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
The kids, meanwhile, are materially indulged to a degree unimaginable when I was a child, only 30-odd years ago; they are bombarded with commercial entertainment and deprived of that perfect childhood luxury of intense boredom. They are treated — by advertisers, nutritionists, teachers and indeed parents — as if they were surrogate adults, with the rights of adults to make intelligent decisions of their own. And when they fail to do so, we are shocked. As I say, we are terribly confused; the kids have got us all in a lather.
This last year has seen a whole raft of prominent (and extreme) criminal cases which gnaw away at our own insecurities over children, over what to do with the kids. Peel back 12 months to the time a little English girl went missing from the Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz; the sniffer dogs growling at the boot of the car, the open window, the Tapas Nine drinking their wine 100 yards away. Madeleine McCann was certainly precious to her parents Kate and Gerry; she had been conceived after lengthy fertility treatment; they wanted her a lot. But clearly they did not want her all the time, otherwise they would not have left her in that apartment bedroom. If this seems harsh, my apologies — but it is a judgment which I suspect fits another few million parents in Britain today, parents who love their kids and would do absolutely anything for them — most of the time. Ambivalence.
It may well turn out that the Shannon Matthews case was altogether less ambivalent and Josef Fritzl substantially less so still. But we have been gripped this last year by reading, pretty much every day, what other parents do to their kids, either by accident or design. It has fascinated and appalled us in equal measure — at least in part because we are not sure what to do with them ourselves.
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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".