Gross Negligence, Failure, Agency Child Abuse

An institution created and whose agenda is related to the safeguarding of children from harm, removing them from abusive home situations and ensuring that they are placed in alternate, caring and responsible family environments is generally held in high esteem within the society where they operate. It is simply an unfortunate fact of life that all too often children are born to parents who are incapable of good parenting. People who have no idea and no real interest in giving their children the love and emotional support and direction they require. People who all too often brutalize their children.

In transferring abused and neglected children to the care of others willing to offer the kind of warmth and care absent from the original family situation, society trusts that the foster parents or adoptive parents will be true to their word. In the case of Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, grandparents of children who their daughter Yvonne Kidman was deemed unable to care for with her husband and father of the children Richard Baldwin, a horrible error in judgement of vast proportions was made when the young couple's children were removed from their care and given into the care of their grandparents.

At a coroner's inquest in Ontario into the death of five-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin, their mother was asked by a lawyer representing the little deliberately-starved boy's siblings if she knew that the Catholic Children's Aid had taken two of her own half-siblings into custody as Crown wards when they had been beaten so badly by her father that they had to be hospitalized. These were children from an earlier marriage of Yvonne Kidman's mother. Since she was only one year old herself at the time, she had no idea.

Nor did she have any idea that her mother, the woman who had slowly starved her child to death, had been responsible for the death of a sibling younger than herself. And despite that her mother Elva Bottineau and her father Norman Kidman, now serving sentences for murder of Yvonne Kidman's little boy had been responsible for the death of one of her own infants, and her husband had been charged and found guilty of molesting and beating another two of her children, she was allowed to retain Yvonne and her two sisters when they were as young as four, five and three years of age.

Not only was this child-abusing couple permitted to retain custody of their three little girls after violence committed against their other children, they were approved as "a day foster mom", when other vulnerable children in the presumed care of the Catholic Children's Aid Society were placed in Elva Bottineau's care. It is not that the CCAS had no files to check back on; they simply didn't bother. Had someone thought to check those files they would have revealed the depth of these two adults' criminal child-abusing past.

"If 'd known all this about my parents", said Yvonne Kidman, "my kids would not have gone there. I'm sorry it's very sickening", she said. Nor did she know that her mother connived against her as a capable mother to her own children. This is a family that lived as a perpetual welfare case, living in genteel poverty, on welfare and in assisted housing. Yvonne Kidman gave birth to Jeffrey when she was 19, and he was the third of her children with Richard Baldwin. They had no idea whatever of what constituted good parenting, for they had no real role models.

All of Nicole Kidman's children were removed from her care, made wards of the CCSA who decided that their grandmother -- who diligently conspired against her own daughter as a suitable mother, urging that the children be taken from her -- was a suitable alternative for foster care. The children may have been neglected in some ways, with their parents, but they were well fed. It was when they were in the care of their grandmother that they became malnourished. Two of the children were horribly abused and faced gradual starvation.

All four of Yvonne Kidman's children with her husband Richard Baldwin, inept and inadequate parents that they appeared to be, were taken from them and eventually placed with Yvonne Kidman's own mother, one by one, until the young couple was left with none of their children. For them the saving grace was that they would be able to see their children from time to time. But they were not permitted to go to the upstairs bedroom where Jeffrey and his year-older sister were kept often locked up and wasting away mired in their own waste.

Family Photo

A family photo of three-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin, at his grandparents' home in east end Toronto. He died Nov. 30, 2002, when he was five years old, of a lethal combination of pneumonia and septic shock, the underlying cause profound and protracted starvation. 

Until the child's death from pneumonia, septic shock and chronic starvation.