THE teenage daughter of a Blaenau Gwent woman charged with wilfully neglecting two of her children, told a court her mother hit her up to five times a day.

In an interview with an officer from the Gwent Police child protection unit, shown at Cardiff Crown Court as part of her evidence, the girl said her mother had hit her and her sister, also a teenager, since they were four years old.

The first time she could remember either of them being hit, she said, was when she was four years old, and her sister was slapped for climbing onto a chair arm to look at fish in a tank. She fell, hit her head on the side of the tank, and “had to go to hospital to have her ear sown back on”.

She said they had been slapped “for everything we used to do”

on the back of the hand or head, and when they were 11 or 12 years old her mother had started to use punches.

The incidents made them feel “upset, sad, unhappy and scared.”

The girl said she was hit more than her sister, because she argued with her mother, who cannot be named, and her mother’s boyfriend.

She said her mother drank alcohol regularly, and her boyfriend had taken cannabis in front of her, her sister, and her half-brothers.

Themother is charged with ten counts of wilful neglect of a child under 16 years old, relating to the sisters, covering November 2007 to October last year.

Prosecuting, Mr Jeremy Jenkins told the court the charges were representative samples of a course of conduct during that period.

Each girl, he said, was subjected to behaviour which the prosecution says caused each of them unnecessary suffering or injury to health.

“We do not say either were beaten in the traditional sense, but were subjected regularly to unnecessary and unlawful applications of force.”

The woman was arrested on October 15 last year after police went to her home following a report of an argument. They found her “uncooperative and intoxicated,” said Mr Jenkins.

“This was not isolated, but a daily, regular occurrence.”

Proceeding