Girl from the cesspool puts victimhood to shame

AUGUST 20, 2009, Hobart: A man in his 50s and a woman with a 12-year-old daughter agree that the young girl will become a prostitute. Six advertisements are placed in a local newspaper. The mother books a room at The Hobart Midcity Hotel for two nights. Condoms are given to the 12-year-old girl. For four weeks, the girl has sex with over 100 men.

The girl's 15-year-old sister manages the appointments for clients who are charged $100 per half hour and an extra $50 if they don't wear a condom.

The money is used for drugs for the mother and daughters. The man is jailed for 10 years with a non-parole period of eight years. The girl's mother awaits trial.

March 20, 2010, Canberra: A stolen car driven by a 23-year-old man with 37 convictions flies through a police traffic stop in Queanbeyan just after 10pm.

Police chase the driver across the border into the ACT but stop pursuing him when he runs a red light. The man and his passenger girlfriend run another red light.

Travelling at a speed of 200km/h, their car slews into another car at the intersection of Canberra Avenue and the Monaro Highway exit ramp at Narrabundah. A family of three - mother, father and baby - die instantly. The 23-year-old driver dies in hospital.

The mother of the hospitalised girlfriend tells A Current Affair: "I blame the police totally. I want the police to pay for what has happened."

It is difficult to comprehend the total absence of personal responsibility, not to mention basic humanity, in the sewers of society. Toxic families. Vile mothers. Violent men. Abused children. It is a checklist so foreign to our sensibilities, yet too common according to newspaper headlines.

For many, the first reaction is that these people are victims of their circumstances; poor, uneducated, with addictions and disorders, they cannot be held responsible for their feral behaviour. Dysfunctional is the word we use as a linguistic cloak to excuse the fact that human beings behave in the most inhuman way.

Perhaps only the world of fiction could throw up a heroine who talks about choice, not excuses. Even so, it is worth meeting the fictional young girl who rejects the view that the cesspool society from which she emerged is full of victims.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl with multiple body piercings, bisexual tendencies, an edgy haircut and a background littered with abuse is not a Jane Austen kind of heroine.

But the sullen, sassy girl otherwise known as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, part of the Millennium trilogy written by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, is a timely role model for personal responsibility.

Lisbeth refuses to believe that even the most dysfunctional upbringing is an excuse, or explanation, for evil. When someone behaves badly, the blame is theirs.

It's not hard to see why the Millennium series has sold more than 27 million copies in 40 countries.

Sniffed at by critics as Scandinavian crime genre, the books explore the underbelly of modern society from corporate corruption and greed (the book was published in the US on the same day that a collapsing Lehmann Brothers made global headlines) to misogyny and murder.

The film version of the book, which opened in Australia last month, traces the compelling story of the disturbed but brilliant Salander teaming up with disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist to solve a series of violent murders that take place in a seemingly serene, snow-covered rural backwater in Sweden.

Larsson's psychosexual thriller novel and the film version produced by Danish director Niels Arden Oplev (a Hollywood version is also under way) have had reviewers and feminists in a bind.

Everyone loves Salander. She is described as "the pint-size minxoid . . . [who] doesn't work or play well with others", a "computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking", a "badass girl" who "knows your secrets, and how to use them".

But is the feisty female lead a modern feminist avenger or just an excuse for Larsson to exploit gratuitously violent rape and revenge scenes and perverted sexual thrills?

It's funny how feminists always think everything is about them. Is she one of us or is she just a pathetic female pawn in a voyeuristic, misogynist society?

In fact, gender is neither here nor there. Salander is no feminist heroine.

When she and Blomqvist discover the identity of the killer, there is no metaphorical raising a clenched fist for feminism.

Salander is a heroine for breaking away from the bottom layer of society, from a feral culture of no-responsibility. She is a reminder that even the most abused and unstable men and women are ultimately responsible for their own actions. Forget the modern-day blame game. People make their own choices, says Salander.

Accordingly, Salander rebuffs Blomqvist's attempt to explain the rapes and murders as the evil consequences of the killer's nasty upbringing. "Bullshit," she says. (For those who haven't read the book or seen the movie, we'll call the killer Jack.)

"[Jack] had exactly the same opportunity as anyone else to strike back," she says. "You're assuming that [Jack] had no will of his own and that people become whatever they've been brought up to be . . . It's pathetic that creeps always have to have someone else to blame."

Salander's message about personal responsibility and choice is all the more powerful coming from a girl who could be cast as the textbook victim: abusive background, spent time in a mental institution, is released into the guardianship of a man who rapes her, is viciously bashed by young thugs, and not to reveal any more, has some major intimacy issues.

Her choice is to fight back, seeking brilliant revenge against the pervert guardian and anyone else who exploits her obvious vulnerabilities.

Salander may not be real.

But she is the perfect antidote for an age in which victimhood and blame-shifting have become fine arts.