A MAN who lost his temper and kicked his partner's six-year-old daughter has been ordered to carry out community service.

The 35-year-old Wirral man, who suffered an anxiety attack during sentence resulting in the court being adjourned for 10 minutes, was also placed on probation for 12 months.

Judge Richard Pickering said that normally the offence would result in custody, but this was a wholly exceptional incident and there had been an unhappy combination of circumstances.

Through no fault of her own, the child has a sad pattern of behavioural problems and difficulties with which she and those around her have to cope, he said. Both the child's mother and aunt had given evidence about difficult incidents they had encountered with the child, and the offence occurred at a time when she was particularly disturbed having moved addresses, said Judge Pickering.

The man had been new on the scene and these things take time for a child to accept, and a psychologist had been called in by her school to try and assist.

The child has improved over the past year and social services had instigated the application that the man's bail be varied so that he could be with her, he said.

"The ordinary public reaction is that violence towards a child is always very serious and it is because of that I must make it clear not only to you but to anybody responsible for a child, maybe a difficult child, that if you lose your grip and resort to violence you can't just get away with a probation order. I have to make it clear that punishment goes with it," said Judge Pickering.

A jury at Liverpool Crown Court had convicted the man of assault causing actual bodily harm to the child outside their Birkenhead flat in February 1996.

A young man walking by saw the defendant's head bobbing up and down through the trees and a sound associated with it.

He was curious and thought it might be a man kicking a football, but he saw the man lift the girl from a seating position by her coat and kick her a number of times, said Mr Geoffrey Lowe, prosecuting. The young man brought a nearby garage owner who saw the continuation of the assault and saw the man with a car's windscreen wiper in his hands.

The man, who cannot be named, claimed during his trial that the girl had taken the wiper off his car but he had not lost his temper and had not assaulted her.

Miss Fiona Jordan, defending, said it had been a case of an out of character momentary loss of self-control.

He has lived with the child and the child's mother since his arrest, and following conversations with child psychologists the social services hope to deregister the child at their next meeting, she said.

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