Shit. I haven’t been able to look at this, til talking on the phone with Poodie tonight who said the story isn’t getting proper coverage. So I went looking for the truth at Shakesville, who hits it out of the park from the git:
THIS story should be reported with purpose. If it is not to be consumed as a pithy bit of titillation over one’s morning tea, it should be blunt, and it should be contextualized. No whitewashing, framed within a larger cultural narrative about the mistreatment of women and/or incidents of incest/child abuse in Austria. And then every. single. time. there is another story of this nature, the frame should be repeated. And repeated. And repeated. And repeated.
Until we can’t ignore its prevalence any longer. Until we can’t treat sexual abuse and torture as so much faff to be dismissed once we’ve had the obligatory “What a world!” grouse to salve our barely piqued consciences.
“I am not a monster…I could have killed all of them — then nothing would have happened. No one would have ever known about it.”
The key underlying point to all this is patriarchal consciousness and how it functions. It’s the same principle over and over again: “I had to kill/rape/assault/verbally abuse my daughter to protect her.”
At least this is the argument that this particular proponent gives. Elizabeth was going out to pubs and behaving in too loose a manner — therefore, as a father, he did the “responsible” thing and saved her from herself.
And he believes that he is not a monster, because he was just being a bit more extreme — “stricter” — than the general patriarchal standard is.
But yeah, its the same attitudinal stance that underlies “honour killings” and so on — the same psychological corruption that is rarely understood as such within patriarchal societies.