Australia has seen a recent surge in vegans protesting against eating meat. But if they want to get their message across, they may be going about it the wrong way.

A Sydney couple who had their three children taken away from them when police found their 20-month-old girl was severely malnourished and suffering from rickets after being fed on a strict vegan diet have avoided jail over the neglect of their child.

Both sobbed in court as a judge slammed their behaviour as “reckless” and questioned their “untruthful” statements to authorities about their daughter’s health.

At Sydney’s Downing Centre court today, the couple was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment, however they will not have to spend time behind bars with the sentence in the form of an intensive correction order. Both will undertake 300 hours community service.

Their baby daughter weighed just 4.89kg, looked like a three-month-old and had no teeth when she was taken into care.

The judge berated the couple and said “the abandonment of parental responsibility cannot be excused”.

She had been fed a strict vegan diet of just oats, bread and a few mouthfuls of vegetables daily for months and had never seen a doctor since she was born.

Subsequent medical examinations found she was malnourished, her growth had stunted and she had thinner bones and motor skills than a child of her age and was developmentally impaired.

The now toddler and her brothers are in the care of a relative. While she has recovered from the malnutrition and weighs more than 12kg, her future development remains in doubt.

‘CANNOT BE EXCUSED’

The 33-year-old mother, wearing a grey suit, silently cried in the dock and held her head in her hand dabbing her face with a tissue.

Her husband, 35, dressed in a dark blue suit and tie, initially sat impassively, at one point reaching out to comfort his wife. But as the details of his daughter’s neglect were read out, his head sunk and he began to loudly sob.

The couple, who cannot be named for legal reasons, collapsed in each other arms crying as they found out their sentence. They both refused to speak to reporters outside the court.

The child was taken into care in March 2018 after her mother called triple-0 when the child started having a fit, looked listless and her lips began going blue.

Judge Sarah Huggett said there was “no greater responsibility for a parent than to care and nurture and protect their child from injury”.

However, the pair had shown a “reckless failure to provide the necessities of life” to their daughter.

“This was not an isolated act or a momentary decision that caused danger to the child. The child was seriously underweight, underdeveloped and undernourished. That would have taken time to occur.”

The mother had become “increasingly fixated” in her beliefs including in their vegan diet, Judge Huggett said.

“There was a considerable danger of injury falling short of death.”

The parents, “were initially unable to accept that their daughter’s condition was due to malnutrition”.

She criticised them for giving authorities “inconsistent … and untruthful information on their daughter’s developmental milestones,” when investigations first began after the hospitalisation.

In her summation, the judge said neither parent was “very young or uneducated” and had two older children, so understood how to care for their daughter. But she accepted the mother was suffering from a level of depression at the time.

She lashed out at the father, however, who during the trial had said his job meant he had less oversight of his daughter’s care.

“He had ample opportunity to observe his daughter’s condition and he did nothing at all to address it, such as seeking help from other family members or seeing a doctor who he himself had seen.

“The further abandonment of parental responsibility cannot be excused,” Judge Huggett said.

Nonetheless, she decided both parents were equally culpable for their child’s state but accepted they were remorseful of their actions. A custodial sentence would deprive the three children of the “important bond” with their parents.

CHILD WAS ‘FLOPPY’

Court documents showed the toddler’s mother told doctors her daughter would generally have one cup of oats with rice milk and half a banana in the morning, and a piece of toast with jam or peanut butter for lunch.

For dinner, she said her daughter would be offered tofu, rice or potatoes. But she said the girl was a “fussy eater” so she might just have oats again.

This diet resulted in severe deficiencies in nutrients across the board for the infant, including a lack of calcium, phosphate, vitamin B12, vitamin A, iron and zinc.

Her levels of vitamin D, which can cause bone disease if found to be too low, were “undetectable”.

Rickets is a preventable bone disease that affects babies and young children and causes soft and weakened bones. Children are typically diagnosed with rickets due to a lack of vitamin D, calcium or phosphorus.

The girl’s condition was only brought to the attention of doctors in March last year, when doctors attended to the infant after she suffered a seizure.

She was just over a year old, but weighed only 4.9kg, which is barely double of what she weighed when she was a newborn.

One doctor described her as “floppy” and said the tiny one-and-a-half-year-old didn’t crawl or talk during the month in care, according to court documents.

In an investigation into the girl’s medical history, doctors found an absence of immunisations, no follow-up check-ups after she was born and no birth certificate or Medicare number.

The toddler’s two older brothers, aged six and four, are also in government care and were also on vegan diets.

FED THROUGH TUBE

In May, a court heard a powerful victim impact statement from the baby’s foster carer, who took the toddler in after she had been taken out of her parents’ care in August 2018.

“For the first 19 months of her life (the baby) did not receive the basic care that she needed to grow and develop,” she said in a victim impact statement read out in court. “As she was a baby during this time, she can’t tell us about her experience.”

She said the baby was “defenceless and unable to protect herself from her parents’ inadequate care”.

“She was being fed through a tube in her nose,” she said in the statement. “I remember thinking, how terrifying this must be for such a small child.

“I was also shocked by how far behind (she) was compared to other children her age I had looked after — they had been able to run around, talk to you, play games.

“Caring for (her) was caring for a very young baby. She couldn’t sit up, she couldn’t speak any words, she couldn’t feed herself or hold a bottle, she couldn’t play with toys.

“She spent the day in her cot rolling back and forth. She couldn’t roll over all the way.

“Currently, (the toddler) has ongoing appointments for weekly occupational therapy, monthly appointments with physiotherapy, speech therapy, a paediatrician and dietitian,” the carer said in the statement, written in January.

She said the baby was now “traumatised” by the monthly and bimonthly blood tests she must undergo and sometimes needed to be held down by medics so they can draw blood.

In January when she was about two and a half, the baby was only 76cm tall — the height for size zero clothing for a standard one-year-old.

The court also heard how the relationship between the girl’s parents had broken down over suspicions of an affair. The solicitor for the toddler’s father — who would break his vegan diet by eating meat outside the family home — suggested his client was “powerless” to prevent his daughter from falling ill.

The father’s defence barrister, Frank Coyne said the mother, who had previously worked in childcare, “dictated” the household, and claimed his client was the sole provider and would do all the driving, shopping, cooking and cleaning.

However, Crown prosecutor Julia Dewhurst hit out at the girl’s father’s defence, saying he “lied to hospital staff” about the child’s development and he made a “conscious decision” not to vaccinate her.

She said that while he drove his children to school, he sent them there with “two pieces of bread and an apple.”

“He cannot now claim the decisions were solely made by (the girl’s mother),” she said.

He said she left hospital just three and a half hours after the child’s birth, didn’t register the birth or have the baby immunised.