A man who says that social workers left him to suffer the most cruel abuse at the hands of his brutal parents won £25,000 damages yesterday in a case that broke new legal ground.

From babyhood through to the age of 14, Jake Pierce says, he was subjected to almost daily beatings by his parents, who kept him and his siblings in squalid conditions.

He told the High Court in London that his mother used cutlery to scratch his eyes and that he finally ran away from home at the age of 14 after his father had pushed him against a wall and held a knife to his throat. “I lived in fear. My mother and father told me that if I told people at school what was happening I would be killed,” he told Mr Justice Eady.

Mr Pierce, now 31 and living in London, sued Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, claiming that he should have been taken into care as a baby and that not enough had been done to protect him from his parents.

Mr Justice Eady agreed that social workers had failed in the duty they owed him and awarded him £25,000 damages. Although, the judge said, there may have been “a degree of exaggeration and dramatisation” in Mr Pierce’s evidence – because of the acute personality disorder from which he suffers – he accepted his account of “indifference, neglect and periodic violence” at his parents’ hands.

Mr Pierce had claimed that he was left outside in the garden naked during cold weather and was never allowed to play with other children.

When he was three, the court was told, an aunt took him to hospital with burns to his buttocks and feet and expressed concern at how he was being treated. But he was returned to his parents’ care to suffer further abuse.

The council’s barrister, Catherine Foster, told the judge after his ruling: “This case is significant in terms of it being the first case of its kind. Your Lordship’s judgment may now be seen as a licence for a number of others to make similar claims.”

Seeking permission to appeal, she told the judge that he had been wrong to accept Mr Pierce’s account of the abuse and, in any event, the damages payout was “plainly too high”.

The judge refused leave to appeal but Miss Foster said that Doncaster – left facing high legal costs – would petition the Court of Appeal for permission to mount a challenge.

Still prey to several psychiatric problems, Mr Pierce had told the judge that his life had been wrecked by social workers’ negligence. His counsel, Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel, QC, said that he had endured “severe physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect from his natural family” almost from birth.

He was six months old when he was admitted to hospital after “failing to thrive”. A doctor there advised that he be placed in foster care and never sent home again, she added. But after a stint with fosterers, Mr Pierce was returned to the “appalling conditions” of his family home in November 1977 when the abuse continued. In May 1979 he was back in hospital with scalding. Doctors suspected that his injuries were “nonaccidental”, but it could not be proved. He was put on the “at risk” register, but again returned home, where he “continued to be severely mistreated and abused by his mother and father”, the QC said.

After being threatened at knifepoint by his father, he ran away aged 14 in 1990 and spent months living on the streets. Only when tracked down was he finally taken into council care.

Arguing that Mr Pierce should have been taken into local authority care in 1977, Miss Gumbel accused social workers of “ignoring obvious signs of abuse” and failing to monitor his progress in his parents’ home.

The decision to return him home was “precipitate”, and putting him on the “at risk” register “of no help whatsoever” if he was placed back where the risk came from and neither visited nor monitored, the barrister added.

The judge accepted that Doncaster social workers had breached their duty in not carrying out a “statutory review” of the family before sending Mr Pierce back to his parents in 1977 and that it “plainly cannot be dismissed as a technical breach”. He had suffered “indifference, neglect and periodic violence in the home environment at the hands of his parents” amounting to “physical cruelty and emotional deprivation”.

Had he been put in care in November 1977, the judge said, it was likely that he would have been fostered, adopted, or lived in a children’s home and been “properly looked after”. He concluded: “I find, on the balance of probabilities, that the claimant did suffer indifference, neglect and periodic violence at the hands of his parents.”

Mr Pierce had legal aid but Doncaster council was ordered immediately to pay £40,000 towards his legal costs. The final bill could be four times that sum. Payment of the damages was stayed pending any appeal.

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