Why did Voldemort go bad?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 184128

Lesley wrote:

<snip> > you can't judge his fathers actions after he left as being
under a potion was the same in the real world as being given the
date-rape drug! He was raped by the mother over quite a few months so
having nothing to do with her afterwards is perfectly understandable
(although finding his child would have been ideal but he would never
have known the mother was dead). <snip>

Carol responds:

I don't want to get back into the ugly, emotion-laden debates on this
subject, but I think you're judging Merope, herself a lifelong victim
of abuse, rather harshly. I'm sure she didn't think of herself as
"raping" Tom Riddle. (The concept of date rape or marital rape,
especially of a man by a woman, wouldn't have existed at that time
even among Muggles, and Merope was neither educated nor an enlightened
thinker.) She just wanted him to be her husband and love her,
physically and emotionally, as a husband (theoretically) loves his
wife. As Dumbledore said, a love potion would have seemed more
romantic to the poor girl, who was only eighteen, than an Imperius
Curse. As for Tom Riddle Sr., yes, he was taken advantage of and
tricked; yes, he had every reason to hate Merope (poor ugly, unloved,
wall-eyed Merope, whom he laughed at before she tricked him into
"loving" her), but that did not give him the right to abandon his
child by her and leave them both in direst poverty. He was rich; he
could have found a nice cottage for them somewhere far away and
provided for them as a medieval lord or prince provided for his
illegitimate children. Instead, he let her die in poverty and his son
live or die (the same to him either way) in poverty and obscurity. I
understand that he owed *her* nothing, but he owed his child
protection and food and shelter, and the child needed his mother's
care. Two wrongs don't make a right, and the child in any case was
innocent, whatever he later grew up to be.

I understand that we differ here, and I'm not attacking your views.
But I, personally, have little sympathy for a parent of either sex who
would abandon his or her child whether that child was conceived
through rape, seduction, carelessness, or love.

Carol, not trying to persuade anyone but simply expressing her own
views on this highly emotional subject