california house parents held children prisoner *may trigger?**

[shakeyourcaboose]

Just woken to news on radio of house in California where police have rescued a family of 11 children whose parents have allegedly chained them to beds and walls after the eldest 17 yo girl escaped. Horrible.

Quiverful really only means that you don't use birth control.

Ricotta of the families that I am aware of who describe themselves as quiverfull it means a lot more than not using BC. Each child they have is an 'arrow' for the army of God, hence they want a full quiver. It is often a small part of a much bigger ideology surrounding the Patriarchy.

The news updates surrounding the Turpins does not seem to fit in with that lifestyle. The children being up all night and sleeping during the day is way off; the QF's are usually obsessed with an early bed time so that the parent's can have 'adult time'. The hairstyles that the father and sons have is very Amish/Mennonite so I wonder if the father has roots there? I am also gobsmacked at the lack of knowledge that the adult dc allegedly have. That sounds much closer to Amish way of life.

The whole thing is so disturbing. Has the facebook page been taken down? I cant dind it has anyone got a link?

Yes their fb page has disappeared now.

I read somewhere that parents were not part of any church. Likely to be their own brand of weirdness which they pretty much invented.

I too can't stop thinking about this.

I watched the youtube vid with the Elvis impersonator and there is nothing in there that would have raised red flags for me regarding abuse. Yes they are clearly an odd family, but as others have pointed out, they are mostly smiling, seem engaged and happy and the ones that look/behave the 'oddest' I'd put down to additional needs, not abuse. If you don't know their true ages you wouldn't think anything was amiss regarding their appearance. One of the older boys is wearing glasses which makes you think that there must have been some degree of medical care at some point. Also, if they were in Las Vegas, they must have got a flight, hotel etc. and come into contact with a lot of people. None of whom reported.

All this helps me understand how this horrific abuse was missed by family and neighbours. Perhaps they look happy because this is the one time in their lives they were treated well? I do also wonder if the abuse ramped up in the last couple of year as a psychological response to the dad's financial problems. It's also quite clear from the video that some of the children are far worse affected than others. Perhaps the parents repeatedly picked on specific children (the boys?) whereas rewarded compliance with more freedoms for others. This might explain why some of the children don't know what medication or a police officer was, whereas others had the cognitive ability to plot an escape plan.

I felt particularly sorry for the middle boy in the video. Could hardly walk, totally emaciated, sitting apart from the others. At first glace i would put this down to cerebral palsy or other medical issues, but with hindsight it is clear he was one of the ones receiving the worst abuse.

Other thing that is striking is how many more girls than boys there are. Did all the boys even make it?

So I can totally see how this was missed but I also like to think this couldn't have happened in the UK, largely because our maternity service still involves home visits after births and there is no way this family could have got past that (I hope)

Huge admiration for the 17 year old and I hope they can now make the most of their lives.

Quiverfull is about more than pumping out babies. It’s basically a cult with very old fashioned ideas about women. You aren’t allowed to turn your husband down for sex. The no birth control thing extends to the rhythm method. There’s a certain number of days after your last birth, I think it’s 90 or so, when you must start having sex again.

They usually have home births and shun modern medicine, don’t allow bottle feeding and only use cloth nappies. So as you can imagine the women must have a pretty shit time when they’ve got multiple kids with barely a year between them.

Yes but this family do not appear to have been a part of any sort of church or social movement.

Totally agree that the quiverful movement is repugnant but any sort of social contact e.g. with a church, might have given these children the protection they lacked due to their total isolation.

I think it's disrespectful to bring up associations with any movement whether you dislike them or not (I am not part of Quiverful, never heard of them before this thread). They were not part of a movement, as mentioned several times above. They just had a lot of kids.

Thirteen children, aged from 2 to 29, so roughly one born every two years. Not sure why there was any doubt that they are all the biological children of the accused parents, all my grandparents came from families of around that size.

The six adult children were at first mistaken for children, the 17 year old for a 10 year old, so I don't see how this could be a case of the parents going from normal to batshit just recently. They must have underfed them for a very long time - forever? - to stunt their growth to that extent. Had it been a recent change, the adults would look adult, the 17 year old at least 15 etc. And if malnutrition to this extent were the norm of their life - sorry, but I have to wonder if there were other children who didn't survive .

Oh yeah, didn't mean to imply that these parents were quiverfull, just sharing what I know about them as it's very interesting.

I know dingdong, but the association remains. It's a bit like talking about Muslims on a thread about terrorism. They are not linked and shouldn't be by association either.

The 29 year old only weighs 5 stone!!!

Yes, I saw an abc news video where a doc treating them said she was Luke an underdeveloped 15yo. So so sad.

Disrespectful to mention other totally bat shit organisations or religious cults which as usual persecute and dominate women. Disrespectful! Not drinking tea but would have spat it out reading that comment.

On the other thread I dont think they flew pretty stayed in hotels. Someone mentioned they saw them being bundled into cars in the middle of the night. I reckon they drove there and back

DingDong, the women have a shit time until the oldest girls become old enough to palm off responsibility for the care of the youngest. You kill two birds with the one stone at that point - the girls get on the job training for their future roles and the mothers get some respite. It all sucks.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/19/california-turpin-13-children-rescued-future?CMP=fb_gu

I feel so sickened by the situation. I have so many questions, like everyone else I suppose, and lots of random thoughts based on coverage.

I saw a comment on the fetishising of babies in the context of this case. Not sure where. I wondered the same thing - all the redoing of vows might fit into that scenario. Basically I wonder if they liked the idea of a fresh start over and over again - including new wedding vows, pregnancy and babies, but didn't want to deal with the babies once they got past babyhood and it became more difficult to project your own idea of who that baby was onto an actual child who could say No, throw a tantrum, refuse to eat their broccoli, etc. Their 2 year old is apparently a normal weight.

In parents who are extreme narcissists, there can be an element of disgust with the children once they become their own little people, and resentment at the fact that they are interactive and becoming independent.

In some people swept up in delusion, there can be refusal to face reality and become responsible parents with all the sheer hard work that goes along with caring for a growing family. I honestly suspect there is an element of willful delusion going on in this case. They loved all things Disney, Elvis impersonators did their repeat wedding vows - escapist cultural phenomena .

Hence perhaps not feeding the children, no proper care, and the punitive elements. Also the matching outfits - no sense of seeing them as individuals though the baby seems to have escaped the family uniform - well expressed by those quite dark in retrospect 'Thing 1'-2...10-11-12- t-shirts.

I saw in some coverage the assertion that she was 16 and he 24 when they married, and that he had basically whisked her off from high school one day, driving to Texas. Also the assertion that her family of origin was very dysfunctional.

Poor children. I wonder how they will ever recover from this, what sort of relationships exist among them, whether they will accept the decision of the brave teen who summoned help.

It is a very strange and awful case, hence all the interest in it. It sounds like they were abused for years. The mother was 16 I think when she married and the oldest child is 29 which must mean the last baby (which I think came after a big gap) was born when the mother was 45, which is certainly not impossible (same as Blair's wife).

They have been hiding something and realised they were acting badly because of the only getting up at night. I suspect things got much worse then the father lost his job, they had to downsize and they probably did not want to admit to others about the problems there were and things escalated. It is hard to know what went in inside - it may be the older children gave food to the younger ones even but it tends to be certain children picked on for abuse in some families.

I hope if the 13 children are close (and none were abusing each other ) that they can stay in close contact rather than be split up. The oldest could adopt the younger ones perhaps to keep the family together (if keeping the children together is a good thing).

Large families as people say above do not necessarily mean there is abuse. It was the norm for most of us a few generations back. My great grandmother had 11 children (10 survived). On the other side my grandfather was one of ten and they all survived. No abuse in any of those families I think.

I can't see the older ones being able to look after the younger ones, the oldest apparently have severe physical and mental health problems, not surprisingly.

Just awful

The consensus of the professionals cited in the Guardian article a few posts up does seem to be that the children should be kept together if possible. I hope they can stay together, at least for the foreseeable future.

Agree with @mathanxiey that the mother’s family of origin seems to have been disfunctional. Just looking at the photos of the mother with her parents and siblings when she was a child show her mother and sisters looking very thin and her father very overweight and ‘dominant’. I could be reading something into it that isn’t there, but they don’t look very happy.

Did anyone read the story of Genie linked to in the Guardian article?
www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers
Very grim

Also this one
www.npr.org/2013/07/16/195193595/a-dark-family-secret-hidden-for-years-in-alaskas-wilderness

I’ve read about Genie before in this book www.amazon.co.uk/Savage-Girls-Wild-Boys-Children/dp/0571214606/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&keywords=Feral+children&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8&qid=1516531298&sr=1-1. Very sad and very disturbing.