November 2, 1993
Dear People,
HEALING VS. ADJUDICATION
Now we are looking at alternative arrangements to parental custody from
the point of view of children's rights and safety. Dwight Noble is a
therapist of 25 years' experience who has for several years taught a much-
appreciated senior-level course here in criminal justice on child abuse.
Last night he advocated that we construct a system of mental health
experts to take care of children's needs in place of the courts. It was
in many ways a profound discussion of choosing between rehabilitation and
punishment which we criminologists and officials fretted over for two
centuries. Dwight, thanks for your gift of insight, which you so freely
shared with us last night.
You said it clearly: Your professional commitment is to conflict
resolution and healing of relations among people who feel threatened by
one another. The object of legal process in matters of child safety is
adversarial, to drive parties poles apart, to select a winner and loser in
a battle over who owns custody of the children, to determine one party
blameworthy for a child's pain and hence certify the other party as
blameless. A child no matter how great the terror s/he shows has no right
to avoid being alone with a "blameless" parent in child custody and
visitation cases. I'm reminded again of the story of Solomon's judgment:
Justice lay first in meeting the needs of the child, and the child was
safer in the hands of the parent who was ready to relinquish custody in
order to keep the child whole. Custody/visitation battles are a rupture
in the child's relations with primary adult caregivers. Why, Dwight asks,
should we put the child's fate in the hands of lawyers trained to divide
up the child as property instead of the hands of those whose calling lies
in making clients whole? Dwight, I can't recall your words as you
contrasted your commitment to that of lawyers, but it was as clearly and
plainly stated as I have heard it said. That's what led me to express
surprise at how "radical" you are. I very much appreciate your
introducing this "alternative" idea of childcare so well. I heard several
students comments on how trustworthy you seemed; one of us told me s/he is
calling you to talk further about how to deal with a child abuse issue.
As we discussed some last night, the only raw nerve your proposal hit with
me was the idea of entrusting childcare to the hands of another set of
experts of any kind. My earliest memories of having my parents describe
power trips to me up close and personal was to see them struggle ethically
with whether to serve as therapists at all. My mother never has accepted
individual clients to my knowledge, although she has applied her doctoral
training to supervising women dormitory students and to organizations like
Mortar Board. My favorite article of my father's, "Help Giving in Search
of a Criterion," was published in 1965, just as I started law school. In
it, he argued that it was an inherent power trip and presumptuous for the
counselor to presume to be ferreting out what the client truly wanted and
empowering the client to do it. Instead, the counselor was ever capable
of obliviously using transference to make the client fulfill the
counselor's fantasies. My daddy thereafter stopped offering therapy for
roughly two decades. My parents remain suspicious enough of the
therapeutic enterprise to debate with themselves joining a flock of
refugees from the American Psychological Association. My own reading and
experience as legal counsel, friend and client since has only hardened my
wariness of dependency on clinical expertise.
You acknowledged to me that in one's "vision," the empowerment you want to
give clients entails their own choice of therapist they trust. It entails
allowing clients to define their own fears, and helping create their own
peace. You cited kibbutzim as examples of safe havens for children, and
acknowledged, again as a "vision," that the greater the range of adults
who communicated with one another and shared contact with the child, the
more likely the child would find a safe adult to turn to. You volunteered
that your academic training had no professional value in contrast to what
you had learned since from clients and colleagues. You made a point early
on of assuring us that children were as capable as adults of telling
trustworthy stories and making trustworthy choices, except that below a
certain age children would trust anyone including abusers who volunteered
to care for them. And all in all, you cited failure of accountability as
a root problem of official ineptness. If I put all these premises we
share together, I think I can reconcile the conflict between my fears and
our common visions.
I find adults willing to be accountable for their childcare in all walks
of life, and even more wannabes. A society in which adults feel
constrained to hire others to care for children which are the legacy of
all adulthood is doomed to break children apart into violent adolescence
and adulthood. In improving children's lot, I see no shortcut to building
grassroots commitment to exercising personal responsibility for taking
time to be with our children. The underlying corollary of the goodwill I
see is that we're in the groove of passing the buck on spending time with
children, exploring their worlds with them. We're too busy with other
things, and it's too emotional to get preoccupied with. So we try to make
snap judgments when we get involved instead of getting involved with open-
ended personal commitments to gaining the children's trust.
Somehow, there's no way out for the children but for us adults to decide
it's worth more investing time getting to know our children and responding
to their needs personally, than in getting ahead and investing in the
military/judgmental ratrace. As participants at the National
Interreligious Task Force on Criminal Justice conference said repeatedly,
boot camps are no substitute for childcare.
The more broadly across our grassroots we invest in caring for children,
the more adults children will have access to in their daily lives: the
more adults they will spend time with in school, in this or that program
adults offer after school, with parents of friends spending time with
their own children, and so forth. The more this happens, the easier it
becomes to discern at younger ages an adult the child already trusts, who
understands the child's fears and how to hear the child express what s/he
needs. ...the more likely it becomes that some adult will intervene to
have the child's expressed and heard. At that point, whatever
"bureaucracy" we had left could coordinate organizing adult
representatives for children and their parents, to form the kind of family
therapy teams Dwight described for us last night. The objective would be,
as Dwight advocated, to mediate the fears among the parties into a
trustworthy arrangement for living in peace, where the desires for
personal autonomy of all parties would be respected.
I come back to a growing personal conviction that adult respect for
children's rights and safety rests not in anyone else's hands but our own.
My hope is that we as everyday adults and children can help one another in
whatever role we play speak openly about problems of childcare, and gain
enough confidence to allow ourselves to attend and respond to signs that
children we meet are being abused. The confidence allows each of us to
gain the kind of experience, both in listening to children and in talking
over childcare with adults, to develop the kind of expertise Dwight has
developed with his clients and colleagues. The more that happens
throughout a society, the higher the odds that workers in any bureuacratic
system will try to find out what the children have to tell them instead of
trying hard to walk away from problem cases. That would make childcare
workers more trustworthy to me, as friends, parents, teachers, principals,
police, child protection caseworkers, judges, reporters, whatever. As
Mary made clear once again last night, once you are willing to pause to
consider what the children are saying or not saying, a lot of sorting out
what helps and hurts children is plain common sense. (For instance, why
on earth should we expect children to disclose abuse to strangers on short
notice?)
What I have in mind for this class of ours is that we all come out more
experienced, thoughtful and "proactive" about how to respond to children's
cries and complaints. Our own expertise then becomes something we can use
to encourage others to "train" in childcare as we are. The force of
personal commitment to attending to our children can metastatize into many
forms, including transformation of courts by exemplary judges who come to
the ranks from among those unafraid to become involved in children's
lives.
Notably, adults in military empires operate on distrust of their children,
on faith that that the devil must be driven out of children, that children
must at all costs learn obedience. I doubt that any of us in my country
has grown up immune from the adult abuse that follows from this attitude.
To some degree in all of us, our reluctance to let children choose their
living arrangements as freely as powerful adults choose theirs makes us
think that concern for children's welfare connotes placing children UNDER
adult care. Ironically to me, this week's cover story in Newsweek is on
growing recognition that "lower" animals talk and think as complexly as
humans do. May we learn to concede children the same dignity, respect,
and attention. As I believe that children's only hope lies in adults'
mastery of children's language, so I believe that fear of letting
ourselves treat our children as we treat adult friends presents a personal
struggle for all of us. (Among other things, it's no way to win approval
from one's ageing, fearful parents.)
Dwight, as you can see, you provoked considerable thinking on my part
about who should be caring for our children. Thanks again for coming.
NEXT WEEK
...Susie Hall from the Alliance for the Rights of Children is coming back
to class. Last week I learned that her last visit was the first time she
had disclosed her own abuse to a group of strangers. We also have a
surprise guest. Susie and the other guest, together with Debbie, Mary and
Sandy, will be going to Kentucky next week to support a protective mother
jailed for failing to disclose her child's whereabouts. Susie has
arranged an appointment with the Kentucky attorney general that Thursday.
DEBBIE'S HEARING
...has been put off once again from tomorrow as the judge promises to
order child protective services to conduct an investigation. Now the
hearing is supposed to be next Monday. Stay tuned...
Love and peace,
Hal