Psychotherapy with A Seven-and-a-half-year-old Girl in the Care of a Local Authority Children's Department

The case of Sandra who came in to the Care of a local authority at the age of three and a half, affords some interesting similarities and contrasts with the case described by Patricia Rad ford (1969). It also raises questions concerning society's treatment of parents found to be neglectful. The first person to seek the help of the clinic was the probation officer who was supervising Sandra's mother, Mrs. M., after a charge of wilful neglect. The parents had failed to seek help when Sandra's refusal to eat had reduced her weight to twenty-two pounds. There had been signs of active physical ill-treatment in addition.

History

The probable reasons for this unhappy state of affairs appear in the early history. An outline of events until Sandra came in to treatment four years later will also be given. Sandra was a second born, dizygotic twin, who had a difficult breech birth and had to be placed in an incubator for the first four days of life. When Mrs. M. and the twins returned home, the paternal grandmother took over the entire care of Sandra. It was apparently typical of Mrs. M. that she allowed this situation to continue for years without a cross word, although inwardly feeling most resentful. Some time during Sandra's third year, grandmother moved away from the family to a home of her own. The family now consisted of five children, the eldest a boy, born two and a half years before the twins, then a girl, Beatrice, born eleven months after them, and finally a boy, Terry, born sixteen months after that. The family was then living in a high flat where they had been rehoused after acute housing difficulties had caused the parents to live apart during Mrs. M.'s pregnancy with the twins.

When Sandra was three, her grandmother made a report to the N.S.P.C.C. without informing her parents. Shortly afterwards, Sandra was admitted to hospital, suffering from a variety of bruises, burns and abrasions, such as we now associate with the “Battered Baby Syndrome”. She wei