I have seen many a dark corner in the rookeries of the city, but the tale from Saratov chills the blood of any honest man. Imagine, if you will, a house that was not a home, but a veritable Bastille, where a mother—a woman who should have been a guardian—turned her own hearth into a concentration camp for her own flesh and blood.

For five wretched years, the poor lass was kept under lock and key. No fresh air, no sunlight, no laughter of peers. The girl was a ghost in her own dwelling, hidden away from the world's gaze. It was only by a stroke of singular fortune—a rare bit of luck—that the sixteen-year-old managed to send a desperate missive to the regional ombudsman, begging for the arrival of the constabulary and the guardians of the state.

When the officers burst through the door, the grim truth came to light. This poor soul had not stepped foot in a schoolhouse since the fourth grade. The mother had snatched her away under the guise of 'home schooling,' a lie used to build the walls of her prison. The girl had no telephone, no contact with the living, and had not even received her identity papers by the age of sixteen. A complete erasure of existence!

The liberated maiden confessed through tears that she had attempted to flee or seek help many a time, but the mother, acting as a cruel gaoler, thwarted every plan.

Now, the girl is under the care of physicians of the mind, and the family is marked by the authorities. It is hoped that, in time, she shall return to her studies and reclaim the years stolen by this maternal tyranny.

Such horrors are not unknown to us. Only recently, reports reached my ears of a mother in Krasnodar who, driven to a frenzy by those bullying her disabled daughter, took a brutal revenge upon the children—a different kind of madness, yet born from the same volatile soil of domestic strife.