Parents Accused of Locking Up Their Children for Decades

A woman claims she and her brother were held captive for years by their parents, and were so cut off from society that she'd never spoken to anyone outside her family before.

But although the case went to court, the authorities reportedly decided they were unable to intervene and ruled the family should continue to live together.

The 24-year-old, named as Daniela by the local media, fled her isolated home in the village of Arbucies, in northeastern Spain, and ran to her nearest neighbor where she banged on his door for help. During her escape attempt on February 24, she told the shocked resident, named as Josep, that her parents had kept her locked up for her full 24 years, and had done the same to her 18-year-old brother Alex, according to the Spanish newspaper El Punt Avui.

When Josep's partner arrived home, the couple fed the girl dinner and she told them she had never been to school, did not have a television and was only allowed to leave the house when she went grocery shopping in the car with her father. Josep said: "She told me it was the first time she had a conversation with someone who wasn't from her family." The neighbor said she spoke in the local language of Catalan, but her basic vocabulary made her seem much younger than 24.

The couple called the police, who took the woman to stay with her uncle that night—despite her reported protests—while they investigated the allegations against her parents, the newspaper said.

Her father, a 58-year-old Dutch man identified as Job, told police officers that the family lived an isolated life because his wife was sensitive to radiation and could not live near antennas. He pointed out that home-schooling is legal in the Netherlands where he's from. And when questioned about his daughter's claims of abuse, he said she suffered from psychiatric problems and said her uncle, who is a therapist, had previously treated her—although the young woman had no medical records, nor any other documentation or ID, according to La Vanguardia newspaper.

The parents were officially summoned to the Arbúcies police station on suspicion of abuse, domestic violence and family abandonment, and the case was later referred to the Santa Coloma de Farners Court for a hearing on March 3.

But the parents refused to testify, and their children refused to make a legal complaint against them. In addition, neither of the children were minors—meaning they could not be removed from the parents' care—but their lack of worldliness made it impossible for them to live alone. So the court ruled that there was nothing else they could do and the family should be allowed to live together, as long as the grown-up children were allowed more freedom in future.

Newsweek has emailed the Arbúcies Police for further information and comment.

It's not the first time a family has hit the headlines, accused of keeping their children prisoners.

Back in October 2019, a family of six adult children and their bedridden father were found holed-up in a cellar beneath a boarded house, where they had lived for nine years "waiting for the end of time." The discovery was made when one of the adult children left seeking help in the Drenthe region of the Netherlands.

In the U.S., California parents David and Louise Turpin were jailed for life in 2019 after they kept their 13 children shackled to their beds and starved them. The pair reportedly quoted the Bible as they abused their children.

Last summer, Australian parents, who were members of a religious cult known as "The Saints," were arrested on suspicion of allowing their 8-year-old daughter to die from her diabetes, by refusing to give her insulin in the belief God would heal her instead.