Charges: Fridley Couple Made Girl Run In Diaper With Shaved Head

If you have a 12-13 year old female child, just emerging into puberty, you understand completely what impact this could have on this child. Taking it out of its context and applying it to adult scenarios is totally irrelevant. Imagining that she should be expected to shrug it off and go on with life as usual with no hair is simplistic and totally lacking in empathy. I have a thirteen year old child and she is smart and healthy and I know for damn sure that if someone held her down and shaved her head and then forced her to parade around in a diaper in front of the neighborhood it would be totally devastating to her self image. Even moreso, perhaps, for a child whose life is already fraught with stress and questionable circumstances (maybe she's making bad grades because her home life is totally fucked-up with two morons for parents). If you can't understand that or think it's shallow then you're just being obtuse.

 

I'm obtuse.

No, really... I get it. As a kid that was constantly taunted by his peers throughout his entire childhood for being a ____, I understand the social and psychological penalties for deviating from the norm, whether natural or forced. That and I think it was pretty obvious that my threadjacky hair-be-damned statement was aimed at the stars, not at the here and now. Just pointing out the superficial nature of the keratin-based sex/gender thing.

/burn that bra, keep that hair

 

I don't really get what that has to do with anything or why it should matter to a twelve-year-old.

And giving the sexual abuse thing a little more thought, while personally I have no reason to believe there was a sexual nature to this situation, there is an unmistakable sexual aspect to forced humiliation. Whether it is conscious or not.

 

It shouldn't. It was a threadjack.

Carry on.

 

yep, sorry.
I've said what I came to say.

 

Whether this crime could be proven to have a sexual motive is secondary, but important.

It is vital that the girl and any other child under the "care" of the parents is taken into the fostering system immediately. The couple should also not be allowed to have care over a child again (if the mother has another child and still lives with the same man, that child automatically would be taken into care after birth)

They should be facing longer than a year inside in my opinion. But as others have said - something like this doesnt happen out of the blue. A person who is capable of shaving the head of a 12 year old against her will, stripping her and forcing her to parade outside wearing a diaper while she weeps hysterically... is not likely to be a person who has up to this point been a good parent. When we dig into this, and when the police get the parents into custody and under questioning... my feeling is that there will be more examples of criminal and absolutely disgusting abuse.

I would hope a crime like this would in itself mean 6 to 8 years porridge. I would certainly hope that they are added to the sex offenders register and I believe that the effect that this will have on their life after prison is fair and reasonable.

_

To qualify my comments, I did say and I will say again that I do not intellectually think that violence is a good solution to violence in most cases. I do not think that wounding the father would be a good idea.

But on an emotional level, when you read about this kind of abuse of a vulnerable child who cannot defend herself, it gives me the kind of feeling that I would like to do really turn the screws on the man who did it. I am not saying that I would do it, nor arguing that I should or ought or have a moral right to even... but I think to line him up and lets say stamp down with full force on the instep of his right foot, right on the angle, and leaving him on the floor crying out that he can't walk... would be a nice feeling.

 

Maybe that from a feminist perspective, girls shouldn't grow up thinking physical features are any part of their identity, that the loss of something as trivial as hair doesn't scar them emotionally.

How do you possibly theorize that forced humiliation unmistakably carries a sexual aspect to it?

 

Yeah, you get right on making sure that every twelve year old girl doesn't have anything invested in her appearance. Good luck to you. I know you're a hard worker.

I didn't mean to suggest that every case of forced humiliation was sexual. But I will suggest that most people who have the will to forcefully humiliate other people are receiving sexual gratification from it on some level. Why, you into humiliating people?

 

A multi-billion dollar hair care industry should say something about how women regard their hair. As we get older and become more comfortable with who we are, our physical features become less a staple of our identity but I'm truly trying to imagine how to convey to a 12 year old girl that her physical features are trivial in comparison with who she is on the inside - in a way that will overcome the pressure put upon her to believe otherwise. Outside of isolating her from the world around her, I can't come up with anything.

 

Possibly.

You guys... it's great that you're talking about present reality, but I (and possibly Plan9) are talking about the idiocy of a society that "educates" girls from early on to be as superficial as they are.

Consider the recent decision by a Swedish kindergarten to raise the kids in a completely gender-neutral manner. But you're right, maintaining the current status quo goes very smoothly with little girls' wishes. It's not like being stupidly superficial is not a healthy mindset.

 

Oh great, now all girls are superficial.
And men never think about their physical characteristics.

So you suppose that if girls weren't so girly they wouldn't mind having their heads shaved and paraded around in public wearing a diaper? The trouble is that she was too invested in her gender? You're just arguing to argue.

 

Holy fuck. Yes, believe whatever the hell you want.