Austrian Horrormp3

Few news stories these days have the power to shock us. Whether it’s teenagers being stabbed in South London or genocide in Africa, we think we’ve seen and heard it all before. Yet, this week’s revelations from Austria will probably have changed all that.

How could something like this happen? What possessed Josef Fritzl to keep his own daughter locked up for 24 years and to father her 7 children? His actions were obviously extreme, but it’s possible that two factors in our Western society may have contributed to these events.

Firstly, we have reduced morality to our own making. What I do is up to me and no one else has a right to tell me I’m wrong. The problem here though, is that if we say morality is up to the individual, there will always be people like Fritzl who create their own twisted sense of right and wrong and who think that their actions are justifiable. As Fritzl said this week, “Why should I feel sorry? I cared well for them. I meant well with Elisabeth.” Surely this shows that we need a moral guideline that goes beyond what the individual thinks is acceptable.

Secondly, as Germaine Greer has argued, society continues to inappropriately sexualise children. Just this week, questions were raised about a photograph in Vanity Fair of 15 year old Miley Cyrus that many people felt was sexually provocative. Similarly Tesco have caused outrage over the selling of a padded bra aimed at girls as young as 7. Ken Livingstone, in relation to his own sexual morality, rather famously said, “I don’t think anyone in this city will be shocked by what two consenting adults do, as long as you don’t include children, animals or vegetables.” But while we will all agree with Ken that sexual behaviour should never include children, society seems to blur the lines about what precisely that means.

What seems clear then, is that in reducing morality to our own making, we’re never quite sure where to draw the lines - and even if we think we know where the lines are, we can often get it wrong. That is exactly why we need outside help – God’s – to define what’s right and wrong, and why we need to humbly admit that actually, he does know best. If we define our own morality we are effectively playing God, thinking that we know better than him. And the Austrian case demonstrates the disastrous consequences this attitude can bring.

Susannah Clark, Evangelical Alliance

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