'I will not feed a demon': YouTuber Ruby Franke's child abuse case rooted in religious extremism
The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
Until a mental health issue has been concretely determined, I believe it's somewhat irresponsible to toss the idea around that it's the underlying root cause for this obscene behavior.
Religion, like other dogmas, has historically empowered and continues to empower a lot of otherwise mentally healthy people to feel okay doing plenty of fucked up shit, simply because religion said it's okay to do it.
Ever heard of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment? Many "normal" people will do terrible things if simply given permission.
That experiment was recently shown to be a lie, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication
But I think you’re right that people go along with a lot simply because of religious doctrine. There are plenty of cases of failed “exorcisms”
I mean, religions are fucked in all kinds of ways and can certainly fuck up their followers in a systemic way but in this instance I'm not sure Mormonism is teaching emaciation of children, more like they were attributing their fucked up impulses to religion.