Mercy Muroki: The way we deal with child killers in this country is a tragedy

A mother who left her four year old son’s body to rot in his cot for almost two years after killing him is being released from prison having served only 7 years of her sentence.

Amanda Hutton was sentenced to 15 years in 2013 for a host of child neglect charges and one count of manslaughter.

Her son, Hamza, was found dead in his cot after dying of malnutrition. His little body was rotting, and covered in flies at his home in West Yorkshire.

The four year old has been starved so severely, that when he was found, he was wearing a baby grow made for a 6 month old baby.

Here’s the other tragedy – despite Sutton having five other children living at her home in filthy conditions.

Despite her children being known to a raft of agencies including the police and social services, despite the child’s own father reporting the mother to the police years before the incident, none of the children were officially registered as “at risk” by social services.

Now, let me first say this. I do not think anyone ever convicted of killing a child, whether that’s through neglect or through a deliberate act of evil, should ever – and I mean ever – be released from prison.

In my ideal world – every single child killer would die in jail. I’m not concerned with how much it costs the taxpayer, I’m not concerned about the philosophical arguments about redemption.

I want child killers locked up for life. That’s a position I choose to take, and it’s a moral hill I’m willing to die on. But we don’t live in my ideal world.

We, unfortunately, live in a world where parents who starve their babies to death can walk out of jail in a matter of years.

And if we can’t even trust the authorities to protect children before tragedies like this happen, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of neglect – how can we trust them to protect children from these monsters after they’re released?

All the child killers released early from prison, walking around in our society as if all is well, are well within their right to have more children.

And that’s one of the unfortunate prices we have to pay for a civil society. But what’s to stop them from repeating the same horrors?

If we live in a system where the child of someone known to be a danger can be dead in a cot for two whole years, without a single person in authority giving a damn, then that system is broken beyond repair.

The way we deal with child killers in this country is a tragedy. The way we abandon innocent children to monsters, a national embarrassment.

The social care system is a farce and our justice system is an enabler.