*TRIGGER WARNING* Lauren Kavanaugh/Girl in the Closet

Apologies if this has been posted before. I scrolled down, but didn't see it. I searched, but tbh, Glow's search feature sucks.

I'm going to start off by saying, again, extreme trigger warning for sexual assault, rape, torture, and rape/torture of a minor.

It's recently been in the news that Lauren Kavanaugh has allegedly sexually assaulted a 14 year old girl.

For those of you who have never heard of her, (trigger warning again, extreme torture/rape of a child) in 2004 she was rescued from the home of her birth mother and stepfather. She had been adopted from birth by another woman, but her mother changed her mind and due to an error in the paperwork, her birth mother regained custody at 20 months.

She spent the ages between 2 and 8 locked in a closet naked. She was starved and only weighed 25.6 pounds (the weight of a two year old) at the time of her rescue. Her arms were the size of quarters and her belly had to be pumped from eating hair/lint/plastic/ and her own feces. The only time she was taken from the closet was to be raped by her mother and stepfather. The abuse was so severe that (EXTREME TRIGGER WARNING) her vagina and her anus were one big hole, instead of two separate ones. She was placed with the mother who had originally adopted her after her rescue. At the age of 14, she was sexually assaulted by the boyfriend of her adopted mother's niece.

There is a lot more to Lauren's story and many more horrible details. If you're interested, you can search for her name or "the girl in the closet."

The reason I posted this is because there is some controversy surrounding what should happen to Lauren now after she's allegedly sexually assaulted a minor. She allegedly told the cops to just take her once they found her, which some say shows she knew what she did was wrong.

Some say that Lauren does not deserve to be in jail and that because of her traumatic past, she needs psychological help.

Others say that she should not be treated any differently than any other perpetrator of sexual assault. That she knew what she was doing was wrong and she should be in jail for it.

Where do we draw the lines on how someone should be punished because of their past?

Should Lauren be in jail? Should she be committed to a psychiatric hospital? Should she be fined? Should she go free but be forced to seek psychiatric help? Does her past matter at all and do you think that Lauren has the mental capacity to understand that what she was doing was wrong and that she was hurting this girl?