Written by | Rio Tears Slave
I’m still blocked in my heart after watching the video of a mother throwing her child from a high-rise building.
Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, but I was caught off guard by a real tragic news story. In Banan District, Chongqing, a 37-year-old woman, He, suddenly became manic in her 22nd-floor home. After injuring her mother-in-law with a kitchen knife, she threw her 3-year-old son out of the window, causing him to fall to his death.
The death of a child is a tragedy in itself, but being killed by his own mother adds a more heavy and suffocating color to such a tragedy, allowing people to truly feel the pain of human relationships.
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The official report stated that He has been controlled by the police, and relatives and neighbors reported that her recent mental behavior was abnormal. The case is still under further investigation.
The phrase “abnormal mental behavior” has sparked the attention and discussion of netizens about whether the woman will be exempted from criminal punishment.
Figure/Network
Some legal professionals pointed out that the law does not exempt all mentally ill people from punishment for crimes, but strictly identifies their criminal responsibility in specific cases. Whether the woman is criminally responsible depends on whether she completely lost the ability to recognize or control her behavior at the time of the crime, and it needs to be confirmed through judicial procedures, not just because she is a mental patient and is not held criminally responsible.
For this reason, a detail was pushed into the spotlight by netizens: According to a report by The Paper, insiders revealed that after there were safety airbags downstairs, He threw her young son out of another window. After throwing the 3-year-old child, she was controlled by the police and fire department when she wanted to throw the second child.
Many netizens asked, didn’t this mother’s thinking seem clear when she deliberately avoided the airbag?
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There are two completely different voices on the Internet regarding He, the mother who killed her child.
One voice expresses sympathy for the woman, believing that she may have been arguing with her mother-in-law for a long time and was “driven crazy” and “how much oppression did this family give her”; some people say that the mother who dropped her child must love her own child more than all netizens.
Of course, the louder voice is to express condemnation and anger at the woman’s behavior. A relatively mild netizen’s hot comment is: No matter how much hardship there is, the child should not bear it.
If subsequent evidence proves that this mother suffers from some kind of serious mental illness, whether or not she needs to bear criminal responsibility, she is of course also one of the victims of this tragedy, and since she is a victim, she deserves sympathy.
However, sympathy is one thing, and empathy is another.
Those “empathizers” on social media may not care much about this mother who may be tormented by illness and will eventually face the pain of losing her child. They “ignore the facts,” and are more concerned about non-existent family conflicts, imposing a virtual image of a “marriage victim” on this mother based on their personal circumstances or certain ideological concepts, and then empathizing with such a mother who may not be real.
In any case, we can sympathize with the mother who threw her child from a high-rise building and killed him, but we must never empathize with her. This is the bottom line of human ethics and civilization.
Sociologist Sun Liping once proposed the concept of “bottom-level collapse.” He believes that the lack of resources and the cramped living space will fundamentally distort the normal logic of life.
This mother’s emotional breakdown and throwing her child, whom she had raised for ten months, from a high-rise building can also be said to be a form of “bottom-level collapse.”
But in any case, there is a bottom line and common sense that should not “collapse,” that is, a child is a unique life in this world, independent of anyone, and is not anyone’s appendage. Including parents, no one has the right to arbitrarily deprive others of their lives.
As netizens said: “Those who sympathize with the daughter-in-law, those who sympathize with the mother-in-law, have you ever sympathized with the child? Did he do anything wrong? If there is reincarnation, then he was wrong to be born into this family.”
It is somewhat sad that similar tragedies of human relationships occur from time to time.
In 2017, in Zuoan Puyuan, Zuoanmennei, Beijing, a mother jumped off a building with her daughter, and the daughter cried out: “Mom, I don’t want to die!” However, the mother was indifferent to her daughter’s cries. The daughter finally even shouted “Mom, don’t pull me, I’ll jump myself,” which made many netizens burst into tears.
Think about it, in what despair and helplessness would the little girl say such words and choose to “jump herself”?
“Mom, I don’t want to die!” This should be the last cry of all the children who were “taken” away by their mothers, even a fetus.
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I want to say that those who kill their own children, those who commit suicide with their children (in this Chongqing tragedy, if there is no external intervention, it is not ruled out that the woman jumped off the building after throwing her eldest son), no matter how desperate they are, are not worthy of forgiveness.
A person has no right to let others die. Children are not the private property of their parents, nor should they become the victims of family misfortune. This should be the basic consensus of modern society. No matter how much misfortune the person involved has, and how deep the sympathy people show, it cannot drown out this consensus.
Of course, they cannot be forgiven, but they need to be saved. In life, there are many people who are wandering on the edge of despair. One step forward is irreversible, and one step back, even if it is difficult to say that the sky is vast, there are countless possibilities for rebirth.
Specifically, in the tragic incident of throwing a child from a high-rise building in Chongqing, what needs to be saved and needs to make ourselves stronger also includes us in front of the screen.
With the development of social media, the presentation of such tragic events is very different from the past. People no longer just “return” to the scene through textual descriptions, but directly “synchronize” into the scene through videos and close-up shots.
An eyewitness said that watching the 3-year-old child tightly holding his mother’s hand, his heart was in his throat, and watching the child constantly trying to climb up, he felt so distressed.
In fact, the witnesses are not only the neighbors of the community, but also everyone who has brushed this video. For example, me, seeing this child suspended in the air trying to climb into the window several times to seek survival but being stopped by his mother, the moment the child’s mother let go made me feel that the whole world was gray.
The 3-year-old child is already sensible, and the sadness and fear at that moment cannot be described by any human language and words.
It hurts to fall from the 22nd floor, but before the fall, he must have felt another kind of pain.
Such a scene, such an involuntary sense of substitution, will cause a huge impact on people’s hearts. We need to guard against that such an impact will bring “secondary harm,” bring a certain amplification effect, and exacerbate some people’s sense of pessimism and powerlessness towards the world – in the mobile Internet era, it is often not that such events have increased, but that they can enter your field of vision more quickly.
Perhaps, we need to strengthen our ability to adjust in this area, learn to face this imperfect world, respect life, learn to reconcile with suffering in our hearts, and stay away from the cliff of despair.
To avoid similar tragedies, we cannot do without the support of public relief forces, so that more people can avoid being swallowed by despair. For example, some people have proposed to strengthen the construction of social workers, but in places where the system cannot cover, we need to self-motivate the ability to resist collapse.
Statistics show that if you can control your emotions well, 80% of the tragedies caused by impulse can be avoided and can be prevented from roaring out of the cage.
“Everything has cracks, that’s where the light comes in.” You must have light in your heart.
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