A 14-year-old girl who authorities say secretly gave birth to a son and then strangled him, will be prosecuted as an adult. Cassidy Goodson is charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. She was arrested Sept. 28 after deputies say she gave birth to a 9.5-pound boy in the bathroom of her house. Detectives say she used a pair of scissors to “pry the baby out,” and delivered the child alive and into the toilet. She then strangled him with the umbilical cord still attached and put him in a shoebox, according to detectives. The girl’s mother found the baby in the box, hidden in some laundry.
Detectives say the girl hid her pregnancy from her family. According to officials with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, the high school freshman killed her baby because she “didn’t know what to do with it” and “didn’t want the relationship with her parents to change.”
I have got to wonder, are the parents of this sad child getting a pass on what happened? Are they being charged with aggravated child abuse of which they are obviously guilty? Imagine the horror this girl had to be subjected to by her heartless, disgusting and abusive parents that she chose to hide in the toilet with a pair of scissors instead of telling her parents of her pregnancy.
Now the girl will be “prosecuted as an adult.” In the meanwhile, the actual adults who terrorized her to this unimaginable degree will play the victims and receive huge amounts of support and compassion. And if you are tempted to bellyache that the girl should take responsibility for her actions, ask yourself why you are not equally tempted to suggest that these horrible parents take responsibility for the results of their parenting.
Clarissa's Blog 
In my last year in Zimbabwe, in Form Three, my female friends sometimes made a joke when somebody was too long in the toilet and they had to wait: “What are you doing? Having a baby in there?” There had been some reports of babies found in sewerage systems. This was quite scandalous from the point of view of right-wing society, although not deeply serious, since all the social changes emphasized by regime change seemed to already have a slapstick humor about them.
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In this specific story, I feel it’s easier for me to understand Zimbabwe than the society where I live right now and where a kid is charged as an adult while adults who are directly guilty congratulate themselves.
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I’ve never been able to understand the forms of logic used by most people in Western society to attribute guilt. That’s why I didn’t comment on the story directly. It’s always surprising to me to see how blame is distributed. Normally, it is apportioned to the weak and vulnerable, which doesn’t make any sense, although you can kind of get a notion of how this tendency is systematized through reading Lacan and his ilk: the child is deviant because the child is necessarily “psychotic” and hasn’t been brought to order by baptism/castration (the Christian transformation). This is Lacan’s formulation. Therefore, the weak, the vulnerable and dependent in society, are necessarily the guilty ones who suffer from irrationality, whereas the powerful and dominant people represent rational states per se.
Definitely, this is hard to stomach, and I do also find my Zimbabwean culture generally makes much more logical sense, which is why I’m returning to it.
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Musteryou – that sounds really interesting. I’ve read bits of Lacan (and liked him very much, although not the easiest read) but not come across this idea before. Got a link to some resources to find out more?
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I can’t remember where I read that Lacan considered the early childhood stage to be “psychotic”. I read a lot of academic articles. Basically, the idea is linked to what similar psychological theories call the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, when a baby does not yet understand that objects are fixed and consistent with themselves. Objects seem to come into existence and then they pass out of existence whenever they are not present. But adults know that the lack of presence at any time doesn’t mean something stops existing. So much seems logical, but Lacan, and I would argue also Freud, puts childhood development into a patriarchal religious context. Lacan even uses overtly Catholic terminology, like the word of the father, or the name of the father. “Castration” in Lacan’s paradigm seems to have a similar meaning to “circumcision” in the Jewish religion. At least, I read one article by a German academic who pointed this out. She argued that the term, castration, should be changed (back?) to circumcision. Anyway, this flow of Lacanian thought seems to be a way of psychologizing already existing religious premises, such as a child being born into sin and needing some kind of dispensation in order to make them acceptable to adult society. This is my reading.
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““Castration” in Lacan’s paradigm seems to have a similar meaning to “circumcision” in the Jewish religion. ”
– Circumcision of infants is, indeed, a castrating practice engaged in by insanely possessive parents. We have had a thread on this blog where said obsessive mommies defended tooth and nail their right to mutilate their sons’ penises.
“this flow of Lacanian thought seems to be a way of psychologizing already existing religious premises, such as a child being born into sin and needing some kind of dispensation in order to make them acceptable to adult society”
– Any psychoanalyst will be deeply opposed to the idea of castrating circumcision.
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“Any psychoanalyst will be deeply opposed to the idea of castrating circumcision”
Perhaps so, but the term is used metaphorically in Lacan’s writing, to imply that one has moved passed the stage of expressing primitive desires and into a realm of civilizing norms. My argument is that the form taken by this normative idea of civilization is implicitly Judeo-Christian. In Lacan, it is Catholic society that one enters when one loses one’s childhood fantasies and desires. Obviously Lacan’s “castration” is not usually understood in any sense literally. He is just being playful and French. But, Nietzsche analyses that Christianity is a more extreme — that is, more ascetic — form of Judaism. So it makes sense that Jewish circumcision is replaced by Christian castration as a form of civilizing norm.
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Yes, Lacan is a jerk. Here we will never disagree. 🙂
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@Clarissa, I agree completely. The 14 yo girls is a child. The parents didn’t even look after her physical health properly never mind the psychological aspects of this matter.
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“The parents didn’t even look after her physical health properly never mind the psychological aspects of this matter.”
– Exactly! Some parents they are not to notice that the kid is in the last term of pregnancy.
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Why does so much of this stuff happen in Florida?
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I think everyone failed this teenager. I wonder how everyone else failed to notice she was pregnant. Friends, cousins, grandparents, teachers……where the fuck was anybody?
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If a teenager has no caring friends, cousins, etc that is because her parents didn’t teach her to make significant connections.
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Oh there is no doubt the parents own the share of the blame but there is more than enough to go around to all the people in this kid’s life. The fact that it seems not even a guidance counselor or teacher didnt see that this kid was pregnant and obviously troubled is a concern for sure.
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I’m not talking about “shares of blame”. I’m talking about criminal prosecution and sanctions.
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I find the whole idea of prosecuting children as adults for any crime to be repellant. There is a separate juvenile justice system for a reason – multiple reasons. These reasons don’t go away when the system chooses to throw some poor kid to the wolves of the ignorant bloodthirsty law-and-order public. What countries other than the US allow such a travesty?
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“to throw some poor kid to the wolves of the ignorant bloodthirsty law-and-order public”
– The public that wants to exorcise its own guilt over the abuse inflicted on its own children. By blaming the kid parents who recognize themselves in her parents can feel less guilty. And there is nothing to protect the kids.
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