Four children have contacted the authorities after their parents showed them Islamic State beheading videos. According to court documents, the Midlands children were taken out of school and were being “socially isolated.”
Details of the alleged “physical and emotional abuse” were heard in the High Court last week, leaving one of the children, a 10-year-old boy who suffers with learning difficulties, so traumatized he can no longer speak.
The children – three boys aged 10, 14 and 16, and the daughter, 18, all of Somali origin – alerted authorities and are now in foster care. Police intervened after the daughter emailed Childline. The 18-year-old told authorities that the children were being “kept at home, did not attend school and were kept socially isolated.” Police then subsequently traced the email to the family's home.
According to court documents, the children were only let out of the house once every three weeks. “The children have complained that their parents expressed support for extremist violence and have expressed anti-Semitic, anti-British, homophobic and anti-white views in the home, which the children reject,” the High Court judgment says.
Justice Alison Russell ruled last week that the youngest child should move to residential care.
"There are outstanding issues of considerable seriousness in respect of allegations made by the children both as to the extent of the physical and emotional abuse within the family home and as the complaints they have made that their parents tried to brainwash them and to influence them into adopting extremist views, sometimes known as radicalization," said the judge in her ruling.
Russell said that the parents, who cannot be named for legal reasons, “continue to deny the extent of complaints made of physical chastisement and of making the children watch inappropriate images of extremism on videos such as a beheading by Al-Shabaab, and of a rotting corpse. The children also said that (their parents) supported Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (a leader of Islamic State/IS).”
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