A mother has succeeded in overturning a family judge’s ruling that she caused non-accidental injuries to her baby son who was severely burned in a bathtub of scalding water. The Court of Appeal ruled that the judge had taken insufficient account of the mother’s blameless parenting record and the inherent unlikelihood that she would harm her child.
The woman rushed her one-year-old son to hospital in 2011 after he sustained severe, full- thickness, burns while sitting a few centimetres of water. She told hospital staff that she had momentarily left the boy in an empty bath while she went to throw out his nappy and discovered upon her return that he had turned on the hot tap. However, her explanation was doubted by concerned doctors and her son was taken into interim care after social workers became involved.
The mother staunchly maintained her account that her son’s injuries were the result of a terrible accident. However, the family judge found on the basis of expert evidence that she had either deliberately placed the boy into the hot water or that she had mistakenly put him into the too-hot water and left him there for up to two minutes, ignoring what must have been his 'screams of agony'.
That finding of fact had the potential to stymie the mother’s hopes that the boy would be returned to her care. However, in allowing her appeal, the Court ruled that the family judge had failed to ask herself the essential question why a mother with a previously unblemished record of child care would behave in such an unlikely way.
Rather than focusing on the mother's character or the quality of her parenting, the judge had placed too much reliance on expert evidence which went to such factors as the temperature of the water, rates of flow from the tap and the length of time that the child would have had to be immersed in it to cause such serious burns.
Lord Justice Briggs said: "The judge reached a conclusion, on the balance of probabilities, derived entirely from the expert evidence – namely that the mother either placed her son in scalding hot water or left him there screaming his little head off. Bearing in mind the mother's blameless record as a carer, that is a conclusion which is inconsistent with the evidence. Why, one asks, should a caring mother leave him there for all that time in the face of his loud protests?"