The role of an enlightened witness...

[A little edited March 19]. In the leader ”The little we can do” about the Austrian man who held one of his daughters as prisoner for 24 years, raped her and made her pregnant six times the leader writer wrote:

“{The crime was committed in] The country of the Wiener waltzes and the all embracing courtesy’s land – but where a great part of the population welcomed the Nazis and where musty forms of Catholicism and patriarchal tradition in a holy alliance have maintained all sorts of old power structures. Maybe it’s something special with Austria, but still: of course you can’t impose guilt on a whole nation.

Is it Fritzl’s upbringing we shall blame? In the talks he has had with his psychologist it has come up that he had an extraordinary horrible upbringing, fatherless and at the same time he became tormented by his mother. Disturbed for life, full of contempt for women and an unhealthy need for control./…/

But there are many people with a horrible upbringing whom for that reason wouldn't commit any bestial deeds.”

I think Alice Miller is right when she writes that the reason to why all abused children don’t commit horrible crimes is because they have had an enlightened or at least knowing witness during their childhood and/or youth, and that’s why they have been capable of, to certain parts and degrees, condemn what they were exposed to.

Addition March 19: Even if they don't become criminals or commit crimes of different sorts (destructiveness) they can suffer from sickness and addictions or other self-destructive behaviors of different kinds. See the ACE-study and what Miller has written in for instance "The Body Never Lies".

And a horrible upbringing is no excuse for what you commit (if you abuse a child, commit crimes or even murders, initiate homicides etc.), only an explanation.