(CW: CSA) Josh & Anna 51: An Unappealing Appeal

[catlady]

i used to casually watch them back then, long before i knew how dangerous they were.  but even then, i thought that using the word "jurisdiction" for chores was a little pretentious, like they were trying to show off their vocabulary or some such--JB & M, not the kids.  

(i was also irritated by Smuggs in the wedding episode when he didn't really give a rat's ass that he stepped on and tore Anna's dress.)

[TuringMachine]

17 hours ago, Shouldabeenacowboy said:

Can someone remind me of the date when Turd is getting sentenced? 

May 25

[Cam]

Speaking of jurisdictions, in the video, Jana said her jurisdiction included her parents’ room.  Upon hearing that, I immediately thought: Omg, that’s why Jana has chosen to remain single. She was probably privy to more while cleaning up in their room than her innocent child eyes should have ever seen and it turned her off to a joyfully available marriage. I’m not saying the parents were in the act while she was there but imagine always cleaning up their personal space afterwards. Just ew. 

Edited April 27, 2022 by Cam

[SassyPants]

2 hours ago, Cam said:

Speaking of jurisdictions, in the video, Jana said her jurisdiction included her parents’ room.  Upon hearing that, I immediately thought: Omg, that’s why Jana has chosen to remain single. She was probably privy to more while cleaning up in their room than her innocent child eyes should have ever seen and it turned her off to a joyfully available marriage. I’m not saying the parents were in the act while she was there but imagine always cleaning up their personal space afterwards. Just ew. 

Now this just tells you how out of touch, perhaps even less than healthy JB and M’s decision making skills were (are)!  Now why couldn’t Michelle assign she and JB to that jurisdiction? These folks just reek of lacking common sense. Did Gothard mandate checking in common sense and logic at the admission door?

[EmCatlyn]

21 hours ago, Lady Dondarrion said:

https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/homeschooling-came-up-in-josh-duggars-trial-and-it-could-have-an-impact-on-his-family

…….  [snipped]

Thanks for the link!  I agree with your main point, but what I was most happy to see in that article was this:

Quote

Arkansas happens to be one of two states that does not allow registered sex offenders to be in homes where children are homeschooled. Per the Coalition For Responsible Home Education, the website notes that both Pennsylvania and Arkansas have protections in place where registered sex offenders are involved. 

. “…  Because homeschooling removes children from the regular contact with mandatory reporters other school-aged children receive at school, we support laws that restrict homeschooling when a registered sex offender resides in the home. Given their relative isolation, homeschooled children are more vulnerable to exploitation.”

I found it encouraging that if Josh gets out while some of his kids are school-age, he and Anna will have to choose between sending the kids to school or having Josh live apart from Anna and the kids.  

To be sure, they might get around it in numerous ways. (Josh could officially live in one place but spend all his time with Anna and the kids,  the kids could be officially moved to the TTH yet still spend a lot of time with Josh and Anna,  etc.)  However, it is good to know that because Josh will have to register as a sex offender, there will be some limits.

[EmCatlyn]

19 hours ago, Mama Mia said:

Yea…I don’t buy it in Anna’s case. Even covenant marriages allow for legal divorce in these circumstances. Anna has access to the internet and - most importantly- her own siblings have divorced and even had children out of marriage - and are still an active part of family life and welcomed by her parents. She knows people who were raised just like her who leave and do fine.  Working full-time outside the home at time would not be realistic financially. But if she WANTED to she could certainly emotionally separate from Josh, she could do part-time work from home clerical work, she could certainly demand a house from JB. She could even stay at the compound and build up her resources so she’s ready to go in a few years, so when Josh is released he doesn’t come home to live with a bunch of little girls.  She’s NOT doing any of that though. She’s the ONLY one defending him. 

I completely agree, especially about what I bolded above.  Divorce aside, there are a lot of things Anna could be doing to detach from Josh and to plan a life for herself and her children that does not include him as a central figure.  Instead, she has doubled-down on his innocence and seems to be clinging to her position as his wife even after everything he has done.

One has to wonder if Anna would reject Josh and try to get her children away even if one of them reported being molested.  Would she believe her own child or is her seemingly masochistic need to cling to Josh so great that she would tell herself and the child that the kid had to be mistaken?  What if she actually saw Josh doing something inappropriate?  Anna is more than “brainwashed.”  I think she may have lost touch with a reality that is too painful to acknowledge.  The question is, what —if anything—could jolt her back to reality?

(Note that I am not speculating or encouraging anyone to speculate about the children.  The question here is about how Anna might respond to entirely hypothetical situations where she would have to choose between Josh and the welfare of her kids.)

[Mama Mia]

2 hours ago, EmCatlyn said:

I completely agree, especially about what I bolded above.  Divorce aside, there are a lot of things Anna could be doing to detach from Josh and to plan a life for herself and her children that does not include him as a central figure.  Instead, she has doubled-down on his innocence and seems to be clinging to her position as his wife even after everything he has done.

One has to wonder if Anna would reject Josh and try to get her children away even if one of them reported being molested.  Would she believe her own child or is her seemingly masochistic need to cling to Josh so great that she would tell herself and the child that the kid had to be mistaken?  What if she actually saw Josh doing something inappropriate?  Anna is more than “brainwashed.”  I think she may have lost touch with a reality that is too painful to acknowledge.  The question is, what —if anything—could jolt her back to reality?

(Note that I am not speculating or encouraging anyone to speculate about the children.  The question here is about how Anna might respond to entirely hypothetical situations where she would have to choose between Josh and the welfare of her kids.)

Unfortunately, Right now I think the most likely scenario is Josh will be out in 5-10 years. He will be placed in a small property somewhere close, but not too close, to the big house. Anna will for all practical purposes live with him there, and the minor M kids will live with Lolli and Pops. When they have another kid or three those kids will also go to live with Lolly and Pops as soon as possible. Josh will be given some lightweight admin work for Duggar businesses to do to earn his keep - but Anna will do it for him. He’ll sit around finding ways to get around computer partitions. If he does anything to any of his kids, or any other kid, Anna will blame the kid and be jealous. Or possibly facilitate it. I think they’d likely have this trajectory even if they weren’t fundamentalist. It’s a not rare pattern with couples where the man is a pedo. Regardless of $$, education, religion or anything else. Anna has more barriers than some women, but less than others. 

[formergothardite]

I don’t see any world where Anna would report Josh no matter what she discovered him doing. Sadly there are plenty of women who are like that. I suspect Anna is going to stand by and protect Josh for the rest of her life. Josh isn’t going to stop this behavior, I’m afraid. He will just try to get better at hiding it. 

[Mrs Ms]

Thank goodness Anna and Josh don’t have a covenant marriage (Florida doesn’t do them) 

 

I believe that Josh abused Anna. Not sure and don’t care to speculate how or how much, but considering what they were happy to show to the public, it would have been worse in private.

 

Arkansas not allowing Sex offenders around homeschooling kids is easily sidestepped by moving! Depending on where he gets sent to after sentencing, we kinda suspected that anyway. 
 

To tie all three points together. I really hope that time and space break through whatever mindfuckery Josh has done to Anna, she finds a personal moral compass and takes advantage of her non-covenant marriage ceremony to divorce his arse. Then she can carry on homeschooling  uneducating her babies if she can afford to and is truly passionate about it.

[AprilQuilt]

On 4/27/2022 at 2:13 PM, GuineaPigCourtship said:

I never really watched the show, just clips on youtube, and had never seen anything from the early specials.  That is so creepy!  How did anyone watching not immediately peg them as members in a cult?  The singing on the van was so creepy...

the thing is, they just looked really dated back then? In the early 90s when I was a kid, these big collars and blowsy dresses were really fashionable, plus that half-up long waved hair. In the 80s and 90s here in the UK the gold standard for 'smart' dresses was Laura Ashley - I don't know if that made it over the pond but really you'll see a similar style in any kids movie from the first half of the 90s. Two examples of Laura Ashley below:

Spoiler

 

...so in the early 2000s I remember that the Duggars looked comical because they were so throwbacky, but they didn't look cultish, per se. They looked frozen in time in a really specific sort of way. The fashion of 10-15 years ago is always the most awkwardly painful to us in whatever our present moment is. I mean, I can understand that they favoured this look because it does specifically hark back to an imagined 'wholesome' past, but these kind of dresses must have been very very easy to find second hand back then too.

[BensAllergies]

I will be surprised if Josh moves back in with Anna unless it is only temporary. After incarceration I do not think he will want to return to his former life. He will use Anna for as long as he can, and then he will move on.

I think he will get 7-10 years but 3 of those will be the federal version of probation. So he could get released around age 40 but then have some time living under restrictions until his full time is up. I honestly think he will bide his time for a while then high tail it out of his family’s life for a young girlfriend.

[Alisamer]

19 hours ago, Mrs Ms said:

Arkansas not allowing Sex offenders around homeschooling kids is easily sidestepped by moving! Depending on where he gets sent to after sentencing, we kinda suspected that anyway. 

The only problem I have with a law not allowing sex offenders in a home where children are homeschooling, is that it leaves the first 6 years of the kids' lives unprotected. They could easily keep each child home with them until they are 6 or so when they have to officially start homeschooling, and then move them to the TTH. 

I get the point of the law, but that seems like a huge oversight. A pedophile can do plenty before a kid reaches school age.

[Anne Of Gray Gables]

6 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

I get the point of the law, but that seems like a huge oversight. A pedophile can do plenty before a kid reaches school age.

I suppose it's better than nothing.  But the reality is, whether they move to another state or whether the M kids attend the Seewald Academy with their cousins, the kids are going to live with their father if Anna opts to stay with him.

[Giraffe]

22 minutes ago, Anne Of Gray Gables said:

I suppose it's better than nothing.  But the reality is, whether they move to another state or whether the M kids attend the Seewald Academy with their cousins, the kids are going to live with their father if Anna opts to stay with him.

This. I can see JB splitting up the land so that the convicted child predator isn’t technically not on the same property as his kids and use TTH as the kid’s permanent address. It’s infuriating but absolutely something the four of them would do. 

[Antimony]

1 hour ago, Alisamer said:

The only problem I have with a law not allowing sex offenders in a home where children are homeschooling, is that it leaves the first 6 years of the kids' lives unprotected. They could easily keep each child home with them until they are 6 or so when they have to officially start homeschooling, and then move them to the TTH. 

I get the point of the law, but that seems like a huge oversight. A pedophile can do plenty before a kid reaches school age.

Ack, I'm back on my bullshit because I actually think this is a pretty reasonable sex offender law, of all the sex offender laws, because it addresses an actual problem (isolation from services and the community) and doesn't make anybody homeless (which, some sex offender laws manage). 

Spoiler

At least 12 states require sex offender registration for public urination; five apply it to people charged with offenses related to sex work; 29 require it for consensual sex between teenagers. According to Human Rights Watch, people have been forced to spend decades on the registry for crimes they committed as young as 10 years old.

There's a legal and cultural definition problem with what a "sex offender" is. Josh is a sex offender, but so is somebody who is caught urinating in public in Utah. If somebody is convicted of public urination in Utah and moves to Arkansas, which does not consider public urination a sex crime, they still have to register as a sex offender and Arkansas doesn't provide any exceptions for low level offenses...like taking a piss at the bus station. 

So, this no homeschooling law makes a lot of sense to me. It has low impact on parties that we aren't worried about. I'm not worried about Davis down the road who pissed at outside the bar during a college binge drinking night, but Davis probably doesn't even want to homeschool his kids, and that's fine. If he does want to homeschool his kids, he's probably not actually that upset about having to send them elsewhere, or it simply isn't worth the cost.  I am worried about Josh, the guy with all the CSAM, who comes from a religious cult who wants to homeschool his kids. 

Good law. Low unintended impact. Addresses community support for children. Puts children near mandated reporters. Doesn't cause homelessness. 

And while Josh could move out of state to avoid this law...well, it's that's true of many a law, but the sex offender registry will follow him from state to state and there are honestly probably states that could be worse for him in regards to that. Most things are legal if you're rich enough, anyway, so this is just another iteration of that. 

[SPHASH]

This homeschooling law could have been the reason JB ran for the state senate last fall.  Wants it repealed.

[GuineaPigCourtship]

1 hour ago, SPHASH said:

This homeschooling law could have been the reason JB ran for the state senate last fall.

That would be a tough sell to the constituents.  My son was charged with possession of CSAM, is known to have molested several minors, and I really would like his kids to be isolated at home with him and no outside contact.

#godly

[Smee]

6 hours ago, Alisamer said:

The only problem I have with a law not allowing sex offenders in a home where children are homeschooling, is that it leaves the first 6 years of the kids' lives unprotected. They could easily keep each child home with them until they are 6 or so when they have to officially start homeschooling, and then move them to the TTH. 

I get the point of the law, but that seems like a huge oversight. A pedophile can do plenty before a kid reaches school age.

True, but school is really one of the big opportunities for children to see a mandatory reporter and since education is compulsory anyway (as opposed to daycare or pediatrician visits or wherever else an under-6 will come into contact with a mandatory reporter) it’s a low impact way to reduce the ability of abusive parents to isolate their kids from those who might help them. If you want to force sex-offender parents to take their little kids to the doctor regularly or send them to daycare, you’ve also gotta make daycare and doctor’s visits free…
 

Of course, the law is less helpful when the kids are part of a cult where they can continue to live and be homeschooled by enabling relatives with an enormous house and built-in babysitter (Jana will never leave). 

[Father Son Holy Goat]

On 4/27/2022 at 8:58 AM, Cam said:

 

 

 

On 4/27/2022 at 11:36 AM, Cam said:

Speaking of jurisdictions, in the video, Jana said her jurisdiction included her parents’ room.  Upon hearing that, I immediately thought: Omg, that’s why Jana has chosen to remain single. She was probably privy to more while cleaning up in their room than her innocent child eyes should have ever seen and it turned her off to a joyfully available marriage. I’m not saying the parents were in the act while she was there but imagine always cleaning up their personal space afterwards. Just ew. 

I feel so sad looking at this picture. These are some of the little girls Josh molested. They are so clearly children, carrying the burdens of their brother’s and parent’s choices. My heart breaks for them.

Spoiler

Seeing the reaction to Jana getting the jurisdiction of her parents bedroom I have to ask, is it always unacceptable for a child to be tasked with cleaning a parent’s bedroom? I was frequently tasked with vacuuming, dusting, changing my parent’s sheets. Was this (yet a-fucking-nother) normalized boundary violation in my abusive and incestuous home? Or is it okay if the parents aren’t in a sex cult?

 

 

[Giraffe]

To me it’s weird that someone other than the parents are cleaning the parent’s bedroom. As many problems as there were in my family of origin it was expected that my parent’s bedroom be treated as a space to only enter when invited after knocking. It wasn’t about there being “bad” things in their bedroom, it was that the bedroom was their private space and expected to be treated as such including that they were the only ones expected to clean it. 
 

So many of these families seem to have the attitude of “I’ve had this many kids so t hat I never have to lift a finger.” IMO that’s the opposite of treating children like they’re a blessing. 

[Bluebirdbluebell]

I have no idea how Josh will fare in prison. He could do very well and he could have problems living incarcerated.  I don't assume he'll behave. 

[Giraffe]

1 minute ago, Bluebirdbluebell said:

I have no idea how Josh will fare in prison. He could do very well and he could have problems living incarcerated.  I don't assume he'll behave. 

I assume all he’ll learn in prison is how to cover his tracks better. 

[Integriste]

I don’t think it’s always weird for children to clean a parent’s room.  The level of privacy between family members is highly cultural.  Even within the same cultures, different families or generations treat it differently.  My grandparents had a “only enter when invited” rule for their bedroom.  My parents we a bit more relaxed.  My own family has an open-door/co-sleeping culture, and my son is welcome in my room and bed anytime.  Indeed, many cultures don’t have separate bedrooms at all, and the whole family shares a room as a matter of practice.  

As far as cleaning, it depends on what that involves.  I wouldn’t ever think it weird to have a child vacuum the carpets in their parents room.  But I wouldn’t allow my son to reorganize my nightstand.  

[tanba]

7 hours ago, Father Son Holy Goat said:

I feel so sad looking at this picture. These are some of the little girls Josh molested. They are so clearly children, carrying the burdens of their brother’s and parent’s choices. My heart breaks for them.

  Hide contents

Seeing the reaction to Jana getting the jurisdiction of her parents bedroom I have to ask, is it always unacceptable for a child to be tasked with cleaning a parent’s bedroom? I was frequently tasked with vacuuming, dusting, changing my parent’s sheets. Was this (yet a-fucking-nother) normalized boundary violation in my abusive and incestuous home? Or is it okay if the parents aren’t in a sex cult?

 

 

For me, a lot of it is dependent on the distribution of work in the home. I do believe that parents should be the ones in charge of most stuff at home, as long as kids are small. So having a kid take the responsibility of vacuuming all rooms, completely fine, as long as they’re not worked to the bone. Changing sheets, to me, is just strange to have someone else do that, independent of status within the family. The thing that always struck out to me was that the parents in the bates and Duggar families did not seem to do anything, and a lot of the chore distribution did not seem age-appropriate. 

[Smee]

My approach to household chores is shared mess = shared responsibility, and your mess = your responsibility. The kids have to keep their own rooms clean and I’ll ask them to load the dishwasher or wipe down benches or fold laundry, but my room is my responsibility.

My question is, if JB & Michelle’s room is Jana’s jurisdiction, what’s THEIR jurisdiction?