The mother, suffering from Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, was sentenced for taking half a liter of blood from her son every week for 5 years.
A 36-year-old Danish woman was sentenced Thursday to 4 years in prison for child abuse. Nurse by profession, she took no less than half a liter of blood from her son, per week, and this, for 5 long years. The little boy had had an intestinal disease soon after he was born, but doctors couldn’t figure out why he had so little blood.
Since his 11 months, when his mother began blood tests, the child had to be transfused 110 times. Arrested in September 2017, the mother tried to explain to the court: “It’s not a decision that I made consciously. I don’t know when I started doing what I had no right to do. It happened gradually. I was flushing the blood in the toilet and putting the syringes in the trash.” This mother took advantage of social networks to pose as a single mother fighting for her sick son while she herself caused his health problems.
A rare disease
Münchhausen’s syndrome causes people to intentionally injure themselves to draw attention to themselves. In the present case, it is the syndrome by proxy which induces that a person having the medical responsibility of a child, voluntarily causes him health problems before having him treated, so as to draw compassion on him via the “disease” of the child. A rare disease that generally affects mothers.
The court in Herning ruled that the abuse had put her son at risk. He therefore followed the requisitions of the prosecution by condemning her to 4 years in prison and prohibiting her from exercising her profession as a nurse. The mother of the family decided not to appeal the conviction. “I saw in her eyes that it had to stop. She can’t take it anymore,” explained her lawyer René Knudsen to the local agency Ritzau. Today, the child, aged 7, lives with his father.
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