It’s really unclear from the article whether the father deserved it, and just how stretched to the limit the girl was. Still, this comes not too long after that 12-13 year old girl got her adult boyfriend to off her family. The thing that concerns me is that these types of stories are finally not shocking me anymore, and this really fucks me off.
It’s all too easy now for me to imagine a young teenybopper with dead eyes on a pure-looking face, holding up a shotgun, getting herself psyched up to do it, and pulling the trigger. And then having the presence of mind to arrange the house so it looks like a break-in. Cold, calculated murder from children not old enough to even get a driver’s permit seems an almost normal part of our society. When I first opened the link to the article, I glimpsed at the story, then hit the back button with a shrug.
Should that be the normal reaction upon reading about a 13-year old girl killing her father in cold blood (regardless of why she did it)?
I don’t know if that is a normal reaction, but we are all so plugged-in that we hear about every outrage that goes on in the world all the time, and our outrage meters are just getting worn out, I figure.
This isn’t far from McKeesport, where I was born, and where a man was recently arrested for kidnapping a 14 year old girl and holding her for ten years.
So if you think things just recently got bad, you probably haven’t been paying attention.
Everyone has a different threshold of what is or is not a normal reaction to extremely upsetting news. Empathizing plays into it, IMHO. If a reader feels an emotional connection to the story they feel more than if they do not.
The cumultive effect is numbing and that is, as you said, upsetting. What does one do?
Keep in mind we know little of the nature of the alleged abuse.
Not that murder is ever the answer, of course. But I have heard of situations so abusive that you wonder why the victim didn’t just get a gun and shoot the abuser.
Of course, this is why the law makes provisions for such circumstances. I guess I’m just saying there’s a lot here we don’t know yet.
What is most shocking to me is the girl told at least 2 people that she was being abused and neither did anything about. I wonder how they feel knowing they could have helped but did nothing. It makes me proud to be a part of the human race.
Not mine. It gives me the courage to act when I see things like this happen. If not me, then who, who will make a sacrifice to make a difference in anothers life?
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article goes into more detail. It says that the mother lost custody of 2 of the 3 kids a couple of years ago, and there were abuse charges lodged even then. Aneighbor is quoted as saying, “The whole street knew that he abused the girls. You could hear her screaming at night.”
Really? I just saw my friends daughter yelling at him, crying, because he wouldn’t let her go to the movies with her friends late on a Friday night because they had to leave early Saturday morning.
Yeah, the girl probably felt she had no choice. I guess I was never really feeling outrage, just a little sad that such a headline doesn’t shock anymore. Does it really matter, though? Shouldn’t the overall rate of this stuff be the most important thing, and not the extreme details of a single case?
The Gazette’s report is seriously fucked, by the way. Wouldn’t all you have to do is call Child Services during one of those incidents, and they’d seriously be on Daddy’s ass? And that’s even if no one wanted to intervene, though how can anyone bear to hear a girl scream regularly at abuse?
I do think it’s two entirely different types of people involved in the crimes the OP mentions. The girl who had her much older boyfriend help her slaughter her family was cut from different cloth than the thirteen year old who shot her father. For one thing, she stopped at her father. For another, the abuse she suffered was so blatent “the whole neighborhood knew about it”. I think we should be outraged at the idea that child abuse is so prevalent in this society, not outraged that another teenager killed because in this case it was a “victim” snapping and striking back, not a self-centered girl who wanted to run away and “marry” her much older boyfriend.
A child protective services report from 2002 shows that about 3% of this country’s 30 million children under 18 were “victims of abuse or neglect.” And one third of this 3% was physical or sexual abuse. That’s still a disgustingly high number, but it’s hardly the boogeyman around every corner that the media makes it out to be.
And I really question what else is going on in this neighborhood if the neighbors could hear the screams every night and no one did anything.
Justin_Bailey, let me rephrase. I wasn’t very articulate. I think we should be outraged that child abuse is still considered something a neighbor should not report, but should “mind their own business” about. People see it as so prevalent, and they don’t want to report it for fear of retribution. They figure the kid will cope somehow.
