This Austrian horror gnaws at our fears about how we treat our own children
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
I am not sure we even recoil from this sort of stuff any more, so familiar has it become to us — though there is no evidence that there are more Fred Wests and Josef Fritzls around these days than was the case, say, 50 years ago. They are still singularities, even if we are occasionally tempted to suspect that it all happens more often than we care to believe and are occasionally supported in this thesis by our zealous social services departments, which hold all parents in suspicion. Meanwhile, incest has long been our favourite crime, by which I mean the crime which most excites and repels us — even more than murder. Only one or two societies in the world lack a comprehensive incest taboo and Austria, I think, is not one of them. Low IQ is often associated with those who break incest taboos in the West; but then low IQ is associated with most crime in general, the prison population having an IQ perhaps 10 per cent below the national average. The exception to this rule is, oddly enough, serial killers, some of whom are known to have high IQs.
But there is one thing about this apparently vile singularity, the Fritzl case, which has a degree of resonance with us all — I mean, aside from the grotesque detail of his crimes. It is there in his statement to the police, the notion that he needed to lock his poor daughter away to keep her out of trouble. It has been evident for some time that we have a dangerously ambivalent attitude towards children and, by extension, parenting: we do not seem to know quite what to do. We are simultaneously outrageously indulgent towards our offspring and — tormented by the invisible presence of paedophiles lurking behind every bush — terribly restrictive. Children have become more precious to us than ever before — so precious that we may not be allowed to photograph them taking part in a school sports day, for example. At the same time, we are not allowed physically to chastise them and are even warned that too stentorian a ticking-off might have future damaging effects — and then we are reminded, when they go off the rails, as they increasingly seem to do, that we should have been more responsible parents in the first case, more disciplinarian.
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D Short
May 1st, 2008 3:34pmI 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 1:42amWhat 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 2:07amVery true and perfectly said, Roy Liddle.
Roy
May 2nd, 2008 8:38am"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 9:45amHere! 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 1:11pmPresumably D Short has forgotten the recent Shannon case in Dewsbury or perhaps they are a typical middle class family.
D Short
May 3rd, 2008 12:33amI 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 3:46amAnd 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 4:24pmMichael 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".