SINGAPORE — A mother was jailed 6.5 years on Monday (July 8) for striking her toddler son so hard that he hit his head against the leg of a table, fracturing his skull and sustaining serious brain injuries.

The woman had been frustrated with her child’s development, and frequently assaulted him as a result.

On a previous occasion, she punched him more than five times in the chest when he did not listen to her instructions. She also fractured his right arm once when he refused to go to the toilet when asked to do so before his bath.

The 27-year-old mother, who cannot be named to protect her child’s identity, pleaded guilty in May to three charges of causing grievous hurt and ill-treating him. Four other similar charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.

On Monday, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Grace Chua called the mother’s actions “senseless and brutal”, pointing out how the child was “systematically abused… on no less than six occasions”.

The boy is now being fed from a tube through an opening in his stomach, and is still unable to use his right hand.

DPP Chua also revealed that the mother is giving the child up for adoption, and has not visited him in the hospital since he was taken there.

“The father was never in the picture and the mother had full authority of the victim. There was no one in his life who could stop this abuse,” she noted.

The mother also tried to hide the abuse, the prosecutor said, by not calling for an ambulance immediately but calling a friend instead. “At this point of time, her child was fighting for his life and her concern was just to save her own skin,” DPP Chua added.

In mitigation, the mother's lawyer John Koh said that she came from a “rather disadvantaged family”, and the “burden of young motherhood can sometimes be very overwhelming”. When her first child was born, she was 23 years old.

“Her now ex-husband was always unavailable for family and herself. This has left her to be effectively a single mother. She tried her very best to juggle family life with work life,” he added.

In sentencing the mother, District Judge Toh Yung Cheong said: “It must not have been easy for you as a young mother to raise a family. However, you could have sought assistance instead of venting your anger on (the child). This was a serious case of physical abuse against a young and defenceless victim.”

WHAT HAPPENED

The court previously heard that the mother has three young children and lives separately from their fathers.

On March 25 last year, she was giving her three children a bath in their apartment. The victim was 23 months old then, and her two other sons were four years old and one month old.

As she was bathing the other children, she smelt faeces and saw the boy digging into his diaper and playing with it.

Angered by his actions as she wanted to end bath-time quickly, she slapped him hard on his right cheek. When the boy persisted in playing with his faeces, she slapped him on the other cheek.

She did it so forcefully that he fell sideways, hitting his head hard against one of the legs of a nearby metal table.

The mother tried to calm the boy down to no avail. He continued crying and his body started to shake violently.

She placed him in her lap and tried to massage him with some oil, but he was barely responsive and had grown semi-conscious. She decided to call for help, first calling a friend for advice as she was afraid her children would be taken away from her if the authorities were alerted.

She eventually called for an ambulance 10 to 15 minutes later at her friend’s insistence, but did not follow her son to Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, choosing to stay home with her two other children.

At the hospital, the boy was found to have multiple bruises — inflicted at different times — on his skull and back. He had also suffered a skull fracture and a part of his brain was compressed and injured from the accumulation of blood.

He was later transferred to the children’s intensive care unit of the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

As a result of his severe brain injury, he was found to have spastic-dystonic cerebral palsy and global developmental delay, with the developmental age of a six-month-old. The boy was also assessed to likely require assistance for all his daily living activities and mobility.

He also suffered disabilities such as poor head and body control and severe expression language delay. As of Jan 25, the boy had not fully recovered from his injuries.

Investigations revealed that this was not the first time the mother had assaulted him. Her relationship with the boy was strained as she found him to be slow in his development. When he was 21 months old, he was found to have mild global development delay due to social deprivation.

For causing grievous hurt, she could have been jailed up to 10 years and fined. For ill-treating the boy, she could have been jailed up to four years and fined up to S$4,000.