A bit late to the party, but here goes. My family used to live in this area where a lot of us knew each other. My parents hung out a lot with the neighbours and my brother and I played with the other kids in the area.

There was one family that moved in after we did. I only remember three of their kids - an girl around my age (6-7?), her little brother and a rather small girl (perhaps three or four) but according to my mum they had a bunch more.

The dad was pretty scary - we called him 'dragon man' or 'dragon dad' or something because he wore a T-shirt with a dragon on it - and the kids were always dirty, like they had food smeared all over their faces and such. I didn't like playing with them because they were a bit weird, but did it anyway sometimes, and I seem to remember that my friends didn't like it either. My mum was always very nice to the kids, but telling them stuff like they needed to wash if they wanted to play with our toys.

I later learned that those parents just kept on popping out kids, but didn't take care of them. They'd leave out bread and jam to sustain them all day and they never made them wash or shower. They were also beaten and abused all the time and their next-door neighbour (we lived a couple of doors down) knew about it. My mum once talked to the neighbour who was like 'Yeah, I'm not going to report anything because that's their business.' My mum was freaking furious at her. Fortunately, she's a nurse and it's mandatory for nurses to report that kind of thing here. So she did and the kids were taken away. Apparently they kept at it - after the others were taken away, they had another kid that was taken at birth.

We met one of the kids, the boy, years later at an amusement park. He was much cleaner-looking, and supposedly happy that he was taken from his biological parents. In my eyes, my mum is a hero, and it wasn't even the first time she helped out a kid in a situation like that.