Runs the headline in the News Of the World
I do not know what to make of this story at all. Remind myself, never blame the victim.
But it just doesn't seem to add up. Okay, she was unwise to go back to their house initially. But we have all probably acted unwisely from time to time. She was drugged and raped. Horrible. Helpless.
When Jenny...woke the next morning she was told she was going to London. First they stopped at her flat to collect her things and then threatened to hurt her and her family if she tried to escape. "My son was staying with my mother at the time. But I knew he would be there if they came back to get me. My greatest fear was what they would do to my son." She was taken to a flat behind Victoria Station in London and in the next four days was kept drugged and forced to work as a prostitute. Jenny said: "They would find the punters for me.
I'm sorry but this makes no sense whatsoever. It seems that she just meekly complied, okay to protect her son, but was he really in any danger - he was at her mother's? If she really feared for her life, couldn't she have gone to her mother's, couldn't she have gone to the police? After all she had been drugged and raped, and she feared for her life and that of her son.
I will accept however that she believed that she and her son were in danger and that was why she complied.
But to me the clincher is
Jenny is epileptic and, with no medication, twice ended up in hospital during the four days after suffering serious fits.
I do not believe in blaming the victim; how can I possibly begin to imagine what she went through. But there is a concept in English Law of contributory negligence. it was discredited twenty years ago when some evil arsehole judge found a rapist not guilty on the basis that the woman was wearing a mini-skirt and thus was asking to be raped - contributory negligence.
Couldn't she have appealed to the medical staff? Couldn't she have tried to explain what was happening? I just don't understand it.
In my view, that couple should rot in hell for the initial drugging and raping. Whatever happened later, I do feel that there was a very large degree of contributory negligence. Nevertheless, it still makes them evil.
And I can't decide whether a little part of me believes that a little part of her went along willingly, or whether I just want to bang my head against the wall in exasperation that a woman of 38 in the 21st century can be so lacking in autonomy.
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