Cruel dad ‘drove 500 miles without stopping to kill daughter’ after she came out as lesbian
After a 19-year-old came out as a lesbian, her father drove 500 miles without stopping and allegedly threatened to kill her.
The 52-year-old man was arrested on a university campus in Narbonne in the south of France, shouting and threatening to kill his newly-out daughter, according to l’Indépendant.
The victim told investigators that she had recently entered into a relationship with another woman and had begun coming out to her friends as a lesbian.
Last week, she came out to her father over the phone. He reacted badly, admitting to police that he was trembling with anger while on the phone.
While on the call he allegedly threatened to kill his daughter, and on Friday morning (October 16), drove the 500 miles from his home in Strasbourg to Narbonne without stopping.
According to reports, he found his daughter outside of a university building, where he confronted her and threatened her life again.
The woman ran into the building, and called police while a university employee blocked the man from reaching his daughter.
He was immediately apprehended, and faced an initial hearing Monday (October 19). The woman, her girlfriend and her mother have all filed criminal complaints.
The sorry incident weeks after new research from the US highlighted that many young LGBT+ people feel less supported by their parents than previous generations.
Research published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that parental behaviours toward LGBT+ youth have steadily worsened for nearly two decades, a result which “surprised” the report’s top researchers considering the overall rise of acceptance towards queer people in recent years.
“This increasing societal acceptance really doesn’t filter down to youth who are still in school, who are still being discriminated against or victimised by their classmates,” the report’s co-author Hilary Rose, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia, in Canada, said.
“And it doesn’t trickle down to parent-child relations. Frankly, we were surprised by that.”