When my son was just two weeks old he was dropped face first into the bath by his father who, unbeknown to me, was drunk at the time. This resulted is my son, W sustaining injuries, some of which were concluded to have been purposefully caused. Instead of doing the right thing and calling the emergency services he deliberately hid the injuries; dressed, fed and put W to bed never informing me of what had happened. He then continued to plead ignorance when I eventually found the injuries, even at one point suggesting maybe I had caused them myself with the car seat. He denied all knowledge and lied repeatedly about how those injuries were sustained. In an instant, the family life I had longed for was shattered.

Despite deliberately causing harm to our newborn child and then consistently lying About it, the justice system in this country means that child cruelty cases often result in community service rather than a prison sentence.

Considering what myself and my son have had to endure for nearly a year and a half I do not feel that we have received the justice he deserves for having been deliberately assaulted by his own father- a person who should have been his safety. I don’t want any parent to go through what we have been through and that’s why I am petitioning for the threshold to be lowered to ensure child cruelty cases, such as ours, can result in prison sentences NOT community service, which to my way of thinking is nothing more than a slap on the wrist. How can that be justice? There is no way on knowing what the long term impact on my son will be thanks to the trauma he suffered in the first two weeks of his life at the hands of his own father. But one thing I do know is that 120 hours community service is not a sufficient enough punishment.