generalspeaking

In Self Defence

"You took 11 years of my life away. I spent 11 years in hell, now your hell is just beginning."
Michelle Knight, kidnapping victim, Cleveland

"These people are trying to paint me as a monster. I'm not a monster. I'm sick."
Ariel Castro, kidnapper, tormentor, rapist, misunderstood

"These people" to whom Ariel Castro, 53, refers represents the three women who as young and trusting girls he abducted and kept prisoners for over a decade of their lives -- tormenting and repeatedly raping them, ravaging the dignity and promise of life from them, transforming them into struggling, pleading captives from whom the spark of life was slowly being extinguished -- now standing in judgement of him.

He has been spared the death penalty for his mind-numbingly chilling strike against humanity. But he asks for understanding and compassion from the media, from the public, from his accusers. He kept three young girls manacled, half-starved, beaten into compliance, hidden and continually abused in the most atrocious conditions, while going about what appeared to his brothers who occasionally visited his home, a fairly normal life.

Among society's most trusted members are surely those who come in contact with children. Ariel Castro worked as a school bus driver. How many parents have it pass their minds that the usually older man or woman working as a school bus driver might conceivably be someone who harbours ill will against their vulnerable children?

How many employers looking for reliable drivers are capable of peering into the dark mind of a viciously depraved sexual deviant?

This man who feels pity for himself and a confusion of hurt pride that the three women he so horrendously abused feel no measure of compassion for his plight, when he evinced none for them in their long years of miserable captivity, contends that he was himself a victim of sexual predation.

He did to others only what was visited upon him by others. And he chose a 14-year-old girl who was a close friend of his own daughter.

Taking 14-year-old Michelle Knight into captivity in 2002 and devouring her childhood into a ghastly world of violent bondage. One victim would not suffice; he captured another, Amanda Berry at 16, and then another, 20-year-old Gina DeJesus. He constructed an alarm system, chaining them into bolted bedrooms, the windows boarded up, doorknobs replaced with locks.

The women were so beaten and battered, psychologically defeated, that one feared exiting her assigned bedroom, even at the sight of her liberation from the place that had become her prison. Police had to promise and convince her that she was free, no longer a prisoner, free to take up her life before it had been taken from her. Free to become a normal person again, if she could surmount the horrendous damage done her.

Court documents cited diary entrances of the women's treatment. Including an allotment of one meal daily, along with a litany of basic hygiene routines that were denied them. "The entries speak of forced sexual conduct, of being locked in a dark room, of anticipating the next session of abuse, of the dreams of someday escaping and being reunited with family, of being chained to a wall, of being held like a prisoner of war ... of being treated like an animal."

All three must have had constant thoughts of their families, mourning them as dead. They must themselves have thought from time to time that they might be better off dead than living through the constant violent assaults, the utter degradation, with no hope for the future other than the bleak realization that they might never have any future different than the life they had been forced into.

It is now their tormentor's turn to experience what it is like to live a long, agonizing period of living death, incarcerated for a period of time extending long past where any human can expect biological longevity to take them.

Labels: Atrocities, Crime, Human Relations, Justice, Sexism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 03, 2013