to live as full a life as possible."
