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WORLD> Europe
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Woman locked up by family for 18 years
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-06-23 07:45 Ricci said investigators are trying to find out who fathered Monaco's son, in the hope that he could help determine what kind of psychiatric problems she had before being locked up. They are also probing why authorities were not alerted earlier. The woman has been receiving a monthly disability check since the late 1980s and should have been paid occasional calls by health officials, the prosecutor said. Gianfranco Carbone, a lawyer for Monaco's family, denied that the woman was locked up because of the pregnancy. He blamed her "deplorable" condition on her refusal to let anyone wash her or change her. Then why not call in doctors for help? "Probably because of ignorance and shame," Carbone said. Experts say those factors were at work in similar cases in recent years across Italy. Two years ago the country was shocked by reports of a woman in Pescara, central Italy, who lived for 30 years in the bathroom of the home of her mother and stepfather because she was mentally retarded and was born from a previous relationship. In 2005, parents near Palermo, Sicily, were accused of not giving enough food to their 3-year-old daughter, who had Down syndrome, then failing to help while she choked to death on a piece of food. "It's almost as if the family feels guilty for siring a person with such problems," said Andrea Materzanini, head of the psychiatry ward at a hospital in Iseo, near Milan. Elvira Reale, a psychologist and director of a women's mental health center in Naples, said the stigma of disability can mask prejudice against women who display behavior considered too bold in the country's more conservative backwaters. Women who behave unconventionally, particularly sexually, can be branded as mentally ill, Reale said. Until the late 1970s, it was common for such women to end up spending their lives in a mental institution upon doctor's orders, she said. A 1978 reform shut down mental institutions, and hospitalization in psychiatric wards must be limited in time. Monaco's case appears to conform to this age-old pattern, Reale said. |
