her daughter has died, I get your point but on this threads its tasteless IMO
I am less concerned with "taste" than making a priority of Big Red Flags being noticed and acted upon. Preferable at a community level via peer pressure, cos that it is known to be relatively effective when compared to an over stretched social services.
And what is evident in this case is that it seems there were Big Red Flags that were not waved, leading to this man having unfettered, unsupervised access to a 12 year old girl. With a time frame extensive enough to do unspeakable things to her, kill her and hide her body.
It doesn't follow that I am without compassion for the mother and grandmother in this awful news story. I'm inclined to believe that they didn't make their choices in a vacuum and there may well have been a generational cycle of "fuzzy" boundaries and poverty of risk assessment when it came to prioritising the safety and well being of children in the family influencing their approach.
It certainly doesn't follow that I am blaming "single mothers". They are a large and diverse group. The vast majority of them being extremely cautious (for good reason) about who has any contact, let alone unsupervised contact, with their children. In the main I think those who would be willing to maintain a relationship between themselves, their children and their mother after said mother had begun a sexual relationship with and moved their ex boyfriend in.... in great number would have insisted that contact took place in their own home without overnight stays at granny's when she would be out at work all night, leaving said boyfriend with very "flexible" boundaries all alone with their child. I don't think the sort access to the child allowed was at all typical of the majority of single parent set ups by any stretch of the imagination.
This case is primarily about a young victim of a truly vile crime. Her story, including how she ended up in a position for this to have happened to her, has to be the priority. And how she ended up being left vulnerable and alone with this man should not be swept under the carpet unmentioned and unexamined in the name of compassion. Because there are god knows how many other potential Tia-s out there presently unscathed and if a long hard look at Big Red Flags Blindness and why they shouldn't be ignored gives them a shot at avoiding a similar fate...well then I'm all for it. Because I am not sure what else we can do given that child protection is pushed to its absolute limits in terms of work load in the face of massive under funding.
I am not without sympathy for the adults left behind to mourn. But I think the situation in terms of child protection is pressing enough that their sentiments cannot be a priority over how this happened to a very young girl and I don't think we can afford tasteful silence given the degree of harm so many children are potentially being left exposed to.
I don't think this family needs ripping limb from limb in order for the outcome of their inability to assess risk to strike a chord with a number of other parents who may reassess their own standards in terms of who gets to spend unsupervised time with their children. And some may go on to place more importance on Big Red Flags and less on labels like "step" and "partner" that infer a degree of trust that may not be earned or deserved.
I am under no illusion that a temporary increase of peer pressure will impact well established and "fixed" generational cycles of somewhat chaotic family dynamics. But I do believe there are a good number of people on the fuzzy edges that could be pulled back from similar red flag blindness in the face of social pressure to do so. If you normalise over enthusiastic trust of partners regardless of qualm inducing behaviour, then people on the cusp can be encouraged to see it as non risky. If you de-normalise it then again there will be those on the margins that will be primed to pay attention to red flags.
It's not a huge gain. But for every Tia there are scores of girls who never make the news because their abuse does not end in a trial followed by all major news outlets. They may be alive, but they are not unscathed. Some future victims could be avoided if their parents were influenced to see red flags like the ones noted in this case and insist on a higher degree of caution so they were not left so vulnerable to a person capable of abuse.
I'm open to any other suggestions as to how parents can become more sensitised to take red flags seriously without mentioning the ones that appear to have been ignored in this case. And I am not so fixed in my position that I won't take a different view if there is a way to achieve that without placing yet more of a burden on the family in question. But just to say be quiet "because they have suffered enough", while true, doesn't look like any kind of solution to reduce the risk an awful lot of children are being exposed to thanks to red flag blindness.
It's not that I don't understand, or even share to some degree, your desire not to pour salt on the wounds of a family who probably feel flayed alive with pain. But by the same token I feel there is something inadvertently wrong in saying the actions of family members that may have contributed to creating the opportunity for a man to cause a child's horrific suffering and death must go unmentioned in the name of taste, because their suffering in the now takes precedence over her suffering then.
I understand that this child can't be hurt anymore while her family still can. But it seems to me that it feeds a mindset where the powerless child, even when sexually abused, even murdered, must defer to the sentiments of her adult family members. I am not sure how to articulate it off the cuff. But for me that speaks of the dynamic we have that allows so much abuse to take place. Children are powerless, don't get to make that many of the choices they bear the brunt of living with, there is often a question mark placed over their word and their parents don't always understand the need to make a priority of a child's needs over their own wants. That's a good part of why they are the most vulnerable among us. That power imbalance is what makes them so attractive to many perpetrators as preferred victims.
We aren't exactly helping that power imbalance find a better place to sit when they die a horrible death and we still make priority of protecting the sentiments of the people who may have increased a child's vulnerability via risk blindness. Especially if it is over and above any attempt to raise awareness as to how specific choices of adults within their adult relationships can leave their children so very vulnerable to those with intent to do harm.
