Perth couple found guilty over abusing daughter, making her sleep in shipping container

A Perth couple who were accused of abusing their adopted daughter and making her sleep in a shipping container have been found guilty by a jury.

After a 10-day trial, the jury retired to deliberate on Thursday and returned with a guilty verdict late on Friday afternoon.

The couple were found guilty on two separate charges of deprivation of liberty, and having control and care of a child and engaging in conduct that could result in the child’s suffering.

The guilty verdict comes after the jury heard the girl, who along with her parents cannot be identified for legal reasons, told a child protection worker her adoptive parents beat her with a metal pipe and tennis racket and cut her hair off.

The girl said on more than one occasion, her mother dragged her out of the house and beat her with a metal pipe.

“At home my mum has been hitting me with a pipe, a tennis bat, and pulling my hair,” she said.

“Once I took the bus because she told me to, so I just went to catch the bus and when I got home she said ‘where have you been?’ I said I caught the bus and she said ‘who told you to do that?’ I said you told me to catch the bus.

“She was really angry about that. She said ‘I want to kill you right now, I’m so close to killing you.’

“Before that she said ‘I will shoot you and your head will go in a thousand pieces.’”

The girl said she had been forced to sleep in a green shipping container on the property from May to September in 2017.

“I don’t have blankets, she took them off me,” she said. “I only have a long sleeve shirt and long pants. It’s kind of freezing.

“I go to the toilet before I get in there ... it’s locked [by] my mum. I can’t get out.

“She locks it at night time or when she goes with [her stepsister] ice-skating. I have to stay here and do nothing. She’ll lock it all the time.

“It’s big, it’s dark, it’s stuffy, it’s messy and there’s sand everywhere.”

The court also heard the girl had once been left outside in a back paddock “all night”, and she had never had a birthday party.

The girl said the way her adoptive parents treated her was starkly different to the way they treated their other adopted daughter.

“They treat her nice, not me. She doesn’t get hurt or anything like that," she said.

The jury also heard from witnesses who said they had seen the young girl doing chores on the couple’s property in the Perth hills, and one neighbour who said she often saw the young girl crouching by their dividing fence.

One neighbour said she had often seen the girl standing out in the rain, and witnessed her doing laps of the property when she wasn’t doing chores.

“When you look out your window and you just see a little girl standing in the rain ... I regret [not making a complaint]. I felt sick,” she said.

“She’s never spoken to me. You couldn’t get close to her. She was very frightened. A very frightened little girl.”

A Department of Communities child protective officer who visited the house after the young girl failed to come home from school said she was concerned about the way the couple had spoken about the girl.

“[The mother] said [the girl] was mentally disturbed,” the worker said.

“She was a child with no feelings. They had adopted her from the Philippines and while she was there, she was physically abused.”

The worker said the mother emphasised to her the girl was “unclean”, that she chose to wear dirty clothes over her clean clothes, and she didn’t act like a child of her age.

The couple will be sentenced on August 23.

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