My Daughter the Youth Offender

February 1, 2026·53 min·5 clips

Her daughter's friends, who had previously assaulted her, went on to bash a young man to death.

The guest stays unnamed for legal and personal reasons. That privacy gives the conversation its shape: a foster mother talking about love, fear, harm, and what a parent can carry. She came to motherhood indirectly. After four years of unsuccessful IVF, she looked at embryos in Greece, South Africa, or Spain, then decided pregnancy was not the point. She fostered instead. The host names the Australian problem plainly: adoption is difficult, while the country badly needs foster parents. That reality hangs over the episode. The daughter is both offender and victim, and the show does not try to smooth that out. One night, she is brought home exhausted, dirty, hungry, and in need of sleep, a wash, and the plain comfort of a bed. A detective who had kept in touch during an earlier court case arrives with others for a welfare check. For a moment, there is relief. Then the next call comes. Has the daughter checked her phone? People she had been with were involved in the fatal bashing of a young man. The host pauses to confirm the central fact. The guest says detectives had seen her daughter, and she was in bed at home. That small detail carries enormous weight. The guest says her daughter was not involved, but the distance between safety and catastrophe feels terrifyingly small. She could have been implicated. She could have been hurt. Still, the mother does not let go. By the end, she still wants a relationship and still calls the daughter hers, whatever any piece of paper says.

As heard by us

A foster mother's story turns youth offending into something rawer: harm, care, fear and one narrow escape from a fatal night.

My Daughter the Youth Offender is a hard, intimate Australian True Crime episode about a foster mother trying to love a girl the system could not easily hold.

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Why you'd press play

You want the foster mother's side of a youth-crime story on Australian True Crime.

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