Blinders

Warning, this is a rant...

This makes me very angry and so very sad.

There's a headline on CNN today, on the web page, seen the world over. It has to do with a criminal case in Austria; a horrific true story of a father who imprisoned his daughter in a basement, basically a dungeon, for 24 years, and repeatedly raped her, resulting in her bearing him seven children. Three of those children were kept in the dungeon as well, and never saw the light of day until the oldest girl, at 19, fell very ill and needed to be hospitalized in an induced coma, at which point the whole gruesome situation was exposed.

That story, that crime, is vile enough. It's appalling and horrifying and makes me absolutely heartsick for those victims. But that's not what irritated the hell out of me today. It was the headline. I can barely type it, but I must to make my point "Incest Dungeon Girl Wakes From Coma".

What writer, what editor, is so phenomenally cold and uncaring, so lacking in empathy and basic respect for human dignity, as to call this young woman who has been through such an ordeal and almost died, "Incest Dungeon Girl"?!?!?! How would they feel if that were their sister or cousin? I can't even imagine what that might do to her psyche to hear herself described that way to the entire world.

This is a person, a young girl, with a heart and a mind and hopes and fears and a very long road to recovery. She's not simply an object; a sensational story angle good for racking up millions of page views. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just try and think of it from her point of view, lying in that hospital bed, joyous at the prospect of a new real life, only to find out that half the world thinks of you as "Incest Dungeon Girl", and see if you can understand what I mean, and why it makes me cry.

Okay, I'm done now.

Aloha