Rape, incest: WTH were you thinking?

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve come face to face with some of life’s bleak, horrible realities. Harker does a good job of shielding us from the big bad wolf that is the real world, and while we know there are dangers out there – murder, rape, drug overdose – and while some of us may be unfortunate to deal with such problems through family members or ourselves, nothing, nothing comes close to what goes on in remote corners without anyone’s knowing.

Austria’s Josef Fritzl, 73, was recently sentenced to a life in a psychiatric prison. His crime was locking his daughter Elisabeth in a rat-infested dungeon and continuously raping her for the past 24 years. She was 18 years old then. Fritzl fathered her seven children, and the youngest one died in captivity from neglect.

"I regret it with all my heart ... I can't make it right anymore," - Josef Fritzl

It gets worse. Three of those children had never seen anything outside the dungeon’s four walls until the police investigation 11 months ago. Fritzl brought the other three upstairs to raise with his wife, whom he told Elizabeth ran away to join a cult and abandoned these infants.

Fritzl testified to raping his daughter, sometimes in front of the children, over 3,000 times.

He is sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in Vienna’s psychiatric ward because the guy is so starkly deranged. Many commentators say we should lock him up in a cell and throw away the key, to give him a taste of his own medicine. I support the shrink option because prison, it seems to me, would only make the beast more depraved, and God knows what he’ll unleash on the population should he escape/be let off for parole.

Thinking about life after high school never really scared me until now. Not that I think something like this will happen to me – knock on wood and spit over your left shoulder – but when I don’t have my mom’s often overprotective breathing face down my neck, what ridiculous shenanigans will I get myself into? Life forgives many of our mistakes, but what if one day I’ll ease myself into a situation I can’t get out of harmlessly?

Just a warning, kids. You never know what sort of freakos are lurking in the shadows. Be very careful.

To read the full article, go here.