Explaining your attitude towards women
Guy rapes one woman, rapes and murders another. Judge finds a woman to blame.
“Your mother rejected you; that may go some way towards explaining your attitude towards women,” said Justice Geoffrey Venning in a New Zealand high court court in November this year as he sentenced Kempson to three-and-a-half years in jail for the rape.
Yes, because hatred of women is so rare and unusual that it must have a particular cause, to be specific, a woman.
On learning he had been found guilty of the 2018 rape, Kempson screamed at the judge: “You have no reason to convict me. You’re full of shit mate.” At his sentencing last month, Justice Venning said it was clear Kempson did not accept his offending and told him: “You have no remorse or insight into it.”
In another trial earlier this year, also suppressed until now, Kempson was convicted of terrorising his live-in girlfriend for months in 2017. He subjected her to violent assaults, threatened her with a butcher’s knife and forced her into sex acts after telling her he had been sent by the CIA to kill her. He was sentenced in November this year to seven-and-a-half years in jail.
What a good thing we can blame his mother.
Yes. And if after his 7 years and 6 months (probably pruned back a fair bit for ‘good behaviour’) and he is released and offends again, they can blame his mother again.
Many years ago now, I came to the conclusion that we can all trundle out some hard-luck story to explain away anything we want to explain away. That defence, if found acceptable, would also get Adolf Hitler off the hook.
We all have to take responsibility for our choices, and the consequences of them. No excuses.
Omar, the only good thing about this situation is that he’ll be in jail longer than that. This is the guy who killed Grace Millane (strangled her during what probably started out as consensual sex), took intimate pictures of her dead body, watched violent porn, then went out and purchased a suitcase and shovel to bury her in the forest.
He’s been sentenced to over 17 years minimum on a life sentence. unless he does some very serious and genuine rehabilitation, he’s not getting out any sooner. especially not with this additional context for the parole board to consider.
#1 Omar
Well you know he was rejected from art school right? All the rest follows, donchaknow.
Holms:
Some would say that damned art school has a lot to answer for. ;-)
It’s depressing that this report is from one of the most civilized and least corrupt countries in the world.
Yes, yes, but…
There may be some truth in what the judge said. Many children who are exposed to abuse and neglect at the critical stage of brain development in the first 18 months of life grow up to become psychopaths — incapable of feeling empathy. Some of those become successful CEOs, some become President, and some become serial sexual sadists. Or all three.
Some commenters here seem to be saying “he’s evil and he deserves to suffer” — which I suppose is a normal gut reaction, but it doesn’t actually, you know, help.
How do we help? If only we knew! Will there ever be a drug, or a talk therapy, or a psychosurgery that would “fix” psychopathy? It seems like the best we can do now is sequester these individuals to prevent them from harming others (and perpetuating another generation of abuse if they would otherwise abuse their own children). But if a psychopath is indeed a wounded person, then he is already a victim himself, and to punish him cruelly for hurting someone only multiplies hurt.
Peter,
That’s by no means certain, by no means certainly true in this case and the judge is not qualified to determine that.
No…. Nobody has said that or anything resembling it.
Anyway, you’re missing the point. Even if the guy’s mother was neglectful, she would still not be to blame for his crimes as the judge – to put it charitably – strongly implies.
Oh, I’ll say it. He’s evil and he deserves to suffer.
SM @ #8:
What I think is severely and sadly lacking at this site is a competent exponent of postmodernism. If only we had a resident and faithful disciple of Derrida, Althusser, or one of the numerous others of passing fashion, that offering of yours could be radically deconstructed, and then we could all move on. But until then and left as it is, we will be stumbling over it, crashing into it, and getting shipwrecked on the rock of it, till the cows come home and pigs take wings and fly.
While I will agree that persons subjected to early abuse may indeed grow up to be psychopaths, there are many more persons subjected to early abuse that do not grow up to become psychopaths (myself included? excepted? Well, am I a psychopath? Guess I’m not the best to determine that). In addition, there are people who grow up to be psychopaths who were not subjected to early abuse, who had wonderful parents and no obvious reason to be psychopaths. So this current fad (current for most of my life) of excusing every wrongdoer as having had a bad childhood or being abused is…grating. Angry-making. Wrong-headed.
I have heard many people go on and on about “he must have had such an awful childhood!” or “his mother must have been really a nightmare!” for no reason other than that the person in question has done something egregious and anti-social. The people saying that do not know that. The default these days is to assume.
I had a rotten mother. I had a vicious, violent, lazy, unhappy, brutal mother. I had two siblings who exceeded her for abuse. If I had grown up to be a vicious psychopath, that might be an explanation, but not an excuse. Instead, I grew up depressed and suicidal, and all these people gushing over every brutal male that commits horrid acts and they excuse it by their rotten childhood (without knowing if they had one) will say to me “get over it already, can’t you? That’s past!”
Clearly inappropriate advice in your case.
My wife’s father was an alcoholic, and a dairy farmer. At around the age of five, and at his wife’s insistence, he started taking his daughter to town each time he went. On arrival in town, he would give her the price of an ice cream, while he slipped into the nearest pub to quickly sink a few. On returning home, her mother would ask her “did Daddy go drinking today?” At first she would say “I don’t know”, but as time went on she came to follow her father like a bloodhound, going from pub to pub to check on him and reporting to her mother. Later, when she was a teenager, in one of the family rows her father accused her mother of having turned his daughter against him, and her subsequent few relationships with men were conditional on their being teetotallers. She would have nothing to do with any man who so much as touched a drop.
She was a very troubled soul when I met her, and had by then a most poisonous relationship with her father, even after he gave up drinking completely. But then she met a very skilled professional psychologist and counsellor, who listened to her story and then said to her: “I put it to you that your father was right. Your mother did turn you against him. Apart from all the other considerations, your mother did turn you against him.”
She fought against the whole idea, and had a few nightmares about it, but finished up accepting it; and it changed her whole life, and very much for the better. She even came to enjoy her father’s company in the few years he had remaining to him.
The moral I draw from it: SOMETIMES the truth is lurking in our mental undergrowth, and is the proposition we find most repulsive and are least inclined to accept.
Man is violent to women – “poor guy, some woman must have been awful to him”
Woman is feminist – “evil hairy humourless manhater*!”
*Spellchecker’s suggestion: homeless manatees.
I’ll offer some lukewarm defence of the Judge. Their full sentencing comments have not been fully supported, nor given context. The Judge noted that the arsehole – sorry, defendant – had quite a number of adverse and troubling aspects to his childhood. A number of those he did not go into in detail and the Court has refused to make the pre-sentencing reports public. Judges in New Zealand are required to note and weigh possible mitigating circumstances when sentencing. There is no indication at all that Kempson was given any credit for the impact that his mother leaving had on him. More frankly do the judges remarks read, in context, as a rebuke to his mother. More an observation of possible impact as an aside if anything.
Iknklast makes a good point that many people grow up in appalling circumstances and still turn out to be decent people, if sometimes carrying scars or flaws as a result. I think iknklast has acknowledged that about herself, and I’d certainly do the same. I could easily have been one of life’s losers and criminals given the circumstances of my upbringing. I’m flawed no doubt, but I have always worked at being decent.
What makes one person integrate into society and another reject it when bought up in similar circumstances? I don’t really know for sure. In my case I think it was that my mother really tried to I still me with a core of decent attitudes and others outside the family gave me the nudges and support I needed at just the right times. Maybe others missed those things at the right moments or just never got them. Maybe some fundamental flaw in their makeup prevented them from being able to see what was on offer. I listened to a series of interviews with an expert on psychopathy last year. He said that the difference between criminal psychopaths and Buddhist monks was compassion. I don’t know how I rate on the compassion scale, but I’ve got empathy in spades and that’s closely related.
Whether or not Kempson could have been redeemed once, I doubt he can be now and I do believe we all ultimately make a choice.