http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13988087/?GT1=8307
And I’ll Pit the father as well. How could he let this happen to his own children.
Hopefully the stepmother will go to prison, father too. They’ll be fed though. What should be done with evil people like this? It’s difficult to think of a worse crime than child abuse.
I’ll pray that the kids can be made healthy again, in both body and soul. There are childless people who ache for children, and then some people treat them like dirt.
The stepmother is a vicious wacko, yes, but the father? Seems to me he’s more culpable. How could he possibly not see that his children were being starved? How could he possibly let it go on?
My grandmother was subject to a less-severe form of this abuse when she was a child. Her father had remarried after her mother’s death, and the new stepmother had two children of her own.
My grandmother and her brother and sister were only allowed to eat the scraps after the father, stepmother and her children had finished eating. If the father brought home ice cream, only the stepmother’s children were allowed to have any, and the leftovers were carefully policed to make sure my grandmother and her siblings didn’t even get a taste of it.
The stepmother’s children had the finest medical care money could buy, but she wouldn’t permit any treatment of my grandmother or her siblings. By the time she married at sixteen, my grandmother’s teeth were completely rotted away. (The first thing her teenaged husband did after they married was buy her a set of dentures.)
She doesn’t like to talk about it, even after all these years, but I asked her once what her father did, seeing his new wife half-starve and neglect his children’s health. She said he basically ignored it in favor of peace, because the stepmother became enraged whenever he paid attention to his own children.
Oh, god. Cinderella, as a nightmarish reality. Those poor kids.
I bet it happens more often than one would ever (want to) imagine.
Yes, it was the same for a friend of mine. His dad remarried after the mom’s death, and the two boys were never treated the same as the new wife’s kids. She told my friend: I just feed you because you were (husband’s) kids. They never got birthday presents. It extends down to his kids. The (now) grandmother never gives gifts to my friends’ kids, but her kid’s kids get lavish toys.
I hate people sometimes.
I was always told my grandfather decided America was not for him when he returned to Wales at 14 after emigrating with his remarried father. I remember talking to him about how intrepid he was and how it was such a shame that he’d lost contact with the rest of the family. It was only after his death that I found out he’d been kept in a locked cupboard and fled, bruised, ragged and starving, to the docks one day.
This happened to my mom and her 5 siblings. Their real mother died and her dad remarried. Their stepmother had 8 kids of her own. She was a crazy drunk and horribly abused (physically and emotionally) her stepkids.
Almost 50 years later, my gradfather is still married to the evil stepmother, and she is still a crazy bitch.
I don’t think anyone will ever forgive my grandfather for letting his wife treat his kids that way.
How in the world could the father not notice? That is just unbelieveable to me. Thank goodness all the kids were taken away from that crazy bitch, and I hope she does some serious jail time.
This seems to be a more common form of abuse than I was aware of.
A case like this happened in my town recently, which shocked the entire community. A 16 year old girl was found pushing a shopping cart, only she looked like she was maybe eight, because her and her younger brother had been locked in a bathroom for five years by her grandmother while her three other siblings were treated like royalty. Her nine year old brother looked like a toddler. Her teeth were rotted away from being so hungry that she would puke, and eat it.
The reporter that I work with who saw them is one tough woman. She was abused as a kid, raped several times, got addicted to several forms of drugs, and eventually cleaned up and got her degree in journalism. She is TOUGH. She came back from covering the story and burst into tears. It was that bad.
http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20060120/NEWS/101200086&SearchID=73251573401087
That’s the first story of a series that was run on those children. It was bad. And apparently, this is a more common problem than I, or anyone, thought.
This thread has definitely given me some stuff to think about.
~Tasha
I wonder how a child would ever recover from that sort of prolonged starvation. At 16, it seems like that girl would have reached most of her adult height. I wonder if she will always be the size of a child, and whether she will be osteoporitic and have other long-term health problems. The mind boggles.
My fiance’s stepmother used to beat him across the back with a wire coat hanger (beginning when he was about 9 years old). He has these long red stripes across his back. He says he thinks they are stretch marks from growing quickly, but sometimes I am not so sure.
Especially when he’s gone for weeks at a time. My son lost a pound when he was four months old (my milk lost its strength, and I didn’t notice since I was with him 24/7)
The doctor put him immediately on cereal and gave him five days to gain five ounces. I was frantic, terrifed, so I was nursing and feeding him cereal mixed with bananas as often as I could.
Well, he didn’t gain five ounces in five days. He gained eleven ounces and now the kid is taller than I am. 
There is no excuse. How could any man remain married to a woman who treated his children that way is beyond me. I wonder where the bio-mom is?
My mother’s a social worker and one of her cases a few years ago was a boy who was 17 years old. He was the size of a ten-year-old, because he’d been literally in chains in his basement for years and starved. Except that his arms were apparently visibly muscular from struggling against his shackles.
It’s horrible what some people do to their children.
This may sound horrible, but:
Why do these people keep the children alive at all? If they hate them so much, if they consider them such a burden, why don’t they simply kill them? What is the point of such drawn-out cruelty?
I really, really don’t understand this at all.
Which is probably a good thing, come to think of it.