What is the consequence of giving Woman to Man?
What is the consequence of placing an individual at the head of a closed family, of giving him authority to rule and guide his family, the family that is his?
What is the consequence of giving Woman in submission to Man? Of placing children, his children under his absolute care and control as the head of his household?
What is the consequence of empowering Man and, as a corollary, disempowering his family, his woman, his children? Allowing him to rule and guide through the mechanisms of submission, obedience - control.
Is it, sometime, abuse? Could we, perhaps, expect that abuse will happen almost inevitably as a result of such a family structure?
So should we be surprised if, sometimes, the consequence is that a man in control of his disempowered family can lock up a daughter in a place where nobody can hear her scream or see her bleed? That he can keep her there, utterly dependent on him for survival, a prisoner for twenty-four years, twenty-four years, as he rapes her and rapes her and rapes her. Repeated sexual abuse my arse. He raped and raped and raped his own daughter. Should we be surprised that he could impregnate her repeatedly, and keep her imprisoned, alone through her pregnancies and labours, imprisoning her children with her, the children of his rapes and rapes and rapes - should we be surprised that this happened? Horrified, yes, of course horrified. But can we really be surprised that this happens?
Should we be surprised that a man capable of such systematic, long term abuse, such cleverly designed, coldly planned cruelty can keep his abuse a secret? From neighbours, friends, associates. From his own family, his own wife, the people living in his house, with him and his imprisoned daughter and his imprisoned (grand)children, the fruit of his shocking, incestuous rapes… is it really so surprising that a man who can do this to his daughter and his (grand)children can control his other family members to the extent that they also knew nothing of what he did in the basement.
How he did it we can only speculate. Perhaps he ruled them with terror, perhaps with violence, perhaps with drugs or alcohol, perhaps he wore them away until they lost themselves and didn’t know even so much as the day of the week. We can only guess.
Why he did it is not guessable - we can say no more than that he did it because he could.
Why is it that he could?
See above.
Or, to put it another way: what about the wife, eh? The mother! How could she not have known what was going on in her own house? You can’t keep something like that secret from your wife! She must have known. It just seems so terrible, her own daughter. Mm. Hey, did you see O’Sullivan’s 147 last night?
Such things hollow a person out.
30 April 2008 at 5:56 am
Does this really surprise people, really? “See above” and that´s all there is.
He raped and raped and raped because he could.
Men abuse and batter women just because they can - it´s like ripping the wings of a butterfly. (This sentence I quoted from Germaine Greer.)
Here´s a little something Margaret Atwood wrote, a poem called A Women´s Issue (a part of that poem):
“You´ll notice that what they have in common
is between the legs. Is this
why wars are fought?
Enemy territory, no man´s
land, to be entered furtively,
fenced, owned but never surely,
scene of these desperate forays
at midnight, captures
and sticky murders, doctors´ rubber gloves
greasy with blood, flesh made inert, the surge of your own uneasy power.
This is no museum.
Who invented the word LOVE?”
And I just read that this monster father claims that he tried to protect his daughter from drugs. Yep. Protect.
I guess he also tries to prove that he loved his daughter so so so so much that he did this?
He loved?
Her so much?
And some people go nodding, not approving, but nodding like they understand it better now that he convinces his love for his daughter. A love so tick that he just had to jail her in.
Rape rape rape.
Why is it that he could do this? Just because he could. Because he could.
30 April 2008 at 11:11 am
I haven’t really been able to think about this for fear of where my thoughts will take me.
5 May 2008 at 6:57 pm
Thank you, Maia, for this. I’ve only in the past day allowed my thoughts to go to her, Elisabeth. And to all her children, especially the oldest, the 19 year old girl with the “unidentified infection;” he was almost certainly raping her, too, wasn’t he, this child, now woman, who has never in her life left her basement cell until now, who has never seen daylight until now.
Our hearts are with Elisabeth and her children, and her mother, too, who is NOT to blame. It’s all on him, though I hesitate to use a pronoun that denotes it was a human being who did this thing, over 24 years. And 6 years of planning before that.
(His maximum sentence, I read, would be just 15 years.)
6 May 2008 at 1:03 pm
I understand this is your blog so it will always be filled with things skewed your way, but is this really a consequence of giving woman to man?
Or is it more of a 3 dimensional atrocity that you seem to be taking a 1 dimensional view on?
Why is it that he could? It is not just because he was allowed absolute control by his wife and family.
It seems more than what you present here, it looks like it is the complete breakdown of not only the Austrian police and Social services system,but of humanity in general female and male.
This system allowed a convicted sexual offender to adopt 3 children after he was convicted once for rape and then once again for attempted rape of a young woman.
This same system allowed for more children to be abused by their mother:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linz_sisters
“She withdrew the children, then aged 7, 11 and 13, from schooling, and imprisoned them in a cellar with no running water in near-total darkness.”
Even with sound proofing one of his tenants has already come forward and said that he heard noises from the basement, it’s a seeming impossibility to think that he is the only one to ever hear anything.
This case seems to draw parallels from another: Auschwitz.
It seems that inside each of us woman, man, child, human, there is something that is monstrously grotesque, and is capable of such things. This person is evil , so are the people that let this go on when there is a paper trail of his prior perpetrations, so is every single person who ever heard a childs cry from that crypt and stood by and did nothing.
6 May 2008 at 9:00 pm
Why is it that he could?
Ghentry, I hear your remarks about “the system”, about rape history being overlooked on adoption, about the neighbours or others who might have seen or heard something which might have led them to suspect that something might not have been quite right… It is certainly remarkable that he was able to make his daughter vanish without trace and to keep her and her children under lock and key in total secrecy for so long. There surely are many questions to be asked about whether someone could or should have intervened earlier and stopped this from happening.
But. *He* did this. Him. Not them.
I don’t wish to be distracted right now by which particular third party, if any, could have stopped this particular instance of abuse by this particular individual. I’m not talking about how he was allowed to get away with it.
I’m talking about why he did it. I’m talking about how he had the power to do this. I’m talking about whether abuse is a predictable consequence of giving power to men and taking it away from women and children. And I’m wondering, also, how we come to blame his wife.