How the trial of WA parents accused of starving their daughter has played out over the past two weeks

WARNING: This story contains details that some readers may find distressing.

Emaciated and pale, she had the slight frame of a primary schooler, pictures presented to her parent's trial appeared to show.

She liked the Wiggles and Bluey, still sat on her mother's lap to have stories read to her, and dressed in bows and frills of the type usually worn by much younger girls, the trial heard.

Her self-care skills were limited — prosecutors have said she needed help to shower and brush her hair, and didn't know how to peel a banana.

Yet doctors told the trial she wasn't suffering any intellectual disability and was considered of normal intelligence.

And she lived in Perth's affluent western suburbs, a pocket of multi-million-dollar localities close to the ocean and river known colloquially as the "golden triangle".

Ballet teachers raise alarm

The case of the allegedly malnourished teenager and the parents whom police have accused of deliberately starving her has been aired in public for the first time in Perth's District Court in recent weeks, and the evidence heard so far has been as unusual as it has been compelling.

It's the prosecution's case that the parents, a couple in their 40s, caused their only child to suffer by withholding food, leaving her weak and gaunt.

By the time the teenager was eventually taken to hospital — allegedly only after her reluctant parents had been pressured to take her there by worried doctors — she weighed just over 27 kilograms, about the same weight as a typical eight-year-old.

But she might not have received medical attention at all had it not been for the actions of her ballet teachers at two separate dance schools who noticed that even for a dancer, the girl appeared worryingly thin.

Her true age was difficult to discern, not helped by the repeated lies prosecutors claim were told by her parents about how old she actually was.

They allegedly led the teachers to believe she was 14 not 16, but even at 14 she should have weighed more, the teachers thought.

"Wafer thin" was how one of the teachers described her arms, explaining to the court that she felt the girl was so fragile she might fracture bones if she jumped too much.

"She was fading away in front of my very eyes," she said in her evidence, having watched her weak and fatiguing in class.

Parents attribute weight to vegan diet

Alarmed about her condition, the teacher said she cut the girl's classes from eight hours a week to four, but was irate to discover her parents had enrolled her in another school, so she could continue dancing the same amount of hours as before.

At the new school, the court heard the teen's appearance also raised red flags with her teacher.

She was "basically skin and bone", the new teacher testified, lacked muscle tone and appeared to be shrinking as the year progressed. She hadn't put on weight in three years.

Both teachers said they tried to raise their concerns with the girl's parents, who were dismissive.

Her skinny appearance could be explained by her vegan diet, the parents told the teachers, and she was simply "small in stature", having been born prematurely.

But medical evidence presented to the court suggested this wasn't true.

The girl had been born at full term, and though her parents had tried repeatedly to claim she had been born in 2006, she was actually born in 2004, records showed.

The parents were insistent their daughter was perfectly healthy, the teachers said, with the father accusing them of harassing him and his wife and discriminating against the girl because she was vegan.

'Healthiest child'

Snippets of information about her diet were revealed in court, with the father insisting to a child protection worker who eventually got involved in the case that she was "the healthiest child he knew" and ate "the best diet in the world".

The previous day's intake included raspberries and a pear for breakfast, nuts and fruit for lunch, and minestrone soup and vegan chocolate ice cream for dinner, the parents told a general practitioner

But when a dance teacher asked the mother to provide a snack for the girl to eat in between dance classes, the child was given "one thin rice cracker" with tomato, compared with the hearty bowls of pasta other dance students were tucking into, the court heard.

By this time both dance teachers were sufficiently worried to call authorities, alerting the Department for Communities to her plight in 2020.

Case workers then began to try to convince her parents to get her medically assessed, but they weren't keen.

"Ridiculous and frivolous" was the father's response to one child protection worker's concerns, and he repeatedly cancelled appointments the department made for the girl to see a dietician.

When child protection workers tried to visit the house, the father insisted his homeschooled daughter wasn't home.

And, as prosecutors claimed, in an apparent attempt to get authorities off his back, he tried to persuade a GP to provide documentation to certify the girl was perfectly healthy, despite not allowing her to be assessed or even see the doctor.

Parents refuse feeding tube

The turning point came in April 2021, when the parents were persuaded to take their daughter to a GP.

By this time the girl was about to turn 17 and the appointment, which had been scheduled for half an hour, lasted 90 minutes as the doctor quizzed the parents.

The teen weighed just 27.3 kilograms and was 147 centimetres tall, the doctor told the court, warning them she was at risk of cardiac arrest and urgently needed hospital treatment.

The court hears days later the parents took their daughter to Perth Children's Hospital where her case was considered a medical emergency, with doctors diagnosing severe malnutrition.

She urgently needed a feeding tube inserted, doctors told her parents, but they allegedly refused.

This time, however, they were overruled and the child was taken into the care of the department, which then became her guardian and allowed the nasal tube to be inserted.

Girl lacked basic skills, court hears

The teenager ultimately spent nearly two months in hospital, with staff noting her delayed social development.

She couldn't brush her teeth or hair without help, staff observed, and liked watching preschooler TV programs such as Thomas the Tank Engine and The Wiggles, which she would sing along to with her parents.

And when they asked her to express her own wishes, separate to those of her parents, the court heard she said simply: "I've never had a voice."

The girl's parents continue to deny starving her — with her father taking the stand for the first time this week to insist he had no concerns about her health, even after doctors told him she was dangerously underweight and at risk of heart attack.

The father — a cybersecurity expert — told the court in his opinion, her blood test results in April 2021 did not indicate she needed feeding, and he didn't want her to be fed via a tube because she "was eating, could eat".

It was only under cross examination that he admitted he now thought she had been underweight.

But he firmly denied the prosecution's suggestion he "wanted her to stay a little girl forever".

The nature of the family dynamics also began to emerge this week, with the father telling the court he dictated how the family was run.

This included having access to his wife's phone, lying about who was calling her and deleting text messages without her knowledge.

He was verbally abusive towards her, he said.

As he spoke, his wife, who is also charged with starving their daughter, sat weeping in the dock.

The trial will continue this week, before the jury retires to consider its judgement.