Denise Hubble has spent the past 10 years counselling families whose lives have been turned upside down by sexual abuse. Through Mothers of Sexually Abused Children (MOSAC), the qualified therapist, along with 42 volunteers and two other part-time members of staff, help hundreds of families each year.

A Midland hospital last night admitted “appropriate action was not taken” after an 18-month-old boy died within 48 hours of being admitted.

The murder of two schoolfriends by an habitual cannabis user has led to calls for the Government to conduct a public health campaign about the danger of the drug.

Gordon Brown will announce today that the government is to spend an extra £1bn to lift 200,000 children out of poverty as he uses his final budget to help put Labour back on track to meet its target for alleviating deprivation among the young.

First-time passport applicants aged over 16 will face a list of up to 200 personal questions when compulsory interviews are introduced later this spring. Hundreds of thousands of people, mainly teenagers, will be grilled about their lives by a Government official in a dry run for the introduction of ID cards.

A “sadistic” foster mother was found guilty yesterday of subjecting three children in her care to a horrifying catalogue of physical and mental abuse over 20 years.

{mosimage}Eunice Spry, 62, beat the children with sticks and metal bars, scrubbed their skin with sandpaper and forced them to eat lard, bleach, vomit and even their own faeces.

She treated the children, two girls and a boy, as if they were her slaves, ordering one of them to stay in a wheelchair for four years even though she could walk so Spry could claim benefits for her.

Spry, a Jehovah’s Witness and a pillar of her local community, would punish the children because she thought they were possessed by the devil.

Once she kept two of them imprisoned, naked and starving, in a room for a month.

She forced them to run up and down the stairs and “tortured” them by making them take part in the “invisible chair” game, squatting for hours on end until they collapsed – then they were beaten.

Men are being scared away from joining the teaching profession by a wave of “paedophile hysteria”, a leading Tory has warned. Boris Johnson said school staffrooms are increasingly dominated by female teachers because men are afraid of attracting false child abuse allegations.

New rules requiring religious adoption agencies to accept gay couples as adoptive parents are due to be debated in the House of Lords. Church leaders say Parliament has not had enough time to debate the changes, part of the new Equality Act.

A major study appears to provide hard evidence that eating a high-fat diet increases a postmenopausal woman’s risk of breast cancer. Animal research has found a high fat intake boosts cancer risk, but other studies in humans were inconclusive.

When it comes to prejudice against people with a disability, it is just as likely to come from a disabled as a non-disabled person, according to a new study. And not only are disabled people as likely to be prejudiced, there is also a tendency to rank impairments in terms of how undesirable they are.