Thursday, September 3, 2009

Years To Think It Over

In California recently, a young woman was rescued after 18 years of captivity. She was abducted off the street when she was 11, kept in a shed in the suspect's back yard, and had children by him. This is disturbing in and of itself.

But it also sounds distressingly similar to the case in Austria recently, where the girl was kept captive in the basement for years, bearing children of her captor. The thought that there could be two such depraved individuals in recent memory is alarming.

But what truly upsets me- what I'm having trouble getting my head around- is that in both cases the captor had a wife.

How could they not have known? How could they not have done something?

Is the dating scene really so bad? Is this really the best they could have done? What could ever possess a woman to stand by her man to such a degree?

Because there is no way that they couldn't have known. This isn't a case of seeing him go into your daughter's room at night, and convincing yourself that it is for an innocent reason. What happened to the maternal instinct? Hell, what happened to human decency? They had to have known that it was happening. Is the trick that it wasn't their own children, that they think they are protecting their own by directing the man to someone else? (That can't be it; the girl in Austria was the man's daughter) Do they, god forbid, approve of the situation?

How is there any way that this makes sense?

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