Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Evading Reality

Women are such incredibly trusting and needy creatures. Many of them, in any event. They are so eager to believe what they want to believe, that evidence to the contrary is shrugged off, too painful to contemplate and therefore much too irrelevant to their lives. Like women who live with abusive men, and persuade themselves that their patience and forbearance will eventually turn things around, and that brute they live with will eventually become what they always hoped he would be.

Not that this is an exclusively female thing; there are men too, needless to say, who live discordantly hopeful lives allied with women who treat them with disdain and don't hesitate to abuse the men they live with because that's just how it is. No one gender necessarily has the monopoly on dysfunctional insensitivity to other people, an inability to care deeply for others, and an unwillingness to restrain their baser instincts.

But as it happens, it is women, all too often, who suffer the greater amount of physical violations, and it is women, and often their children as well, whose lives are in danger when coupled with a male partner whose personality is surfeit with the pathologies that make people controlling and dangerous to others. And when women are in a relationship that they treasure, they will accept low-level brutalities without recognizing them for what they are.

As a case in point, but one whose unbelievably outrageous depths of desperate willingness to believe against all logical signposts and actions to the contrary, there's the instance of a husband-loving woman who denies her husband was responsible for the vicious rape and horrible murder of her very own sister. Despite evidence that clearly outlines her husband's actions as a boldly, baldly unrepentant murderer.

The evidence against this man is so compelling as to be beyond a reasonable doubt, yet he has taken it upon himself to defend himself in a court of law in his murder trial. Police detectives had no difficulty discerning that the murder of this woman's sister took place in her very home, by her husband. Blood identified as her sister's was found in the house, a mattress had been taken out of the house, full of blood, and discarded, later found and identified.

Her husband had suffered suspicious-appearing lacerations to his stomach and groin area. The burned-beyond-recognition body of her sister whom pathologists claim was strangled to death was found, abandoned, in an isolated, wooded area. Her sister's blood was found in the family vehicle. Some of her sister's possessions, along with a portion of rope identical to one found binding her, were in her husband's possession.

But she now, testifying for her husband, claims he was a victim, and not the perpetrator of her sister's gruesome death. Nine months after the dreadful event, her husband explained to his wife that he had been assaulted in their home, by two male strangers, who had proceeded to sexually violate him, thus accounting for the scratches on his groin and chest.

After which the intruders, whom she speculated received entry to the house through having been given the keys by her sister, forced her husband to take the spare-room mattress from the house and load it into the family van, which the two attackers then took away with them, to be discovered abandoned later.

That day in early January 2005, she had been expecting her sister to drop by, while she was away at work, to take care of her three-year-old daughter. Her husband insisted his sister-in-law had never arrived, had telephoned to inform him that she was on her way elsewhere. The child, on the other hand, told her mother that she, her father and her aunt had gone somewhere together.

The prosecutor at the trial incredulously asked the wife on several occasions, "You actually think this happened in your house?" referring to the purported break-in. To which she responded, "Yes, I do, it made sense to me." "You know what we allege about those scratches, don't you", he asked her.

"The allegation is that she was bound, wrists tied. You know that?"
"Yes, I do."
The prosecutor went on to say that while the husband was "allegedly penetrating your sister" she scratched him in an attempt to fend him off. To which statement the husband rose and exclaimed of the prosecutor, "No, he's adding to his lies again". And the faithful wife clings to her belief in her husband's innocence.

Stranger things have happened; evidence that appeared incriminating beyond a doubt has been found in some unusual cases to have another, explicable and innocent explanation. In which case this wife's faith in her husband, if it were to be found in his favour that the evidence is somehow tainted, would be her reward.

On the other hand, reality does impinge, and it does not at all appear likely that her husband to whom she is so utterly, trustingly faithful, preferring to believe that her divorced sister was somehow responsible for her own death, - is guilty not only of murdering her sister, but betraying his wife's trust and manipulating her and robbing her of judgemental intelligence.

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