If the point was really to make an artistic highlight of the cruelty of humanity, I would expect the character to be a little more humanised before having all sorts of terrible things done to her, and then abandoning her.
I mean, it could also just be bad writing, that this was the best they could do at characterization. Or an argument could be made that it's intended to be atmospheric (e.g. laying groundwork for a seedy, unforgiving setting) but if so they really dropped the ball on that in most all other respects.
But Occam's razor and all that—the simplest explanation would seem to me to be that she didn't need good characterization because she's just fantasy fodder anyway.