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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The husband sounds like quite a piece of shit.

To be fair they both sound like quite a piece of work. There are very few women who would willingly leave their children behind just because their husband told them to not to mention leave them in foster care just because you now have a life.

Part of being a parent is sacrificing everything in order to raise your children regardless how old they are.

It's a tough life she choose so in a way that's probably best for the children but still not fair to them.

In a patriarchal situation you'd be surprised what men can get away with and how far they'll go in pushing around their women who from being a child onwards have been conditioned to obey them unconditionally.

If you're not used to that then I can imagine that it is hard for you to see how this could even exist but it's unfortunately true in a large chunk of the world and apparently it extends to behind closed doors in modern day Germany as well.

It's absolutely not the norm in modern day Germany. Besides she apparently grew up in East Germany (when it was still occupied by Russia). But even then I can not imagine it was common.

Of course it isn't the norm. But the family hails from an area where such things are not exactly rare. (They're not from Germany originally if I interpreted the article correctly.)

The husband is a Chechen Muslim:

> Few tourists visit the gorge, a notoriously insular region with a reputation for drug and arms smuggling, and radical Islam - one of the top leaders of Islamic State (IS), Abu Omar al-Shishani, hails from here.

Once you realize that, the rest of the article makes sense.

That was my initial reaction. I certainly could not imagine a situation in which I would voluntarily abandon my children to their father so that I could go and live in another country. But I then began to wonder if there's more at play here - physical and emotional abuse, for example, can make even the most devoted of mothers do things that they ordinarily might not do.

I am trying to remember that we only have the parts of the story a) the mother and b) the Beeb want us to actually read.

From my extensive expertise in ahem armchair amateur psychoanalysis ... I suspect a major mental disorder/abuse component to the story.

Their kids ending up in foster care may be better for the kids than being raised in a DSM certifiable parenting environment. At least in foster care the expectations of care are darn low, so less chance of being left with a sense of betrayal into adulthood.

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