Did They Give Her a Room With a View

A young girl gets pregnant, she’s not married. This is how one Italian family took care of the situation:

Police say a family in southern Italy kept a woman locked in a room in their house for 18 years because they were angry she was pregnant out of wedlock.

For the last 18 years, this woman was held hostage in a room with a bed, a chair, a sink and a dirty toilet. To make matters worse, her son never knew she existed, he was raised by other relatives.

There are so mnay things going on in this little article that I don’t know where to start. Imprisoning ones daughter for being pregnant out of wedlock, being pregnant as a single mom, abstinence until marriage, stealing this woman’s child, the psychological terror this woman has lived through for the last 18 years. Where does one begin?

Maria Monaco, 47, was said to be suffering severe psychological trauma after being kept in “indescribable” conditions. She has been taken for treatment to a hospital in Naples.

Think about these dates first. This woman is 47 now, and has been imprisoned for 18 years, which makes her 29 years old when this started. She wasn’t a teenager. She was a fully mature woman, capable of making her own decisions. Yet, at least 3 articles claim she was mentally ill, putting her mental condition up as a potential reason for her imprisonment. And even if she was menatlly ill at the time she became pregnant, her treatment is completely reprehensible.

Taking a guess, I’d say it was the imprisonment by her family and the isolation and dirty living conditions that lead to her current mental state.