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| Hannah Anderson: victim or villain? (www.gospelherald.com) |
We've become cynical. Very, very cynical.
That fact has been driven home to me, if it hadn't been previously, since I started reading online feedback to the sensational kidnapping and subsequent rescue and return of 16-year-old Hannah Anderson. If you haven't followed this extraordinary story, Hannah was kidnapped by a 40-something-year-old male family friend with a reported (by Hannah herself on a social media site after her return) romantic interest in her after killing her mother, younger brother, and dog, and setting fire to his home to destroy evidence. But some of those items were pulled from the ashes, including letters from Hannah to her captor, according to news articles.
That information, along with reports of a dozen phone calls exchanged between victim and captor on the day of the incident, and Hannah's insistence on resuming an active social media presence (even answering questions about her experience from strangers online), has people shaking their heads and suspecting foul play...on Hannah's part. She's been a bit too resilient, the skeptics have commented. She's been a bit too willing to make public appearances (online and otherwise).
As terrible as that sounds, I understand the skepticism. We've seen and heard too many news stories of teenage girls running away with adult male boyfriends, lying about their actions,...and worse. (I recall seeing "48 Hours" telecast a story of a teenage girl who killed her mother for threatening to disrupt the girl's relationship with her bad-influence boyfriend.) These things, unfortunately, are not unprecedented.
Women, unfortunately, fake their own kidnappings. Teenage girls, unfortunately, run away from home (with or without boyfriends). The truth, we've learned, isn't always what it appeared to be.
Is Hannah's post-return behavior strange? Who's to say? She's a teenager. She's a teenager who has experienced a series of horrific life-changing
events in a week's time. In all the media storm surrounding this, I
think we've lost sight of that important fact.
Many teenagers are addicted to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, sharing way too much personal information with virtual strangers. Perhaps that social connection is sustaining her through the loss of her family and aiding her recovering. Perhaps she's still in shock and hasn't processed anything at all. Maybe she's just acting without thinking. (She wouldn't be the first teenager-or adult-to be guilty of that!)
I don't know. What I do know is I can't imagine myself publicly answering questions or posting information about such an ordeal on Facebook. I can't imagine not lying low for a very long time afterward, so the news articles about her Facebook posts and ask.fm question-and-answer session gave me a squicky feeling, though there's nothing necessarily sinister in that.
I don't understand why she has chosen to address this so publicly, but maybe she doesn't either. Personally, I don't want to believe that she (or anyone else) was involved in the deaths of her family in any way. Of course I don't. So I'm choosing to believe in her innocence unless the evidence (if it exists) proves her guilty of wrongdoing.
But like any other cynical American news watcher, I'm also fervently hoping that "we don't get fooled again" (to quote the Who).
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