How the trial of WA parents accused of starving their daughter has played out over the past two weeks

WARNING: This story contains details that some readers may find disturbing.

In photos presented at her parents’ trial, the 16-year-old girl appeared emaciated and pale and had the slight build of an elementary school student.

During the trial she heard that she liked the Wiggles and Bluey, still sat on her mother’s lap to have stories read to her, and dressed in bows and frills of the type commonly worn by much younger girls.

Her self-care skills were limited – Prosecutors have said she needed help showering and brushing her hair, and that she did not know how to peel a banana.

Yet doctors told the trial that she did not have an intellectual disability and that she had normal intelligence.

And she lived in Perth’s affluent western suburbs, an area of ​​multimillion-dollar properties close to the ocean and river, colloquially known as the ‘golden triangle’.

Ballet teachers are sounding the alarm

The case of the allegedly malnourished teenager and the parents accused by police of deliberately starving her has been aired publicly for the first time in Perth District Court in recent weeks, and the evidence heard so far is equally unusual as convincing. .

According to the prosecutor, the parents, a couple in their 40s, made their only child suffer by withholding food, leaving him weak and thin.

By the time the teen was finally taken to hospital – reportedly alone after her reluctant parents were pressured by concerned doctors to take her there, she weighed just over 27 kilograms, about the same weight as a typical eight-year-old.

But she might not have received medical attention at all if her ballet teachers at two separate dance schools hadn’t acted and noticed that the girl looked worryingly thin even for a dancer.

Her true age was difficult to determine, not helped by the repeated lies alleged by prosecutors told by her parents how old she actually was.

They would have led the teachers to believe she was 14 and not 16, but even at 14 she should have weighed more, the teachers thought.

‘Whistle thin’ was how one of the teachers described her arms and explained to the court that she felt the girl was so fragile that she could break bones if she jumped too much.

“She disappeared before my eyes,” she said in her testimony, after seeing her weak and tired in class.

Parents attribute weight to a vegan diet

Alarmed at her condition, the teacher said she had reduced the girl’s lessons from eight hours a week to four, but was furious when she discovered her parents had enrolled her in another school so she could continue dancing for the same number of hours as before .

At the new school, the court heard the teenager’s appearance also raised red flags with her teacher.

She was “basically skin and bones,” the new teacher testified, had no muscle tone and seemed to shrink as the year went on. She had not gained weight in three years.

Both teachers said they tried to raise their concerns with the girl’s parents, who were dismissive.

Her thin appearance could be explained by her vegan diet, the parents told the teachers, and she was simply “small in stature” because she was born prematurely.

But medical evidence presented to the court suggested this was not true.

The girl had been born full term, and although her parents had repeatedly tried to claim she had been born in 2006, she had actually been born in 2004, records showed.

The parents insisted their daughter was perfectly healthy, the teachers said, while the father accused them of harassing him and his wife and discriminating against the girl because she was vegan.

‘Healthiest child’

Snippets of information about her diet were revealed in court, with the father insisting to a child protection worker who eventually became involved in the case that she was “the healthiest child he knew” and ate “the best diet in the world”.

The previous day’s intake consisted of raspberries and a pear for breakfast, nuts and fruit for lunch, and minestrone soup and vegan chocolate ice cream for dinner, the parents told a doctor.

But when a dance teacher asked the mother to give the girl a snack to eat between dance classes, the child was given “one thin rice cracker” with tomato, compared to the hearty bowls of pasta that other dance students were tucking into. court heard.

By then, both dance teachers were concerned enough to call the authorities and inform the Department for Communities of her plight in 2020.

Case workers then began trying to convince her parents to have her medically evaluated, but they were not enthusiastic.

“Ridiculous and frivolous” was the father’s response to a child protection worker’s concerns, and he repeatedly canceled appointments the department had made for the girl to see a dietician.

When child protection workers tried to visit the home, the father insisted that his homeschooled daughter was not home.

And, as prosecutors alleged, in an apparent attempt to get the authorities off his back, he tried to convince a general practitioner to provide documentation proving that the girl was perfectly healthy, despite not allowing her to be examined or even but went to the doctor.

Parents refuse feeding tube

The turning point came in April 2021, when the parents were persuaded to take their daughter to the doctor.

By that time, the girl was about to turn seventeen and the appointment, scheduled for half an hour, lasted 90 minutes while the doctor interviewed the parents.

The teenager weighed just 27.3 kilograms and was 147 centimeters tall, the doctor told the court, warning them she was at risk of cardiac arrest and needed urgent hospital treatment.

The court heard days later that the parents took their daughter to Perth Children’s Hospital, where her case was deemed a medical emergency, with doctors diagnosing severe malnutrition.

A feeding tube urgently needed to be inserted, the doctors told her parents, but they reportedly refused.

However, this time they were rejected and the child was placed in the care of the ward, who then became her guardian and allowed the nasogastric tube to be inserted.

Girl lacked basic skills, court hears

The teen ended up spending nearly two months in the hospital, with staff noting that her social development was delayed.

She could not brush her teeth or hair without assistance, the staff noted, and enjoyed watching TV shows for preschoolers, such as Thomas the Tank Engine and The Wiggles, which she sang along to with her parents.

And when they asked her to express her own wishes, separate from those of her parents, the court heard she simply said: ‘I never had a voice.’

The girl’s parents continue to deny that she is starving. Her father said for the first time this week that he was not concerned about her health, even after doctors told him she was dangerously underweight and at risk of a heart attack.

The father – a cybersecurity expert – told the court in his opinion that her blood test results in April 2021 did not indicate she needed feeding, and that he did not want her to be fed through a tube because she “ate, could eat”. .

Only under cross-examination did he admit that he now thought she was underweight.

But he firmly denied the accuser’s suggestion that he “wanted her to stay a little girl forever”.

The nature of the family dynamic also began to emerge this week, when the father told the court he dictated how the family was run.

This included accessing his wife’s phone, lying about who called her and deleting text messages without her knowledge.

He verbally abused her, he said.

As he spoke, his wife, who is also accused of starving their daughter, sat in the dock crying.

The trial will continue this week before the jury retires to consider its verdict.

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