Born bad

I saw this story a few days ago when the Daily Mail first published it. I’m glad you posted it here, Donna. It’s an important one to educate the public about the incorrigibility of psychopathic behavior.

The story of how Maryann, at only three years of age, brutally dismembered her dolls and gouged out their eyes could have come straight from the script of a horror movie. It’s a perfect example of Life imitating Art. But it also reminds me in real life of how Ted Bundy, at the same tender age of three, planted knives in his aunt’s bed as if he were acting out a death wish toward her.

Cherry’s story is a very sad one, and goes to show how much damage a psychopath can inflict on others even as a child. Cherry and her husband John should have had an idyllic marriage living in their beautiful dream home with their two adopted daughters to make their family complete. Instead, the stress of trying to care for Maryann broke up their marriage, and Cherry ended up living in (comparative) poverty with ruined health: a fate the poor lady never deserved. (We’re not told what happened to John.)

Unfortunately when it came down to the fundamental disagreement that disrupted their marriage—about the “best” parenting approach to take toward Maryann—both of them were wrong. It wouldn’t have made any difference whether they’d taken the “kinder, more nurturing” approach that Cherry believed in, or the stricter measures that John was advocating. Neither approach would have corrected Maryann’s intolerable behavior. The couple’s marriage foundered on an insoluble problem—in part because neither of them realized the problem was insoluble.

There are lessons to be learned from this. One, I think, is the necessity for couples to put their marriage first, and make sure that’s strong, before they tackle issues related to child raising. Children should never be permitted to become a wedge that drives a couple apart.

But there are other, more public issues too. In particular, it’s nothing short of outrageous that Cherry was unable to get the specialist help she needed to cope with Maryann. This is disgraceful for at least three separate reasons.

For one, I’d blow my top if some idiot told me that a child “causing mayhem” was not a matter for concern—not unless the child was doing something this idiot thought was “really bad”… like “smoking,” for instance. SMOKING??? For God’s sake, do these MORONS have ANY sense of proportion? I’m not pretending smoking is healthy, but there is nothing pathological about kids experimenting with things like smoking. And as they get into their teen years, “experimenting” is virtually a way of life. They’ll try beer, they’ll try pot. (To say nothing of sex!) This may not be “good,” and prompts a lot of finger-wagging from grownups, but none of it means a kid is on the road to hell unless it develops into a larger problem. That some blockhead would imagine “smoking” is somehow a “more serious” problem that Maryann’s plainly pathological behavior is nothing but an obsession of the wretched neurotic antismoking nazis. This is turn is just one tiny reflection of the far more widespread idiocy of “political correctness” that’s been ruining Britain for at least half a generation or more. There are too many brainless fools like that in positions of power whose values are entirely upside down in a plethora of ways, from the “Elf ‘n’ Safety” nuts to the clowns who let dangerous criminals go free. Britain would be vastly improved if the whole lot of them were lined up against a wall and shot, and replaced with ordinary people with plain common sense.

Apart from that detail, it’s also disgraceful that Cherry and her husband were, in effect, blamed by the health system for their adopted daughter’s pathological behavior. If the only “help” they could get was “lectures on parenting techniques,” while nobody would recommend that the child be examined by a specialist, that’s tantamount to saying there’s nothing wrong with the girl herself, so her bad conduct must be her adoptive parents’ fault.

However, that also indicates a third and more basic problem: namely, a refusal by the health “services” to recognize psychopathy in a child. Obviously those responsible need educating on the subject.

It may not be taking matters too far to speculate that the same “political correctness” could be partly responsible for this head-in-the-sand attitude. Namely, the “liberal” obsession with social constructionism at the expense of ignoring genetic and physiological factors governing human behavior—or pretending those factors don’t exist. Much of that overemphasis on “nurture,” at the cost of ignoring Nature altogether, is rooted in wishful thinking. For instance, plenty of people don’t want to believe that a child might actually be “born evil.” So they go into denial about it and strain reality to construct alternative explanations for the child’s awful behavior. Some people need their noses rubbed in reality before they’ll accept it.

I was sorry to read that Cherry herself has still not fully accepted this reality. Cherry is still saying even today: “They’re not evil children, they are just children who never got proper medical and psychiatric help, despite our requests. I still feel guilty for putting them both back into care and wonder if there was more I could have done.” I can’t speak for Nicola of course, whose problems are less severe, and who may well have suffered from unwitting neglect when so much attention was heaped on her sister Maryann. But I have little doubt that Maryann took after her criminal mother genetically, and there’s not a lot that anyone could have done for her. It’s sad that Cherry is still tempted to blame herself after all these years for something that was never her fault. I hope she does eventually wake up, accept reality, and dump that burden of useless guilt.