Letters to the Editor
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Wrong again
The only way the women could be considered equally culpable is if they knew everything and STILL did not report it to anyone though they could have. Even if they themselves never performed ANY of the crimes.
This is probably a pretty universal determinant of complicit guilt in a crime.
I don't know what the standard is in Austria, but if this happened in the US, no such luck. Different rules apply to criminal neglect of children, but even then, you couldn't charge the wife with rape, murder, false imprisonment, etc. with respect to her adult daughter. There is no duty to report crime (except as to the children), and there is no duty to be a good samaritan in America. Thus, if you were on the beach, and you were a really good swimmer, and you saw someone drowning, and you did absolutely nothing to help them, you could not be charged with anything, nor sued for damages.
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@lacastor...
are you a weak man?
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No, i'm a lady
but i really like those lanky Calvin Klein boys. Couldn't live without 'em. Thus, your plan does not appeal to my feminazi sentiments.
Of course, my boyfriend is already under my thumb, cooking, cleaning, having all kinds of faggy interests, so, i'm already halfway there.
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Ya gotta love this line ...
"Fritzl served only 18 months for the rape, allegedly because a judge considered he should be reunited with his wife and four children."
... from the link LeCastor posted.
Moreover, it is good for sex offenders to be reunited with their families. It helps them (appear) to go straight and to be reassimilated into their communties.
When I worked as a victim advocate in Mormon country, it was always deemed a good thing to reunite bad men with their families. One had to keep the familty together at all costs so that it would have a patriarchal head.
Speaking of the religion of the Latter Day Saints, we do have the strange case of the FLDS cult in Eldorado, Texas, (actually no real relationship to the now mainstream LDS) where brainwashed fundamentalist women protect the patriarchal heads of their families from any accountability to U.S. law for choosing to find a roundabout way to have sex with 14 year old girls. Just marry 'em! Now if they could only marry up those stray boys to men as well, that bit of sexual abuse could be "legally" validated.
Which leads us to the evils of mothers just in time for Mother's Day ....
(See there is a way to do snark, tie things together, and still insult mothers, but by any standard the Jane Eyre/John McCain thing is a bit of a stretch, unless Cindy has been imprisoned for impasto makeup.)
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If there is a an ongoing crime being committed
and someone is aware of this crime being committed against their own child or parent, and that person does nothing, even though they could do something, certainly it SHOULD be considered at least some sort of crime to not do somethign about it.
The proof is in whether this person knew about the crime, for how long was the crime committed, whether this person was the only one who knew and who thus could help the victim, etc.
If it is not a crime to not lift a finger, it ought to be, even if that crime the bystander is seeing is not considered rape or murder, but negligence of a person in their care or complicity in a conspiracy.
I'm no legal expert, but it sure seems there ought to be some culpability by others in the know.
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Nerdy comment--
My only thought was this:
Have you actually SEEN Blade Runner? Yes, there was weird hair which was sometimes poufy, but no character had that high-in-the-front, late-80's-mall-hair thing going on.
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well leCastor
I promise ice cream fridays...hows that?
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Cataract
Why can't be have both? It would be brilliant.
But no ice cream for the boys, otherwise, they won't be lanky anymore, and that would be a travesty.
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I wonder if this dude
is gonna write another article on Father's Day.
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Is Ms. Fritz complicit?
I don't know. No one knows what this person, this woman, went through. There is the possibility that she is one of those passive follower types or that she is a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. But, I do know that Patty Hearst tried the Stockholm Syndrome (don't know if that term was used) defense, and it did not work. But, I do believe in its existence and that Patty Hearst was a victim. It was decided otherwise.
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sorry, meant
Ms. Fritzl
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unconscionable
Mrs. Fritzl accepted a man back into her life who went to prison for breaking into a woman's house and raping her at knife-point (and also was on record for a second attempt), all whilst being a married father of four children.
She knew more than enough about this monster; protecting her kids, especially the girls, should have been of paramount concern. He began sexually abusing the daughter he later imprisoned at the age of eleven, and no one noticed anything, questioned anything, even when the kid ran away? Unconscionable.
(And yeah, the whole tenor of this article is inappropriately clever.)
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Only Salon article on the Austrian family?
Am I wrong? Or is this only commentary that Salon has published in a week after the Austrian family news was reported?
If so, I find it incredible that Salon's only response is an offensive op-ed that seems to be trying for laughs.
I find the tragedy of the Fritzl family more disturbing than anything in the news since 9-11. The idea of the children who have never seen daylight in their lives is difficult to fathom.
To reduce their ordeal to a few paragraphs in a column that includes joking about a pregnant woman arrested for DUI is astonishingly bad journalism.