(no subject)

[conuly]

"You can't just say, 'Well, you're a stupid idiot,' and let them drown. It would be pretty hard to justify that."

Well-said.

I've been lightly following this case over at Yahoo... mostly just following the comments. A surprising number of commenters apparently wanted this girl to die to teach her parents a moral lesson of some sort, or to save money. Others would've been content if she'd just been raided by pirates and raped. Let me say that if I get stranded on a lifeboat with these people, I'm eating them first.

People make a fuss that she's 16 years old, that this situation happened because of her age and the poor judgment of her parents. This may be true, I don't know. Maybe she's not competent enough for this sort of trip.

But it occurs to me that many seasoned sailors have drowned in the past, some with more years of experience than she has even had on this earth. This isn't always because they're careless or stupid or even drunk, it's because the sea is dangerous. It was dangerous a thousand years ago, and it will be dangerous in another thousand years as well. I'm not so sure it would've been any LESS dangerous if she'd had her mommy, daddy, and teddy bear with her.

And even if it was the stupidest, most asinine thing for any child to ever do - get a grip. If you think she's not old enough to make this choice, then she's REALLY not old enough to die as a punishment for her bad decisions.

Comments

[redbird]

One thing I ran across is that apparently her brother did more or less the same thing at about the same age; boys are allowed, even encouraged, to take risks that girls aren't, even when the physical factors are the same. (Yes, some girls might have trouble handling a sailboat; so might some boys. Nor is this a case of a 12-year-old girl and a 19-year-old boy.)

Had her brother had a mast break in a storm, I wonder how many of those commenters would have thought kidnapping and rape was the appropriate punishment for him.

[conuly]

Some of them do seem to think that the fact her brother did this is proof that their parents are abusive "stage parents" (or whatever you'd call it for sailing) and should be punished, preferably by having her die and their remaining children taken away.