Google image of backyard compound where Jaycee Dugard and her daughters were enslaved by the Garridos for 18 years. (graphic courtesy of MercuryNews.com)
The unfolding of the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping/multiple rape story in the past couple of days has an eerie nightmarish quality about it, and I’ve had to force myself to read beyond the headlines. Trying to imagine what Jaycee endured during the 18 years of her abduction fills me with outrage equaled only by the story of the Somali girl a few months ago who, after three adult men raped her, was stoned to death for adultery – as I recall, she was about the same age as Jaycee at the time of her death.
Jaycee was only 11 when the two fiends Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy abducted her at a bus stop on her way to school. Rather than using her for his depraved purposes and then abandoning her in Somali style, Garrido – aided and abetted by his wife – enslaved the child for his sexual pleasure all those years.
Dugard was taken directly to the house and sheltered from the world in a secret, leafy backyard, investigators said Thursday. Her abductor, investigators said, raped her and fathered two children with her, the first when Jaycee was about 14. Those girls, now 11 and 15, also were kept hidden away in the backyard compound behind the Antioch home.
"None of the children have ever been to school, they've never been to a doctor," El Dorado County Undersheriff Fred Kollar said. "They were kept in complete isolation in this compound."
Never been to a doctor? My mind freezes in the attempt to grasp what Jaycee’s two experiences of childbirth were like in those circumstances.
One can only ask how will the now 29-year-old Jaycee and her daughters ever find their way to healing and wholeness after the deprivation and abuse they’ve suffered?”
Still stunned by Jaycee’s horrific ordeal, I search in vain for words of wisdom to conclude this post.
Maybe later.
