Caroline Eshghi was kicked, burnt, starved and force-fed rotten milk, but her mum spent just eight months in prison
Caroline Eshghi, a child abuse survivor
A woman who says she was beaten, burned with cigarettes and starved as a child by her mother is demanding a law change – after the woman served just eight months in prison. Caroline Eshghi says she is outraged at the release of Melanie Burmingham, who she says fed her rotten milk and kicked her around as toddler “like a football”.
Caroline, 58, was left urinating blood, with bruises and injuries all over her body as a child. The mum-of-two said she had been subjected to years of “torture” while living with Burmingham in Bristol, Somerset and Wiltshire during the 1970s and 1980s.
But her mother could only be punished under the maximum penalty allowed when the offences were committed. Caroline, of Cornwall, has now called for a change in the law as if the same crimes were committed after the changes in 2005 her mother could have faced up to 14 years in prison.
She said: “People like Melanie should not be able to skip justice, just because they committed their crimes before 2005. It’s about bringing retrospective sentencing guidelines up to date with current sentencing laws when it comes to those who inflict harm.
“If we are allowing those who commit the worst crimes to get the weakest sentences, what does that say about our society? What does that say about where we draw the line? We live in a society where we’re constantly hearing of child abuse.
“But we just don’t seem to have developed a zero tolerance in this culture for child abuse, and that is very wrong, and it needs to be changed.”
Caroline decided to report the abuse she had suffered as a child to the police in 2019. Five years later, Burmingham was charged with one count of cruelty to a child under 16 years contrary to section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933.
Burmingham was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months, on March 7 2025, after pleading guilty during a trial at Portsmouth Crown Court. Caroline appealed her mother’s suspended sentence, and after a Court of Appeal ruling in May last year Burmingham was sent to prison for 20 months.
But, Burmingham was released from prison in January 2026 after serving eight months of her sentence. Caroline is now campaigning for a change in the law around sentencing guidelines for historical child abuse cases.
Under current laws, judges can only pass a sentence within the maximum term available at the time of the offence. This means individuals who committed acts of cruelty against children before 2005 can only receive a maximum sentence of two years.
Today, the same offences would carry a maximum sentence of 14 years. Caroline was born in North Middlesex Hospital in London and within a year moved to Bristol with Burmingham, where they lived in multiple properties.
She said: “One of the earliest memories I have is when I was four and we lived in a flat in Bristol, and she kicked me from this big cement tiled hallway from one side to the other like I was a football and in my back and in my stomach. I can remember going to the toilet and peeing blood, and telling her, as a small child would, and the look of horror on her face. But it wasn’t because she was worried about me. She was worried about being found out.
“The other memory I have, which probably goes back further, is that she would go out partying quite a lot, and I can remember being very, very small, and being left on my own in this basement flat, and just running around, screaming in terror. Because I was on my own, I’d exhausted myself screaming and crying, and I just remember this feeling of just giving up and just going back into the bedroom and lying down.
“I just gave up calling for help. One of the key witnesses for the trial was that they saw Melanie coming out partying in the early hours, and I was left on my own as a baby, and they were left shocked.”
“There was a huge amount of sadism to her cruelty,” she added. “She would give me chores to do and then stand over me like a Gestapo officer.
“If I made one mistake or did something wrong, she would grab my hair and start dragging me around and beating me.”
Social services were alerted in 1975, when Caroline was eight and living in Bristol. She claims Burmingham’s suspected abuse wasn’t investigated, nor was her body checked for injuries.
“I was on their register from the age of 8 to the age of 15, and they didn’t make any checks,” she said. She was under Avon and Bristol social services, but cannot get access to her file as it has reportedly been lost.
In 1977, Caroline was examined by a doctor after being admitted to hospital as a result of her mum’s regular beatings. The doctor’s notes stated her injuries to her face were the result of an assault by her mother, and she was a child at risk, but no further action was taken.
They later moved to Long Ashton, just outside Bristol, and she says at that point the abuse “escalated”. She says Burmingham started burning her with cigarettes.
From that point, Caroline claims no one in authority ever checked her body for further abuse injuries. She said: “The abuse became something that would fuel her through the night, so my body would be covered in cigarette burns, bruising, and nobody was checking, and her way of getting away with it was to continually move me.
“One of the hardest things when I looked back is the people who knew what was happening and didn’t do anything. They allowed me to slip through the net.
“Another key witness at the case was a child at the school who had seen me covered in bruises and burns and knew that I was not getting food, and the question I am left with is how a fellow child was more aware of this than an adult?”
In Long Ashton, Caroline said she became more aware of the abuse and began imagining she lived with a different family. She said: “My fantasy would be that I could go and live with a different family and have a different life. These were all things that kept me surviving what I was going through.
“When they say children are very resilient, they are to a point. But ultimately, trauma from a young age informs all your life, really, in many ways. All the decisions and choices you make in your adult life have an impact.”
Throughout her childhood, Caroline explains she was an “incredibly lonely” child with no friends to play. She continued: “I always thought there was something wrong with me. That’s how you survive when a caregiver is a monster: you take all the responsibility on yourself. Melanie’s mantra was always ‘it’s your fault’.”
At the age of 15, Caroline decided to run and escape the abusive household. In her 30s, Caroline claims she wanted to report the case to the police, but she was unable to because a family member didn’t want it exposed.
It was only in 2019 that she made the decision to report the abuse she had suffered to the police. She said: “I broke off contact in my 20s, then I became a mum, so I have not had any contact with her for decades.
“Then in 2019, I made the decision I would go to the police and report her for historical child abuse and then followed a police investigation which spanned 3.5 years.”
When Caroline found out that her birth mother had been released from prison after serving eight months of a 20-month prison sentence, she said, ‘she could not understand it’. It just floored me completely,” she added.
“Everything I am doing now is for the next generations of people who do come forward to get justice because nothing that I am doing is going to affect the outcome of my case.”
Now Caroline wants those bought to justice through police investigations for historical child abuse crimes under the Child Cruelty Act to face the sentencing regulations in place now and not those at the time crimes were committed. She has set up a petition which has gained more than 42,000 signatures.
She plans to take it to Parliament later this year and hopes to reach 50,000. Caroline said: “The petition is asking that sentencing guidelines for retrospective punishment be changed for child abuse. We should have some kind of moral thread when it’s about malevolent harm to another human being – there should be an override.
‘The only thing that stops monsters’
She added: “The only two things that stop monsters are stopping access and exposing them.”
Caroline is also writing a memoir where she will expose some of the abuse that has never been disclosed before. She said: “I heard this line once from a top psychologist saying that around the world we do not have the language that encompasses what a child endures, the horror, when they’re brought up with an abuser, and that really struck me.
“As an adult, you have a certain defence; you can think it through, but a child just absorbs it. There’s nothing to protect them from a person who is capable of doing the worst crimes. With this book, I want to also support other victims who come forward for justice, creating almost like a roadmap for them.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Child abuse is a horrific crime that can cause ever lasting damage and our thoughts are with victims like Caroline as they work to rebuild their lives. Courts must sentence offenders according to the law in place at the time the offence occurred, but judges can still consider the full seriousness of the harm caused when setting punishments.
‘How the law sees it’
“This government is also investing more than half a billion pounds into victim support services to help more victims than ever through the justice system.”
MP Andrew George, who has been supporting her campaign, said: “I strongly support Caroline’s petition. A perpetrator of child abuse should not be treated much more leniently just because they committed the offence in 2004 rather than 2005. But that’s how the law sees it.
“Caroline has demonstrated remarkable inner strength to face reopening the terrible wounds of her past abuse, and to tackle a system which effectively discouraged her from seeking justice.”
To sign her petition visit: https://www.change.org/p/justice-for-survivors-reform-sentencing-for-historical-child-abuse
