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Last week when I saw the headlines about the “House of Horrors” in Springs, I did not want to read the reports. The headlines were nauseating enough.
It had been a really awful week in the news too – a pregnant woman was stoned to death in public by her family for marrying against their wishes, teenage sisters were gang raped and hanged from a tree, a cop shot his girlfriend and innocent bystanders at the airport and a young man went on a killing spree because “hot sluts” wouldn’t sleep with him.
So when I read about the businessman who kept his wife and five children captive for years, I really didn’t want to know the details of what had gone on in that house. I stopped reading when I got to the word “torture”. I did not want these images in my head.
But then I heard that the 11 year-old boy who escaped and ran to his neighbours, pleading for their help, was returned to his father.
According to Beeld, the “shocked” neighbours, who didn’t know that the man next door had children, found a little boy, wearing only shorts, banging on their door and begging them for help, saying his father was going to kill him.
Instead of phoning Child Services and the police, the neighbours, who feared they’d be accused of kidnapping, phoned the father and sent the petrified boy back with him – even after the man slapped the child in front of them.
I could not believe what I was reading.
The father then proceeded to beat the boy so viciously that he had to hide the child at his sister’s house. The sister’s husband reportedly said that the child was so badly bruised it was difficult to touch him.
Beeld published a cropped picture of the child’s terrified, blackened eyes that will haunt me forever.
The neighbours only phoned the police the next day.
Over the next week a host of stories emerged, both on Facebook and in the press, of people coming forward who had known all along what was going on in that house. Stories of sexual abuse, torture, whippings, drownings, electrocutions, burning with blowtorches and more surfaced.
Yet no one had stepped in. No one had said anything. No one had intervened.
Why do people act like this? We can’t merely blame it on modern society and bad neighbourliness since domestic abuse is the one crime humankind has consistently overlooked from the time we lived in caves.
We can’t blame the police, because no one came forward to make a complaint.
Why do communities descend en masse with the proverbial pitchforks when property is damaged or stolen, but everyone keeps mum when something far, far worse is happening?
I can’t help feeling that people stay quiet about the horrors of domestic abuse because they still feel a man is the head of his house, and that outsiders do not have the right to interfere with what goes on in that house.
Why else would people allow this?
Thankfully an article in the Sexual Offences Act now makes it illegal for a person not to report a suspected sexual crime. Thus, if you refrain from reporting a crime of a sexual nature you can be prosecuted. I can only hope that this law will be extended to cover crimes like abuse and torture.
It’s sad that we need this kind of legislation to force people to act like compassionate human beings, but if the threat of being sentenced is what it takes to make a person speak up for someone else, I say about bloody time.
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It had been a really awful week in the news too – a pregnant woman was stoned to death in public by her family for marrying against their wishes, teenage sisters were gang raped and hanged from a tree, a cop shot his girlfriend and innocent bystanders at the airport and a young man went on a killing spree because “hot sluts” wouldn’t sleep with him.
So when I read about the businessman who kept his wife and five children captive for years, I really didn’t want to know the details of what had gone on in that house. I stopped reading when I got to the word “torture”. I did not want these images in my head.
But then I heard that the 11 year-old boy who escaped and ran to his neighbours, pleading for their help, was returned to his father.
According to Beeld, the “shocked” neighbours, who didn’t know that the man next door had children, found a little boy, wearing only shorts, banging on their door and begging them for help, saying his father was going to kill him.
Instead of phoning Child Services and the police, the neighbours, who feared they’d be accused of kidnapping, phoned the father and sent the petrified boy back with him – even after the man slapped the child in front of them.
I could not believe what I was reading.
The father then proceeded to beat the boy so viciously that he had to hide the child at his sister’s house. The sister’s husband reportedly said that the child was so badly bruised it was difficult to touch him.
Beeld published a cropped picture of the child’s terrified, blackened eyes that will haunt me forever.
The neighbours only phoned the police the next day.
Over the next week a host of stories emerged, both on Facebook and in the press, of people coming forward who had known all along what was going on in that house. Stories of sexual abuse, torture, whippings, drownings, electrocutions, burning with blowtorches and more surfaced.
Yet no one had stepped in. No one had said anything. No one had intervened.
Why do people act like this? We can’t merely blame it on modern society and bad neighbourliness since domestic abuse is the one crime humankind has consistently overlooked from the time we lived in caves.
We can’t blame the police, because no one came forward to make a complaint.
Why do communities descend en masse with the proverbial pitchforks when property is damaged or stolen, but everyone keeps mum when something far, far worse is happening?
I can’t help feeling that people stay quiet about the horrors of domestic abuse because they still feel a man is the head of his house, and that outsiders do not have the right to interfere with what goes on in that house.
Why else would people allow this?
Thankfully an article in the Sexual Offences Act now makes it illegal for a person not to report a suspected sexual crime. Thus, if you refrain from reporting a crime of a sexual nature you can be prosecuted. I can only hope that this law will be extended to cover crimes like abuse and torture.
It’s sad that we need this kind of legislation to force people to act like compassionate human beings, but if the threat of being sentenced is what it takes to make a person speak up for someone else, I say about bloody time.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
