Man stabbed 18 times by mum says 'warning signs were missed'

A man who was almost stabbed to death by his mother as a child says "lots of warning signs were missed".

David, 24, was stabbed 18 times when he was nine years old and was only given the serious case review recently by mistake.

He has been speaking out about his long battle to get hold of a council report into what went wrong. Such reviews are normally made public, but South Gloucestershire Council insisted the report was never released to protect people named in it. The authority said the findings were shared with relevant agencies and lessons were learned.

David said: "There was lots of warning signs, right from the day I was born."

David was stabbed repeatedly by his mother at their home on 4 November 2010, the day of a court hearing to decide if he should be taken into care.

He suffered serious injuries to his liver and kidneys and underwent life-saving surgery.

"She thought I would be better off dead than without her. She tried to overdose as well," David said.

His mother pleaded guilty to attempting to murder the nine-year-old and was detained for treatment in a psychiatric hospital.

His mother told the BBC: "South Gloucestershire Council backed me into a corner that there was no escape from and did not see how mentally unwell I was.

"I should have found another way to deal with things, but I did not have the strength.

"What happened haunts and tortures me every day - I can only imagine what it does to David," she added.

A serious case review (SCR) was issued in 2011 into what happened, a report David said he had repeatedly asked for the contents of since the age of 18.

The government promised to publish all serious case reviews commissioned after June 2010 in full unless there are exceptional circumstances.

David said when he was a teenager the council only agreed to read extracts of the SCR to him and he was never allowed to see the entire report.

David, who now works for the council as a children's ambassador, drawing on his experiences of being fostered after the stabbing, said it was only through a chance meeting in 2024 with a social worker that he was handed the serious case review.

The review examined why David was not taken into care despite repeated threats from his mother, who was a drug addict and was diagnosed with emotionally unstable personality disorder.

Two years before the attack, she was arrested for trying to stab her husband, although it never went to court.

The report found that "the nature and severity of the final assault could not therefore have reasonably been predicted by any professional involved with the family at the time, although it was clear that risks were escalating".

The review concluded that the stabbing may have been prevented if assessments had been more robust, there had been a better coordinated approach to working across adult mental health and children's services and the child's welfare had been fully independently represented at the emergency protection order hearing by the presence of the children's guardian who was fully aware of all relevant information.

It said the council should require agencies to improve the way they work together where a parent's mental health or substance misuse problems impact on their parenting capacity.

On his reflection of the report, David said: "Everyone was looking at the situations as they happened rather than thinking right this has happened, multiple other things have happened, something's clearly wrong here and it's not going well."

A spokesperson for South Gloucestershire Council, said the serious case review (SCR) was written by an independent author and was reviewed by a multi-agency panel, led by an independent chair.

"At the time, a decision was taken by the Local Children's Safeguarding Board (LCSB), who commissioned and are the owners of the SCR, not to publish or share it beyond the professionals who needed to see it," they said.

"While SCRs are often published, there are grounds for this not to happen in some circumstances, including where to do so would pose a risk of harm to those the report mentions. David has been fully supported to view the report, but the decision taken by the LCSB relating to its wider publication remains in place."

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