Smiles
Haleigh Poutre is 11 years old and has been beaten into a vegetable by her stepfather, with assistance from her aunt/adoptive mother.
Despite this, the photograph that accompanies the article about her vegetative state reveals not a wee lass whose life was unbearable beyond comprehension but one beaming a smile filled with glee and wonder.
Similarly, the last couple of horrid cases of child abuse leading to death in Toronto revealed the victims in photographs smiling happily.
The disconnect between the reality of these children's situations and what the camera captures (which absolutely can be totally divorced from reality) is very disturbing. It is overwhelming to consider that despite Dad fucking you, or Grandma making you drink from the toilet, or Mom using a broken-off coffee table leg to smash bits of your very own skull into your brain, you have the capacity, the resilience to experience enough fun to smile.
I hope desperately that's the case -- that they are real smiles, that in those brief smiling moments there is an erasure, no matter how short in time, of the torture filled, painful, slave-to-monsters existence of these children.
In a sick bit of humour, the man, who puffed up his manhood by knocking an 11-year-old around and who will face murder charges if Haleigh dies, has legally sought to keep her on life-support. A high court actually had to rule that he has no say in her medical care.
God help us all.
Despite this, the photograph that accompanies the article about her vegetative state reveals not a wee lass whose life was unbearable beyond comprehension but one beaming a smile filled with glee and wonder.
Similarly, the last couple of horrid cases of child abuse leading to death in Toronto revealed the victims in photographs smiling happily.
The disconnect between the reality of these children's situations and what the camera captures (which absolutely can be totally divorced from reality) is very disturbing. It is overwhelming to consider that despite Dad fucking you, or Grandma making you drink from the toilet, or Mom using a broken-off coffee table leg to smash bits of your very own skull into your brain, you have the capacity, the resilience to experience enough fun to smile.
I hope desperately that's the case -- that they are real smiles, that in those brief smiling moments there is an erasure, no matter how short in time, of the torture filled, painful, slave-to-monsters existence of these children.
In a sick bit of humour, the man, who puffed up his manhood by knocking an 11-year-old around and who will face murder charges if Haleigh dies, has legally sought to keep her on life-support. A high court actually had to rule that he has no say in her medical care.
God help us all.
posted by Heipel at
3:24 PM
2 Comments:
that's awful.....bad.....
I'm not one of those prone to thinking that children are little marvels, flowers from heaven, and all that rubbish (they're all the good and bad bits of the rest of us, just more visible because it's not yet been socialised).
But I do wonder at children's ability to normalise whatever situation they're faced with.
~
The writer at Anxiety Culture (.com) has a particular bee in his bonnet about the way the media like to report crime stories and crime figures, puffing them up into seeming social pandemics.
His take on child murder cases like this is not that they point to some horrible trend (since people have been saying this as far back as we have printed words), but that they are remarkable because they are so rare. Yes, this girl died horribly, and what's notable about that is how extra-ordinary this experience is.
I'm not saying that these wrongs don't happen. They do, and the appropriate bodies must act on them. But not the media. Not for their parasitic purposes -- getting copy that sells... because of that smiling picture.
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