Breaking the spirit of ‘angries’ among us
Arecent court report of a girl whose cruel and wicked parents had for years abused and treated her as their personal slave, made for harrowing reading.
As the miserable tale progressed and I read how the neighbours had heard the stepfather shouting at the teenagers for hours on end, day after day, I wondered why they hadn’t intervened sooner.
Five years it went on. Some of those who noticed her appalling state of dress, and observed her walking to school barefoot in the rain, had tried to give her clothes.
These sartorial gifts only enraged the parents further. They cut them up and the girl reverted to wearing filthy clothing that stank. Sleep-deprived from having to share a bed with her toddler brother and look after him as her own, she would be seen by neighbours carrying him on her hip as she toiled in the backyard.
Her life was a living hell of drudgery as she rose early to perform a routine of gruelling chores before going to school. Hopefully her classmates refrained from bullying a girl who smelt and looked bad. She would have had little energy to try and navigate the luxury of forming, or trusting friendships.
When her parents were questioned about the harshness of the girl’s upbringing, they insisted their daughter was a liar who had fabricated bad fairytale stories from watching too many TV shows.
One set of neighbours gave an account of hearing the girl’s father routinely shouting a litany of abuse at her during their meal time. They could almost set their watches to it. There was considerable physical abuse too.
From somewhere in the depths of that miserable life, when she realised the cavalry was never going to come, and she couldn’t stand it a moment longer, the girl ran away.
At the parents’ trial there were people who gave witness to what they had heard and seen go on around that house. It made you want to find out how many times social services had been alerted, if at all, and if anyone had really challenged the parents.
Perhaps they thought that if they had confronted them it would only have incurred further wrath, and more punishment would have rained down upon the unfortunate girl’s head.
I’ve done it myself – neglected to act. A couple of years ago while staying at a YMCA I woke early and went down to the dining room for breakfast. A woman and her young daughter were at a table, the daughter still in her pyjamas and dressing gown.
Not that the little girl’s sleep attire had anything to do with the price of fish. I know that in this post-Victorian era, coming down to breakfast in your pyjamas has long been acceptable garb for small-fry, but it made me notice them.
She looked so snuggly and cute, mother and daughter seeming to be perfectly happy, till it all changed when a man joined them. He was one of those ominous dark cloud guys whose mood quickly infects a room. If he was born at the turn of last century he would have made a great silent movie actor. His eyes were wide and wild and he trained his gaze on the little girl who froze with fright.
Heavy whispered invective was coming out of the brute’s mouth and the mother kept her eyes lowered in a mixture of embarrassment and terror. They were seated close to the counter and the young woman behind the servery kept darting nervous glances at the trio in a worried fashion.
He didn’t let up and whoever these two females were to him, he seemed to have total control over their lives. My heart was pounding and I rose to go over and say something. But I stopped.
The mother looked up and saw me getting out of my chair to come over and communicated a tiny shake of her head to me. Keep out of it, was the message, it’ll only make it worse.
If I intervened and shot my mouth off it may have made me feel I had done the right thing. But eventually those three souls were going to go back to their room and behind closed doors, mother and daughter would have probably copped it, the man blaming them for the intervention.
You can’t call the police for violence that might happen, and it’s not against the law to appear menacing in public. Even the hostel couldn’t do anything about a general vibe of violence.
And maybe I had read it wrong and the horrid man was just all mouth and trousers, and like a lot of ‘‘angries’’ got a kick out of terrorising people through threat. Sadly, that’s probably the only way he got any attention.
But the incident stayed with me and if it presented itself again I’d like to think I would have found a way to intervene without making it worse. They say it takes a village to raise a child. But it only takes one person to kill the spirit in everyone.
He didn’t let up and whoever these two females were to him, he seemed to have total control over their lives.