I don’t know.. carrying a newborn around in a single bodysuit in freezing cold in a bag for life.. feels pretty evil to me.
People can scoff at the word all they like but I’m not sure what’s to be gained by utterly rewriting definitions of love, care, evil or cruelty. I don’t know what purpose it serves to victims, who are the people that matter.
Of course people are not inherently diagnosable “evil”, they’re the product of nature and nurture and there are all sorts of neurological disorders that can make people more predisposed to committing harmful acts. The armchair psychology is not for me as far as these two are concerned, it doesn’t add anything imo. We all know what is meant when the word evil is used in the context of a baby being left to rot by their own parents- the judge might even use the same language, we’ll see!
Plenty of people however do commit acts of unspeakable cruelty and as a social worker has already pointed out, plenty of people do not have love for their children and only possess them or use them for their own needs. If I were to make my children stand outside now through the night in just their pyjamas, whilst they cried, whilst I could see they were pale and cold, whilst I knew there was absolutely a way to make them better, warm and feel content - imo that is an act of abject cruelty and evil yes. To do it to the point they die? Yes more so again. They were neglectful to the point of abuse and had 4 kids taken off them, we will probably never know the exact reasons why but they will have been fairly extreme. I taught lots of children that had less than perfect home lives but only one that was removed fully from parents and the reasons were vile, extreme and utterly cruel and neglectful. Locked alone for days, forced to smoke (4 years old) lots of truly awful stuff. Total cruelty. Again, it’s just an easy way to look down on people that are more inclined to say negative things about these two rather than offer reasons or interpretations as to why or how they became serial child abusers. Which is what they are.
