In a story published today by CBS, one of Phillip Garrido's printing business clients, Cheyvonne Molino, asks that Jaycee Dugard - the kidnap victim held for 18 years by Garrido - "tell the truth" about her years as a hostage. According to Molino, Dugard did not sleep in a tent, despite widespread media reports about a makeshift shelter-prison in Garrido's backyard.
However, sleeping arrangements are not really the issue in this case. Certainly, we all recognize the barbarity of forcing someone to live in a backyard tent without access to healthcare, proper sanitation, or social interaction, but even if we take the tent-prison out of the picture, this is still one horrific story. An eleven-year-old girl was snatched on her way to school, taken against her will to a city over two-hundred miles away, raped on more than one occasion (at least twice, as evidenced by Jaycee's two children, one of which would have been conceived when she was just fourteen), and forced to give birth without access to medical care or social support of any kind. Whether she lived in a tent or the house, Jaycee Dugard has been violated in every possible way.
And frankly, Jaycee has no obligation to tell the public anything at all. It will be hard enough to provide testimony for trial.
One wonders what possible motivation Molino has for demanding such a concession from Dugard. The answer seems to be simple self-preservation: Police have searched Molino's property, looking for evidence of child pornography in connection with the Garrido case. Perhaps Molino seeks to undermine Dugard's credibility in a bid to win sympathy or even cover her own connections with the case. If so, the strategy has failed. All Molino has succeeded in doing is calling attention to herself - and not in a positive light. At best, she seems to lack sympathy for Dugard; at worst, she sounds complicit. After all, when bystanders demand "concessions" from victims - particularly victims of sex offenses - they may as well pour battery acid into their emotional wounds. It re-victimizes and re-traumatizes survivors all over again.
Worse, though, is that CBS sees it as appropriate to air such demands. This makes the network complicit as well - and not only in re-traumatizing Dugard, but also in spreading cultural myths about survivors of molestation and abuse, and how the trauma really is not "as bad" as it is portrayed.
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