Mental illness is global.

Hurriyet Daily News reports that Albayrak had been hired to photograph the July 5th wedding at Turgut Özal Nature Park in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya. On the day of, when he noticed that the bride-to-be didn’t look like an adult, he asked the groom her age and learned that she was only 15.

“The groom had come to my studio some two weeks ago and was alone,” Albayrak tells the Daily News. “I saw the bride for the first time at the wedding. She’s a child, and I felt her fear because she was trembling.”

Albayrak then reportedly refused to continue as the wedding photographer and attempted to stop the wedding.

The argument soon turned physical when the groom attacked him as he was attempting to leave, Albayrak says. The photographer ended up breaking the client’s nose in the fight, according to local reports.

Albayrak confirmed the reports in a Facebook post, which has been met with widespread approval, attracting thousands of Likes and hundreds of overwhelmingly positive comments.

“I wish this had never happened, but it did,” Albayrak writes. “And if you were to ask me if I’d do the same thing again, I’d say ‘yes.’ Child brides are [victims] of child abuse and no power on earth can make me photograph a child in a wedding gown.”

The legal minimum age for marriage in Turkey is 18-years-old for both sexes, and child marriage is punishable by imprisonment for men who marry underage girls. Despite being outlawed, however, child marriage is still prevalent in the country and remains a controversial political issue.

btw - let’s remind ourselves, americans, that unlike turkey, in the US the legal minimum age for marriage is only 18 in two states. in alabama, you can be married as young as fourteen years old if you have “parental permission”. in california, you can get married under 18 if you go to counseling, have a parent with you when you apply for the marriage license, and appear before a judge. in some states, there isn’t even a specific minimum age for marriage.

the minimum marriage age for girls in new hampshire is 13 years old.

48 states allow child marriage.

Instead I will be reading and thinking about Ted Bundy’s victims. I wonder where their movies are. I wonder why their names aren’t raised.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Lynda Ann Healy, a 21 year old psychology major about to graduate that semester. Lynda worked with handicapped children and got up early every day to report on the skiing conditions for local radio.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Debra Kent, a 17 year old aspiring social worker who was known for always having change to feed parking meters for strangers.

I wonder why we don’t hear about Susan Curtis. Susan was only 15 years old and was riding her bike to church that day. She was a star on her high school track team.

In a world filled with kind, beautiful people, I wonder why we all know Ted Bundy’s name. I wonder if that isn’t giving him and people like him exactly what he wanted. And frankly I’m sick of hearing people talk about him.

I’d like to talk about 12 year olds Lynette Culver and Kimberly Leach, neither of whom turned 13 because Ted Bundy stole their innocence and their lives from them. Kimberly had just been elected first runner up “Valentine Queen” by her peers and never got to wear that pretty new dress. Do you think her parents still have that dress, hanging in the back of a closet? I bet they do. I bet her dad sits with it in his darkest moments. You ever thought about him when you hear the name Ted Bundy?

Let’s talk about 19 year old Susan Rancourt, who had a 4.0 GPA. 17 year old Laura Aime. 18 year old Georgeann Hawkins. 23 year old Janice Ott. 26 year old Nancy Wilcox. 23 year old Caryn Campbell. 17 year old Melissa Smith. 19 year old Donna Manson, who was an excellent flute player and by all accounts a bit of a goth. 20 year old Kathy Parks. 22 year old Brenda Ball. 20 year old Lisa Levy. 21 year old Margaret Bowman. 25 year old Denise Oliverson, who had just gotten into a spat with her new husband and had gone for a walk to clear her mind. Denise weighed 105 pounds. She was bound, gagged, raped, mutilated and thrown from a fast moving car. Have you ever considered what HIS life has been like since that day? How many hours of his life do you think have been spent on the floor, clutching the ring he had given her, apologizing into thin air?

These stories are real. These people are REAL.

I get that Ted Bundy was handsome and his eyes were very blue but please. Please stop glamorizing him like this. He ended and ruined lives. Nothing about him is cool or worthy of emulation. Ted Bundy raped, tortured, mutilated and strangled over 30 females, including 12 year old girls. None of his victims weighed more than 115 pounds.

Ted Bundy was a pathetic man.

Emulate Lynda. Emulate Debra. Raise their names and their voices to those around you. Honor them. They were very real people with promising lives and futures stretched ahead of them, stolen.

Please don’t elevate or whitewash this kind of rampant violence against women. I assure you the world is harsh enough for us without a new generation thinking Ted Bundy is a cool, fascinating guy.

Thanks.

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The phrase “living paycheck to paycheck” implies there is no room for savings. You are spending your entire paycheck to survive. All of your expenses are going towards you barely being able to tread water. Any savings made are quickly lost when emergencies inevitably arise. Two back to back financial crisises? That’s your ass. That’s fuck you, you should have saved more, even though you couldn’t have.

Your comment is saying people who are struggling to save deserve that pain because they didn’t save. 800,000 currently furloughed workers with 800,000 different lives are carrying the burden of missing a month’s pay, bills, rent, childcare, food, debts indifferent to that burden - in what way is telling someone barely surviving they should have stopped being poor a meaningful statement? It isn’t.

That’s chronic fatigue.

It’s not ‘feeling tired’, it’s not ‘feeling sleepy’. It’s struggling every day with utter exhaustion, and still dragging yourself out of bed to get to work.