The Parental Enabler
by shannon | Published on September 17th, 2009, 10:23 am | Life
Time after time I am baffled when parents are so blind to things happening right under their noses. As a mom I believe that more cases than not, parents are aware but prefer to live in denial. Something so clearly can be standing right before them and because they wish it wasn't so that the mere avoidance of it would make it untrue. I know our kids learn quickly how to manipulate us over the little things. But when it comes to those really big "secrets" how can we be blind? How can a mother, who carried this child within her womb not have a feeling that something is not right? Fear is what keeps us from admitting the truth. I would always do whatever it took to rescue my child from the kind of emotional burden incest would create. Why would someone hurt their own child in this way? cops in the Australian state of Victoria have charged a man with keeping his daughter prisoner in his home and fathering four children with her.
The rapes allegedly took place over a 30-year period, beginning when the girl was 11, Melbourne's Herald Sun reports, and continued until 2007. Cops reportedly believe the man, now in his 60s, threatened to harm the girl's mother and siblings if they spoke out about the rapes.
One of the four children, a girl, died. Her cause of death was attributed to, among other things, respiratory failure and lung disease, according to the Herald Sun report. The three surviving children reportedly all suffer severe health problems.
The suspect's wife, the mother of the victim - with whom the suspect, daughter and their children lived until 2005 - maintains she was ignorant of the sex abuse allegedly taking place almost daily.
"One day she just up and left and I haven't seen her for years. The first I knew of all this is when they came and arrested [my husband]," the victim's mother told the paper.
"We lived in a big house, so I wouldn't have known."
The daughter was evasive whenever asked about who had fathered her children, the victim's mother told the Herald Sun.
"She used to say something about going out to nightclubs and meeting a fella, but then she would clam up," she said.
A neighbor in Victoria said the victim's mother was very involved with the children's lives.
"They were a nice normal family, and then all this comes about," she told the paper. "[The grandmother] was great with those kids, attending school functions and coaching and things."
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2 ... _abus.html
