Severely beaten girl, 10, asked for help multiple times; Foster parents in custody
A 10-year-old girl from Vlaardingen was hospitalized with severe injuries last week and is still in critical condition. Her foster parents were arrested on suspicion of attempted manslaughter on Monday. The child asked for help multiple times, approaching random people at supermarkets and employees at her school, telling them that her foster parents were abusing her. Her biological mother also raised concerns, AD reports.
The girl was admitted to a hospital during the early hours of May 21. She had severe physical injuries and was unconscious. She is still in critical condition. On Thursday, the police launched a large-scale investigation. On Monday, they arrested her foster parents, both 37 and from Vlaardingen, on suspicion of attempted manslaughter. Two other children living in the same home have been accommodated elsewhere.
Sources told AD that the 10-year-old girl sought help multiple times. Early in December, she told an employee in a supermarket that she had trouble walking and that her foster parents were beating her. The supermarket called the police, who photographed injuries on the girl’s legs, but concluded that it was unclear whether they were sustained through abuse.
Later in December, the girl told people at school that she was being yelled at, punished, and beaten at home. Sometimes she has to stand naked in the garden, the girl said in the middle of winter. The school consulted with her foster mother and sent her home.
Later at a mall, the girl approached complete strangers, asking for help and saying she was abused at home. Employees of her school picked her up and later took her back home to her foster family, the newspaper’s sources said.
The girl’s biological mother raised concerns, her lawyers, Mieke Krol and Frank Pool, confirmed to the newspaper.
Local residents contacted foster care, the neighborhood police, and Veilig Thuis, which handles domestic abuse cases, about the girl. They saw her walking around poorly dressed and shivering from the cold. Her curls had been shaved off, and the foster parents told contradictory stories about why. One neighbor heard it was because of lice, another was told it was a ritual, and another heard the girl had been playing with hair removal cream.
The police are investigating what happened, and that includes looking at how reports about the girl were handled. “Which reports have been made and who has been contacted is being mapped out. That investigation also requires great care and takes time, considering the seriousness of the case and the privacy of those involved,” a police spokesperson told AD.
According to lawyer Krol, representing the girl’s mother, the authorities regularly don’t take the parents of children who have been placed out of their homes seriously. “Sometimes they are portrayed as a ‘fighting parent,’ or a parent who wants to make a foster family look bad. And sometimes there are situations in which a child gives signals of abuse, which are not always heeded.”
