What happened to the Child of Rage?

What happened to the Child of Rage?

A DAMAGED child who appeared on TV claiming she wanted to stab her adoptive parents in their sleep has made a surprising U-turn — she is now a therapist.

Beth Thomas featured on a 1992 documentary called Child of Rage, which featured shocking footage of her telling her psychiatrist she wanted to kill her parents and brother in the dead of night.

In the footage, Beth — then aged 6 — explains that parents Tim and Julie lock her in her room at night to stop her from stabbing them to death.

She also admits to sexually abusing her younger brother, torturing the family dog and killing a nest of baby birds.

Jonathan also had to go to hospital after Beth repeatedly smashed his head in to a concrete floor in a bid to kill him.

Beth and her brother Jonathan were adopted from a situation of severe neglect, and she was later diagnosed with “reactive attachment disorder” (RAD), a rare but serious condition where young children fail to make healthy attachments with parents or caregivers due to extreme abuse.

RAD is common diagnosis of children who have been adopted, with their new parents struggling to cope with violent outbursts aimed at them and family pets, destructive behaviour and self-harm, all triggered from their traumatic early starts.

It emerged that Beth had grown up neglected, and been sexually abused by her biological father until she was 19 months old.

Her and Jonathan’s mum had died when she was one, and her brother — who was seven months old when they were taken by child services — had a strangely shaped head due to being left on his back in his cot all day.

It was reported that the front was bulbous and the back completely flat.

Beth saw a series of psychiatrists who struggled to help her develop empathy, and overcome her psychopathic personality, which was the result of her father’s sick behaviour.

Her adoptive parents were at their wit’s end, so when therapist Connell Watkins offered to take her in to her home to give her intensive behavioural modification therapy, they willingly agreed.

Connell began by setting extreme restrictions on the young girl, making her ask permission for everything and again, locking her in her room at night.

Within a year, she was able to share a room with her biological daughter, and had developed empathy, stopped self-harming, and was remorseful for how she had treated her brother.

Today, Beth works as a nurse after studying for a degree and has authored a book called More Than A Thread Of Hope with her second adoptive mother, Nancy.

Their company, Families By Design, help other families dealing with a RAD child, and claims that Beth has grown up to be a “no longer a child of rage but an award winning registered nurse and an amazing speaker”.

Sadly, Connell hasn’t had such a happy ending after she was involved in the murder of a child diagnosed with RAD.

She was jailed for seven years after killing a child with an illegal — and controversial — “attachment therapy” practice called rebirthing.

It involves wrapping a troubled child in blankets and pushing against them with pillows for 70 minutes to simulate being born.

This “hugging therapy” is meant to allow children to struggle, fight, scream and release the rage that is stopping them from bonding with their caregivers.

In 2001, 10-year-old Candace Newmaker was smothered to death by four adults during such a session as her adoptive mother watched on.

Her death was caught on camera, and she can be heard screaming that she was “going to die” 11 times, before eventually being suffocated in the makeshift “birth canal”.

This story originally appeared in The Sun and is republished with permission.