Hi PACEs Connection community.
TW: trauma talk with names of the type of trauma and discussion of that trauma. This discussion might not be for you today.
Last night I watched all 10 parts of the Turpin sisters on 20/20 with Diane Sawyer (each part is 10 mins or less). These can be accessed on Youtube and ABC's network website.
The 13 Turpin children and adults were found chained inside their house in 2018 in Perris, CA in Riverside County, shocking the nation and the world. Some were as old as their late 20s but looked like children still. All were emaciated and unbathed.
I hate that these sisters had to find resilience in this circumstance but I couldn't help but be in awe of them as they were interviewed by Diane Sawyer. They seemed remarkably like the fictional character Kimmy Schmidt, which was writer and producer Tina Fey's comedian project to help her try and process what would happen to a person once they escaped lifelong captivity. So I commend Tina Fey for the depth and accuracy of her research! The sisters are full of optimism, life, and a delightful naivete that lacks socially programmed fear of being their full, authentic selves.
Of course, as a child trauma obsessed person, I had to dig around on the internet for hours as to the childhood trauma of the parents who could do this to their children.
The mother, Louise Turpin, was a child bride to the father, marrying him when she was 16 and he was 24. She did this to escape a devastatingly abusive home in West Virginia where she suffered repeated sexual attacks at the hands of her grandfather. She is much older than and looks nothing like her two younger sisters so I worry that her grandfather is also her father. (Also the story for the most notorious American serial killer, Ted Bundy!)
This kind of depravity is so hard to comprehend! And yet, if you're reading this, chances are that you are in this work because you want to help solve this kind of depravity.
I can't help but fixate on the childhood photos of Louise. She and her mother look like walking skeletons! I'm not sure that holding a mirror up to their mouths would produce steam!
I'm currently reading The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, published in 1986 and providing a historical account of our earliest Western civilizations. As soon as we have record, in looking at ancient Mesopotamia and Babylon, it appears that men were commodifying and enslaving women and children. The first structure and division by class was the distinction of where women fell as a commodity owned by men. Marriage was a monetary transaction and women were either 1st wives, concubines (2nd or 3rd wives), or slaves—all bought and sold. (Women then internalized the misogyny to protect their precarious class--something we still see today, for example when wealthy white women voted for the new elected Republican governor of VA.)
Louise's sister explains in a memoir about their childhood that their grandfather would pay their mother money in order to have sexual time with them. This both horrifies me and also feels like...wow, it's been this way since the dawn of civilization!
I can't help but think, "what was the original trauma?" when it comes to the Turpin family. It seems like, based on the historical records, that the original trauma is simple existing as humans. Animals surely exist to kill or be killed but only humans torture each other. (For those that watched the Netflix show The Good Place, maybe we ARE in The Bad Place!)
I appreciate the work we are all doing but I can't help it if it feels sometimes like we're not moving the needle at all in alleviating the suffering of the human condition.
In the ABC special about the Turpin kids, they relay that the police got the children out of the frying pan and into the fire. The foster parents that the 5 youngest were placed with immediately started physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them.
Anyway. Open to hearing any/all viewpoints, discussion topics, insights, challenges, or thoughts! This story really represents the worst of the worst of humanity so I know it's not typical—I suppose that's why it's so captivating.