Worthless parents ...

... get worthless kids.

I was watching one of these shows on TV earlier tonight, a documentary about beauty pageants for little girls. Babies, even. Only in America would you have a girl show herself off in swimwear on stage before she's learned to walk. Yuck. But it really struck me what total lack of insight some parents suffer from. There was this one couple (where the husband was so obviously gay it was ridiculous) who had a two year old daughter who just 'loved' doing pageants. The mother tried to get the kid to hold up a couple of her trophies and say Ava loves trophies! or something like that ... she couldn't even get her to understand what she was supposed to do. And then she immediately went on to say that her daughter was soo committed to her pageant participation, she just loved doing it and would go on stage and just give 110%. WTF? Talk about confirmation bias ... ! I just don't understand how it's possible to as a parent be so blind. o_O

And sometimes that has infinitely worse effects than some kids just being raised like living dolls. In Sweden right now there's a criminal case that's shaking the nation ... and it really is appalling, they should be reeling. It was broken open by Uppdrag granskning, which is a wonderful investigative TV show. It's like the Swedish answer to 60 Minutes. I watched the show on Wednesday, The Second Rape, and it really was appalling and shocking. I hardly know where to start, there is so much to criticize there that it's almost overwhelming.

Brief recap: 14-year-old girl is raped by 15-year-old boy on school grounds during school hours. She goes to the police, they investigate, the boy confesses and is eventually found guilty as charged. But in the small community where these teens lived (the girl has since moved away), the convicted rapist is celebrated and the victim is brutally slandered. I mean, it almost defies belief ... slander in the community and beyond slander online. The rapist's brother set up a website for him all about the kid's innocence, and of course the comments came pouring in ... I'm talking gross death threats, seriously, it's been on that level. The girl lost almost all her friends and was bullied half to death. At the graduation celebration in the local church she did not attend, but her attacker did ... he was welcomed to the church even though there was of course a restraining order against him, and his victim might well have been there. He gave out flowers to his schoolmates and was applauded [!!]. Then during a beach party the same night, again a graduation celebration, he raped another girl! He's been tried for this as well and found guilty. But still the community supports him, and the second victim is being called 'cunt' to her face by random people in the streets. (She was 17 years old, the boy is now 16 and in a juvenile institution.) There were some interviews in the show that just beggared belief.

The vicar in this parish ought to be fired from his job. He is a complete & utter idiot. Get this: he claimed not to have known about the second rape, which took place the same day that he welcomed this convicted rapist into his church and felt that it was 'a powerful demonstration'. o_O Nope, never heard of it. Then the reporter asked what his opinion of the situation was now that he did know about it. This devoted servant of god actually managed to say the following: Poor boy. I mean ... what a total piece of shit. Both of them.

The bullying online has been ongoing the entire time, now against both girls. But of course after the show aired the tide has completely turned ... now it's the boy's family who are getting the death threats. Cowards that they are, they have removed their website. The Facebook group (now deleted) supporting the boy had 4 000 members, the one supporting the girls (only just created this week) already has something like 50 000 members. Death threats are bad, but I can't make myself feel sorry for this family. WTF is wrong with this mother??

As a general rule, although there may be exceptions (some people may be just born 'bad'), IMO, when your son is a twice-convicted rapist at age 16, you have failed as a mother. If your son at age 15 forces a young girl to the floor, straddles her, holds her arms down, forces her jaws apart and shoves his dick down her throat after she has asked him to 'please stop', according to his own statement, five or six times ... then you have failed as a mother. And reading an interview with the mother in Aftonbladet, I see that she's not even ashamed of it, and is continuing to fail her child. Of course I believe my son is innocent. She's going to keep fighting for her son, as apparently she feels is her duty as a mother. o_O

Now, I don't have any kids, and I don't want any either, but seriously, if I had one, I really hope that I would have the brains and the ethical stamina and just the common decency to make my child take responsibility for his or her own actions. How does it help to deny reality?? She's probably setting the kid up to become a serial rapist - just one more to go, and he's there. He's a criminal. Her mollycoddling is quite possibly what made him one, and she's only going to make it worse by insisting on treating him like her golden boy still.

Now, as we know, I am so prejudiced. Just bursting with prejudice, I am. But the photo that has been published of this woman ... When I see a grown up white woman with all her hair in afro braids like this, that just screams white trash to me. There's been no mention whatsoever of a father, so she may well be a single mother to these boys. Red flags just going up all over the place. Her kids have the deck stacked against them to start with ... and she is determined to make it worse.

Worthless parents, worthless kids. Hard to know where to start to fix the problem. :-(

One more thing: Amanda Ögren, one of the very few people who has stood by the first victim through all of this, is a true hero. She deserves a medal. She is 15 years old and she has done something that IMO most adults would not have had the strength to do. I mean, Q.E.D. People like her restore my faith in humanity. :-)