Can you be really sure there's no Fritzl living next door?

Gail Walker

Gail Walker, Belfast Telegraph

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

By Gail Walker

The slew of headlines trying and failing to reflect the mind-stunning horror that is Josef Fritzl and his secret incestuous family imprisoned for almost a quarter of a century in a claustrophobic dungeon goes on.

We've been presented with 'the face of a monster'; 'the horror of the cellar'; 'the sunshine holidays that hid a chilling secret'; the deeply ironic 'The Family Man of Amstetten', and, that old comforter, 'a uniquely evil man'.

And the face of Josef Fritzl - with its quirky raised right eyebrow as if asking what you think of him now? - is burned into the global memory bank as an image of absolute inhumanity.

There's no let up on the chin-rubbing pap psychology front either, in the papers or the workplace. Such sensational cases make shrinks - or pub bores - of us all, as we seek to rationalise the existential horror of Fritzl's crimes. Here is a man who sired his daughter's children and is both father and grandfather to them. Who selected three of the children for a 'normal' life upstairs. Who kept the others locked up yet gave them a TV so they could watch the outside world they could not get to.

What if he'd suffered a fatal heart attack while leering at a Thai masseuse girl on a trip abroad and never come back? Would his cellar family have slowly starved to death? How could his wife or neightbours not have known? How do the survivors live with the legacy of their in-breeding — on social, health and notoriety counts? Raised like battery hens, their counsellors have had to build them a replacement 'cellar' to help them adjust to space, sunlight and fresh air.

We grasp at explanations and fall upon Austria. Yes, it's all the fault of the Austrians and their weird national psyche, and we bolster our argument by making crass comparisons with the imprisonment of Natasha Kampusch.

That's what happens when a country is over-polite and too harmonious for its own good, we reason, when people don't want to poke too much into anyone else's business in case they bring up their old Nazi grandpa's past. How lucky it couldn't happen here.

Out come the professional criminologists, too, feeding our CSI-sophisticated minds with polemics on 'how could such evil live in our midst?'

How indeed? You want the truth? It does so very easily. For all our old routines with stories like this — shock, analysis, distancing — there is nothing 'uniquely' evil about Josef Fritzl. He is evil, but he is not a one-off. The eyes of the world narrow in incomprehension at the events in Amstetten, but they need to look around their own families and neighbourhoods just as acutely.

It's really just a question of extremes. We like to fool ourselves that it couldn't happen in Northern Ireland and if it did we'd know about it, but would we? Nobody knew about Fred and Rose West's abuse and killing spree in England, even though they were burying their own daughter in their cellar.

Don't count on our powers of observation — bodies lie for months in houses here and nobody notices someone no longer nipping out for a pint of milk. So, yes, fathers rape daughters and brothers rape sisters and grandfathers 'interfere' with wee ones here, literally all the time. It happens in Belfast, Craigavon, Ballymena ... Blind eyes are turned and threats deliver silences.

The only thing that distinguishes this from Austria is the thoroughness with which Friztl went about crimes, building his cellar and stockpiling food. Other than that, for the men abusing young female relatives here — and women abusing male relatives — the basic impulse is the same.

We shouldn't get too aloof about Austria or too self-congratulatory about our wee province. Many lives are wrecked by 'monsters' here, too. They're the victims who really begin to understood the hell endured by Elisabeth Fritzl.

What we don't know can hurt all of us.