Police: Mother Cursed and Threw 10-Month-Old Against Fence Because He Couldn’t Stand

Police tape in a stock photo. (Carl Ballou/Shutterstock)

A mother in Florida was arrested after allegedly cursing and throwing her 10-month-old baby against a wooden fence at about 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 11.

Pinellas Park Police Department said Natalee Sesler, 25 of New Port Richey abused her baby because she was annoyed that he was unable to stand up, reported WFTS.

The mother is facing multiple charges, including child abuse, child neglect, assault, resisting an officer, and violation of probation.

When authorities arrived at the home in Pinellas Park, they found the child wearing a shirt with no diaper or pants. The police talked with two juveniles in the area who witnessed the incident.

Police said Sesler was also accused of attempting to throw the head of a metal rake at her baby, police said. The rake missed the child, and the mother then picked up the incessantly crying baby by the leg and tossed him on a lawn chair, reported ABC 15.

The police said the baby looked malnourished and had bruising and swelling near one of his eyes. The mother appeared to be under the influence of drugs.

When the police arrived at the scene, they found Sesler also wearing just a shirt. She was visiting an unknown male in the area.

The baby was taken to a local hospital for observation and then handed over to other family members, according to WFMY.

The mother is in custody in the Pinellas County Jail, according to the police.

Child Abuse in the United States

An estimated, 700,000 children are abused in the country every year. 1,670 children died due to child abuse in the country in 2015, according to the National Children’s Alliance.

In the same year, children advocacy groups served 311,000 cases of child abuse around the nation, whereas 683,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect.

“Households in which participants suffer from alcoholism, substance abuse, or anger issues demonstrate higher occurrences of child abuse as compared to households without,” said Psychology Today.

Child abuse is about actions that cause harm but it can also be about inactions that cause harm and that falls under neglect.

“Physical abuse involves non-accidental harming of a child by, for example, burning, beating, or breaking bones. Verbal abuse involves harming a child by, for example, belittling them or threatening physical or sexual acts. Emotional trauma can result from several forms of abuse,” said Psychology Today.

Patterns of Physical Abuse from One Generation to Other

A landmark study conducted over 30-years found that parents who suffered physical abuse as children were not more likely to be violent with their own kids. The results undermine the prevailing consensus that patterns of physical abuse are passed from one generation to the next.

“All of the literature had led us to believe that physical abuse would be passed on from one generation to the next. That is not what we found,” said Cathy Widom, a psychologist at CUNY, on a Science Magazine podcast.

The study recruited 908 people who had been abused and neglected—as documented by court filings—between the ages of 0 to 11 and followed them as they aged and started their own families. A control group of 667 people who were not evidently abused as children were recruited to serve as a comparison. The rate at which parents abused their own children was examined using the information provided by child protection agencies, as well as self-reports from the parents and their children.

“Parents who had histories of abuse and neglect did not report more child abuse than the comparison group subjects,” Widom said.

The researchers were not surprised to find that other patterns of abuse—neglect and sexual abuse—are correlated between parents and their children.

“Parents who have histories of neglect are more likely to have children who are sexually abused, but it is not necessarily the case that those parents are the perpetrators,” Widom said in an email.

Children of parents who were neglected were twice as likely to be sexually abused, Widom said, and listed drug problems, mental illness, and a failure to protect their children from sexual predators as possible causes that will continue to be studied.

Epoch Times reporter Jonathan Zhou contributed to this report.