Atrocious Love

A child is so wholly dependent on parents for emotional stability and support, for guidance and for caring love, that with all or a portion of those absolute requirements withdrawn from that child the world must certainly appear as a dark void of misery. It is not actually possible for most people to visualize a child so utterly abandoned, left hopelessly adrift by a parent's disinterest, or in certain circumstances, left to psychotic episodes of child abuse and exploitation.

Most people feel an instinctive, subconscious need to to cherish a child, support and love a child. It is a deep-rooted imperative inscribed in our collective genes, tied securely to our most basic instinct of survival. Love and compassion flow from strangers toward an abandoned child. People become emotionally moved to do whatever it is in their power, to help a child overcome feelings of being lost and abandoned.

Yet the dreadful fate of some children is to be violated; by extreme physical neglect, by psychological torment arising from lack of care, and by sexual predation. In Ottawa, a trial presided by Ontario Court Justice Lise Maisonneuve has just concluded, with a 57-year-old man being sentenced to 5 years' imprisonment as penalty for having molested and abused his step-daughter from the age of six to age fifteen.

The child was very well aware that her mother was involved in her abuse simply because her mother witnessed it and encouraged it, to keep her husband in a good frame of mind. And the step-father testified that this was an ongoing life-lesson for his step-daughter, to teach her that everything comes at a price. The gifts and money he gave her were in exchange for 'favours', of a sexual nature.

The birthday gift the girl implored her mother to grant her for her fifteenth birthday was to have her mother finally put a stop to the sexual abuse. The young child lived a life of horror, and when her pleas to her mother went unanswered she finally revealed to a friend and the friend's mother what had been occurring to her.

The girl testified against her step-father, but no charges were laid against her compliant and willing mother, because the girl refused to press charges against her mother. The mother admitted to police she was aware of what was occurring, she witnessed her husband touching her daughter's breasts, and knew that from age six the girl was forced to masturbate the man.

The mother gave no explanation for her having assisted her husband in abusing her daughter. And she has no intention of leaving the man. A court-appointed psychiatrist testified that the man claimed the girl enjoyed his sexual attention. The young girl testified in a victim impact statement her empty feelings, lack of self regard, and thoughts of suicide.

And there is, in Montreal, another ongoing trial, that of a doctor, a father of two young children, whose wife, he discovered was having an affair. That knowledge devastated the husband. In the absence of his wife he murdered his five-year-old son and his three-year-old daughter in their beds, using his surgeon's skills to eviscerate them.

The morning he was discovered in his bedroom, having taken a drug overdose, with h is dead children lying bloodied and cold in their beds, police rushed him to hospital. He asked paramedics looking after him en route to hospital to "Tell my wife I love her". And he also said "I did it this morning".

His parents, who lived an hour's drive away had an anxious premonition when they had spoken with him the night before; his mental condition seemed highly abnormal. They had discussed between them whether to drive over that winter's night to ascertain whether all was well, and decided in the end, to wait until morning.

And in Manitoba, a Winnipeg woman was sentenced to 12 years in prison for smothering her two-year-old daughter to death while at a Child and Family Services-approved shelter. She was under the supervision of Child and Family Services while living at a women's shelter where the little girl had been returned to her care. The 29-year-old mother insisted she hadn't meant to kill her child, just stop her crying.

An autopsy of the child revealed she had over thirty separate injuries to "nearly every portion of the body", in the days leading up to her death. Injuries that included bite marks to her legs.