Parents in Need

Does the press approach these parents to entertain their readers or do journalists truly believe that a parent who is stuck in this unenviable situation can come up with a sensible reaction? More than that: do we actually want to know what the parent is saying?

Hours after his son had killed 50 people in a gay bar in Orlando, the father who apologised and hastened to add that the killing had nothing to do with religion, explained that some months earlier, his son had seen: "two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry…They were kissing each other and touching each other…” 

Last week, also in America, Dan Turner, whose son was given the outrageously light 6 month sentence for raping a fellow student at a party in Stanford, pleaded: “That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.”

And an Israeli mother, whose 17-year-old son was a member of a gang of young men who for 3 years raped and sexually abused a girl from their high school, informed us that her son was “a normative boy, a nice boy, who will soon be going to the army and now this prosecution will destroy his life.”