Man Stabs babies to death in a creche in Belgium...shocking (1 Viewer)

[whathappen?]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7846815.stm

 

[dleacht]

I don't want to hear any more horrible news this week so I'm not reading that article

 

[David Kronenbourg]

jesus christ. that's one of the most horrific things i've ever read. the media have already picked up on the white face paint and dubbed him "the joker killer" the scummy pricks

 

[nlgbbbblth]

Security for our local creche is an intercom and a locked front door. You buzz the appropriate room and state who you are and the name of your child. Then they let you in.

 

[Cormcolash]

Maybe they don't expect crazy knife-weilding maniacs to be trying to get in to stab babies?
It's not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about creche security after all.

 

[deedee]

Security for our local creche is an intercom and a locked front door. You buzz the appropriate room and state who you are and the name of your child. Then they let you in.

Yes, same with the creche my little one goes to although my sister who's the montessori teacher in same creche says that some of the girls would just buzz people in without checking who it is first

This guy apparently said he wanted information on the intercom so you can't blame the poor staff for letting him in.

Fucking shocking. My little girl is 3. Same age as the babies killed by this lunatic.

 

[Reets]

That's heartbreaking, literally every parents worst nightmare.
I was going to bitch about the crap I had to put up with on my way home last night but after that I feel guilty for being so relieved that the children in my life are happy and as safe as we can make them.
What the hell is with evil bastards (I know he clearly had mental problems, but it was still an evil act) hurting kids?
Have these kinda things always been happening and its only because of modern technology we hear about it more often, or some symptom of modern life and the increasingly uncaring way people treat each other, but perpetrated against those most vulnerably?

 

[jane]

That's heartbreaking, literally every parents worst nightmare.
I was going to bitch about the crap I had to put up with on my way home last night but after that I feel guilty for being so relieved that the children in my life are happy and as safe as we can make them.
What the hell is with evil bastards (I know he clearly had mental problems, but it was still an evil act) hurting kids?
Have these kinda things always been happening and its only because of modern technology we hear about it more often, or some symptom of modern life and the increasingly uncaring way people treat each other, but perpetrated against those most vulnerably?

I think so. I mean, I joke about criminals practically being sponsored by tabloids, but the reality is that this shit has always gone on. And what's scary is that a lot of the things that shock us now are things that would not have been quite so shocking even a hundred years ago.

The practice of killeen burials, for example, that went on until nearly the end of the 20th century. When I was doing my MA, we were told the last known use was in the mid-60s, but I found a local story about one from 1976. But if an unmarked child burial was found last week, it would be all over the papers as a scandal, even though they were not considered so scandalous in the past. It was probably always a personal tragedy, but now we seem to make everyone's personal tragedies into public ones.

Some of them -- like the clerical sex abuse cases -- should be public scandals. They should have never been allowed to get to the point where even one child was abused, but I don't actually think the world is that much more dangerous than it ever was. You could say that it's more dangerous because we don't have a sense of community, but the reality is that people are most likely to be harmed by someone they know, so maybe we just hear about it more than we used to.

Shit like the Madeline McCann case help ease our minds, and let us believe that kidnapping and harming people is always done by shadowy strangers and under unusual circumstances, when those cases are the exception.

I dunno, someone I grew up with and used to babysit me and taught me how to say all my swear words, killed his family and then himself, and it's just never gone away in my head; it really knocked off-balance any ideas I had about the idea that a person is 'evil' or 'not evil'. I found this really creepy website where someone had got hold of some of his personal papers and was trying to 'decipher' them and find the 'real' story. I find myself extrapolating back to our childhood, looking for signs, but then I have to stop myself because I could easily misread something in retrospect, and really, you can't predict something like multiple murder, or murder-suicide. It isn't done by people whose evil can be seen so easily. Because 'evil' is a word we use to separate ourselves from realities that we don't want to accept, or that we want to keep at a distance.

Also, though, sometimes people ignore very obvious warning signs of someone's potential for 'outlier' behaviour. It's part coping mechanism because in a sense, the worst horrors are committed by the least obviously 'horrible' people, but it's also because you just don't want to believe that someone you see all the time could do it. Otherwise you couldn't make it through the day, and you couldn't trust anyone you know. If we spent our time too close to that reality, we would be too terrified all the time to cope with daily life.

I don't think our society is any more violent than it ever was, nor are we any more interested in shock factors, even though what qualifies as 'shocking' is constantly changing. We also have more outlets for becoming shocked. We need the shock that allows us to imagine that it only happens across definable lines or we're dangerously close to being reminded of the reality.

WTF am I saying? I don't know. I need more coffee. I dunno.

I need to go look at puppies now.

And yiz can all give out to me for long posts or whatever.

 

[GO]

Feel good thread of the year.