This Austrian horror gnaws at our fears about how we treat our own children

30 April 2008

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Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world

You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for more than 20 years and fathered a total of seven children with her. The last nutter you read about, meanwhile, was Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted a young woman, Natascha Kampusch, and kept her beneath a manhole cover in his garage for eight years. Both crimes are, of course, beyond appalling: it takes a lot to get Austria on to our front pages, usually either something with Nazi overtones or, failing that, paedophilia. Fritzl’s, though, is the more fantastically grotesque and scarcely believable; his first sexual assault on his own daughter occurred when she was just 11 years old, something which he has already — apparently quite cheerfully — admitted. Indeed, Fritzl has shown not the slightest remorse, claiming that the incarceration of his daughter was initially a sort of noble piece of tough parenting occasioned by her allegedly unruly behaviour. ‘She was a difficult girl,’ he told the police, and being locked up kept her away from drugs. The police, meanwhile, have described Fritzl as an ‘arrogant’ man; yes, that sounds about right, I should think.

The fact that these two similar-ish cases occurred in Austria is a red herring; the country’s statistics for crimes of a sexual nature, crimes against children, crimes of violence and indeed murder are all well below the European average. In fact the Fritzl case seems, despite the lack of a murder, to have far more in common with the crimes perpetrated by Fred and Rosemary West at their terraced house in Gloucester which kept us all transfixed a decade or so ago — the absolute lack of normal parental feelings towards their children, the blitheness and lack of remorse with which they admitted their crimes. And the sense, maybe, of their casual wickedness having an exponential character; that once one act of wickedness had been committed it broke down a sort of barrier which allowed more and worse acts of wickedness to be committed. Sexually abusing his 11-year-old daughter was not Fritzl’s first sexual crime; there were others before, which the police knew about.

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D Short

May 1st, 2008 3:34pm Report this comment

I think Liddle will find it's only middle class, predominanantly metropolitan children who are almost imprisoned in their own homes that the parents 'don't know what to do with them'.

Up and down the country there are plenty of children who are let out of the house to do whatever they want to do with their friends, who develop a life of their own in a natural way.

Not every child is a product of over-obsessed, over-protective, older, media-involved older parents.

Lucinda Bendavid

May 2nd, 2008 1:42am Report this comment

What sickens me is your attempt to draw a parallel between a sadist's transparent attempt at excusing his cruelty and the anxiety felt by normal if overprotective parents. The horror we feel is deep, almost unbearable empathy for the sufferings of the VICTIM, not identification with the PERPETRATOR. Your moral equivalence is truly evil.

Sharon Reid

May 2nd, 2008 2:07am Report this comment

Very true and perfectly said, Roy Liddle.

Roy

May 2nd, 2008 8:38am Report this comment

"How we treat our own children . . ." Speak for yourself! There will always be miscreants like this man. No need to get het up about it. It is just unpreventable for people like this to slip through the welfare that most societies feel for other individual members around them. One can just be stoic and take what nature decides to throw among us!

Neil Saunders

May 2nd, 2008 9:45am Report this comment

Here! Here! Children need to get used to being bored. When I returned home from school 20 years ago we only had 3 television channels to watch, and one of them was "Pages from Ceefax".

TDK

May 2nd, 2008 1:11pm Report this comment

Presumably D Short has forgotten the recent Shannon case in Dewsbury or perhaps they are a typical middle class family.

D Short

May 3rd, 2008 12:33am Report this comment

I can't really see TDK's point.

The Shannon case has no bearing on my comments or on the Austrian affair.

Michael

May 3rd, 2008 3:46am Report this comment

And what about the beatings and honour killings of female children by their muslim fathers? No anxiety there. Just "you dishonored me, now die". Those relationships are far too common in the news to be reportable, right? But oh boy, one sicko in Austria and all or Western parenting comes into question! Stop the insanity!Don't sensationalize one horror story in Austria when the routine mistreatment and murder of young women is happening every day in the islamic world from Toronto to Tehran on a much greater level we can even begin to imagine! www.stophonourkillings.com

Russell Harris

May 7th, 2008 4:24pm Report this comment

Michael seems to mix up "honour" killings with the case in Austria. While agreeing with Rod Liddle that this case should not be mixed with a generalised latent Austria-phobia because of the Anschluss etc etc, but should be looked upon as a single case of an evil and cunning man who got away with his crimes for 24 years... it has no connection whatsoever with honour killings. The only connection is in the minds of those Islamophobes who would pin all evil in the world onto Islam. Give us all a break, Michael of honourkillingsdotcom - or would you have us believe that any Moslem with a cellar is planning to lock up his daughter to the sake of family honour?

This is the real problem - when one evil sicko is discovered, we immediately have a chorus of similarly twisted sickos parroting the usual refrain of "it's the Moslems wot dunnit".

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