Four siblings suffered in grandparents’ house of punishment

Four traumatised siblings who came into the care of their affluent Hobart grandparents have painted a picture of horror within the home.

Supreme Court of Tasmania, Salamanca Place, Hobart, Tasmania. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Richard Jupe

Four traumatised siblings who came into the care of their affluent Hobart grandparents have painted a picture of horror within the home, including days and months of “punishments” , multiple spy cameras, and one child made to eat his own vomit.

The grandmother, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the siblings, has given evidence for a second day in Tasmania’s Supreme Court. She has pleaded guilty to one charge of ill-treating a child but is disputing certain facts in the case.

Now aged in her 70s, the accused has a prim manner and has expressed no remorse at her treatment of the vulnerable children over a period of eight months in a six-bed mansion in a prestigious Hobart suburb.

She has also expressed no love for them, variously describing the siblings, aged 13 and under, as “horrible”, “ arrogant”, “selfish” and “obnoxious”.

On Tuesday the woman admitted mounting a second CCTV camera in the bedroom of her preschool-aged granddaughter, in addition to one in her 13-year-old grandson’s room. The woman told police at the time that the camera was used to monitor the small child hiding her excrements and urine around the room.

Supreme Court of Tasmania, Salamanca Place, Hobart, Tasmania. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Richard Jupe

During cross-examination crown prosecutor Linda Mason suggested that the grandmother’s attitude to the children was that they be “seen and not heard” and she “began to lose control” as the months wore on and the punishments escalated.

The grandmother admitted her punishments had no end date “it could be weeks, it could be months” and that the children were frequently punished as a collective when one of them had displeased her.

On one occasion the grandmother admitted making the eldest child clean his plate and bowl for “hours and hours” while the other children watched. When he said he needed to use the toilet the grandmother refused and the child wet himself. She then made his younger sister fetch him one of her nappies before he was forced back to scrubbing.

“If you’re going to act like a baby, I’ll treat you like a baby,” the prosecutor reported her as saying to the boy.

The court heard that in another collective punishment all four children were made to “write 2000 lines” based on which rule they had broken, for example, “I won’t be selfish” and “I will not lie”.

Because the youngest child had only just started school at the time of the abuse, she was made to write the alphabet and numbers out 2000 times.

Food was a flashpoint in the house with the siblings all losing weight in their grandmother’s care, the court heard, and reporting that she would punish them by withholding food or making them eat garbage.

On one occasion the eldest boy was made to eat garbage and then his own vomit after becoming sick.

Supreme Court of Tasmania, Salamanca Place, Hobart, Tasmania. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Richard Jupe

The grandmother told the court all the children were “overweight and lazy” when they arrived in her care and that the eldest boy “had a problem with gluttony”.

The grandmother admitted her view of raising children was that they needed “to be controlled” and that she saw “no problem” with her eldest grandchild sleeping on the floor without a mattress, pillows or blankets.

“People sleep outside in tents, what’s wrong with sleeping on the floor?” she said coldly.

The court heard that when the boy began showing up to his new high school in 2016 with frequent bruising and wearing a smelly nappy, the grandparents emailed the school instructing them “not to give him food and water” during school hours and explaining that his bruising was the result of “self-harm”.

Another email to the school claiming the child had been absent for two days with “belly ache” was contradicted by CCTV footage from the boy’s room showing him standing with his hands on his head for seven hours and nine hours consecutively.

In a separate video created the same month the boy is filmed standing in his nappy repeatedly punching himself in the arm, before turning to a person off camera and saying “it hurts”.

“That was you wasn’t it?” Mason said to the grandma in court, suggesting the couple filmed the staged video as “evidence” that the child was self-harming.

“No” she said. “I was upstairs having a shower. I only came down at the end.”

Originally published as Four siblings suffered in grandparents’ house of punishment