Miranda Wallis didn't associate violent rages, police visits and the physical destruction of her home with starting a family when she first adopted a pair of sisters seven years ago.
Cute, mild mannered and polite, the girls, then aged six and nine, had initially been on their best behaviour, and Wallis, in her mid-40s at the time, revelled in the joy and fulfilment of being a first-time mother.
What she didn't see was the seething pain and mistrust behind the girls' charming demeanor, the result of early lives spent in a broken home, an orphanage and foster homes. It was during a minor disagreement with her younger daughter one evening that Wallis first saw the problem for what it was, or as she describes it, when 'the typhoon' first struck.
'All of a sudden, my younger child hurled her bowl of rice against the wall, breaking it into a million pieces and the rice going everywhere,' she says.
'She wouldn't stop screaming and yelling. It was shocking because the reprimand I had given her just didn't match her reaction.'
Aghast, the mother-of-two set out to understand the cause of all this. A call to the foster mother with whom they previously stayed revealed a much deeper problem.
The violent flare-up, Wallis discovered, had not been a single event. It had, in fact, been a way of life for the younger child.