940419.1142 Hal pepinsky@indiana.edu
And here's how the applier of PCT principles might hope to find peace
as between children and parents. Here, in terms of the discussion on
this net, I introduce a problem I well remember Simmel
addressing--three-party control systems: as among parent, child, and
external evaluator/intervenor like me. l&p hal
fn=fj4194. at
ftp.indiana.edu/pub/departments/criminal_justice/pepinsky
Hal pepinsky@indiana.edu Feminist Justice--April 19, 1994
DIGEST
After last night's closing session of this children's rights
and safety seminar before next week's closing pizza party,
Mary Cunningham, who has provided the great bulk of our
course readings and videos from her archives, brought us
back to our roots, by showing us two videos--one of Faye
Yager's daughter and Faye, and the other of 16-year-old
Yvonne, trying to take her 4-year-old sister out of the
grasp of a raping (step)father. We then went around the
class as students discussed what they had learned in the
seminar, and about how they imagined they might apply what
they have learned. In this weekly class letter of mine, I
review what I pick up from all of us as the significance of
CHILDREN's rights and safety.
Dear People,
Next week--the pizza's on me at the original Mother Bear's
on Third St., 5:45 as usual. See you there!
My thanks to Harmony School for providing us a free meeting
place for yet another semester!!!
Last night, Jonah, our Harmony High School seminar member,
put it bluntly: children have no rights; adults act as
though children's feelings and reactions to life's events
mean nothing except trouble; adults just don't listen to
children.
As I wrote about "unthinkability" last week, I see the world
fractally. Fractally, ageism doesn't mean we stop treating
people "like children" just because they turn a certain age.
Jonah is entering high school. He is entering the prime age
group for being policed and busted, for becoming one of the
media balleyhooed dangerous class. Formally enrolled
students are graduating college, graduate school and law
school. They're still being treated like children by
teachers, parents and (prospective) employers.
Elsewhere this past week, I have been talking with those on
Jeff Walker's criminology seminar net in Little Rock about
"peacemaking" as the term was coined in the title of the
1991 IU Press book Richard Quinney and I edited. I came
back to this first principle of method: begin by critically
examining your own uses of power, then consider how your own
power might be applied toward peace rather than contributing
to the violence.
A demand for private disclosure only invites lies, but all
of us in the seminar and on e-mail live public lives as
well, and here I believe lies the most fertile ground for
examination of our own commitment to ageism and abuses of
our own personal power.
It happens that the primary scheduled commitment I undertake
for my own state paycheck is teaching. When I think both of
those who abuse children privately and those who turn away
from children publicly, I think to my own decades' long
struggle to stop abusing my power over students, most of
whose parents by now are younger than I am, all of whom in
the formal education proxy for age are more than a quarter
century behind me. I think I'm making progress. As a
product of emotional battering by colleagues at Minnesota
and Albany (who were convinced I was acting like an out-of-
control child), I reached a pinnacle of internalizing the
abuse and acting it out on my students when I came from
teaching all graduate students out East to teaching mostly
Hoosier undergraduates in 1976. Notwithstanding the fact
that I did not carry my abuse physically as far as many
others, fractally I see that the cycles and progress of my
denial and then of my freeing myself from cycles of violence
and vengeance, and the issues I have wrestled with, for all
the world appear to be just like those of abusers and
unresponsive child protection functionaries.
When it comes to my primary formal power--that of
"grading"(!) students from A+ to F--I am virtually
unassailable by my students. With minimal notice and
consistency, I can demand that students slave for me to
assure me they know what I already know, I can humiliate and
degrade them in open class, I can in the company of my
colleagues easily convince myself that entire classesful of
students are "unprepared" (as though it is not my paid duty
to prepare them for life after class) and "not serious." I
can, among those in a position to come to students' aid,
apply virtually any standards to students I want. I have
displeased students myself by refusing to get involved in
grading disputes between them and departmental colleagues,
just as I refrain from telling parents how much some of what
they do horrifies me. I have never thought a grade worth
appealing, and have long since recognized that grades are
ultimately virtually unappealable...just like arrests of
streetcorner youth and biological fathers' claims to
unsupervised visitation/custody.
Meanwhile, we even chastise and denigrate students for
caring so much about grades. And I ask myself, who taught
them to take making the teacher's grade so seriously? The
teachers certainly. And how about all those parents who pay
their kids to bring home A's? Ya gotta make the grade kid.
That sounds like an adult message to me.
I am still letting go of my demands that students do their
learning my way. It was only this semester, in my
eighteenth year of offering my large lecture class on
alternative social control systems, that I finally let go of
setting exam/paper topics, and a year ago I was even
dictating points to be awarded for each of four grading
dimensions for each exam topic. And until last fall in
feminist justice, I was setting the class agenda pretty much
all by myself. That world certainly changed when I invited
Mary et al. to help me put the focus on children's rights
and safety.
Like everyone in class, every e-mail reader has been a
student for many years, and many are teachers as well.
Examine all the reasons most university professors would not
dream of letting their control of class agendae and grading
anywhere near as much as I have experimented doing, and you
have at hand a set of reasons that applies equally to why
judges send children back to abusive parents. That has been
brought home to me personally by all the warnings I have
received over the years from concerned adults that I would
ruin my child by failure of discipline--starting years
before Kate was born (and continuing nearly 17 years since).
On the new intimacy and violence net, the obvious question
has already been raised: How are we to define violence? I
regard that as an inherently patriarchal question. I would
ask instead: WHOM do we allow to define violence? Whom do
we allow to set our social agendae? Whom do we ask to speak
first, and listen to hardest: those most likely to have
been abused (children/students/streetcorner youth) or those
formally positioned to do the abuse
(parents/teachers/police)? Jonah tells us seniority--the
superior power position--gets all the respect (although I'd
suggest that when adults pass the age in my culture of
"productivity," they resume the status of neglected
children).
I am old, healthy, male and white enough that scarcely
anyone dares to tell me I'm making it up when I report being
offended even by a remark, let alone by anal rape. I cannot
envision anyone seriously trying to force me to go stay over
in some physically superior person's house I was scared to
go to. If I tell you I hurt, that's that. I never have to
stay in bed overnight even with my wife if I choose not to.
That's plain sense, right? Now, imagine I am four-year-old,
and I'm telling you my bottom hurts, that my daddy put his
privates in there, and if I'm in the usual parental denial
I'm likely to hear it first from a pediatrician who has
examined the anus and found the reflex when the anus is
touched is relaxation rather than constriction. I'm begging
you not to make me go home with daddy this weekend. The
only thing that makes my complaints "more complicated" than
what I would report as a healthy white male adult is my age.
At four, I have less standing than Jonah in high school, who
has less standing than college students to complain about
grades or other teacher misconduct where formal appeals
processes are at least provided. As I wrote last week, the
more grotesque my report (as in having to help kill my young
friend, sodomize him or her, roast the body, cut it up, eat
it and learn to hold down the "food" if you want to
survive), the more unthinkable it becomes to take it
seriously for any adult anywhere. Since all of our public
relations as between teacher and student are based on our
baseline model of how children best grow up with a
biological mom at home and a biological dad in charge as an
"adult male role model." As children grow up we provide
programs and institutions to fall back upon--prisons, homes,
treatment centers, mental wards--when "natural" patriarchy
fails. The younger the child, the more we despair of even
imagining a substitute for parental control of our children,
the more desperately we seek "reunification" into some
imagined, idyllic status quo ante, where father knows best
and mom cuddles best.
Recall that when SRA survivor and Louisville county social
worker Jeanette Westbrook spoke in our seminar March 7, she
emphasized that a professional could not help others without
working through his or her own denial. A human frailty I
share--in good fractal fashion--is that I cannot get in
judges' and others' faces as freely as I do, insisting that
children be listened to and respected as adults, if I cannot
manage to treat "my own" students the way I want the judges
to treat the children. I have to deal with the ways in
which I take my own personal exercise of power over others
for granted. Otherwise, I'll back off confronting judges
and others when I'm left speechless trying to argue that
children deserve power I can't bring myself to allow with my
own public charges in the classroom, let alone with my
private child charges at home. For one thing, the social
world I'm up against--as personified in the judge at the
moment--is a world in which all moral judgments rest on
assessment of the moral character of the person at hand,
which among other things allows judges, therapists and all
of us to accept as expertly established that children who
accuse parents of terrible things are liars; all benefit of
the doubt must be given to adults accused by children, or
we'll be living in a world governed by the children
described in LORD OF THE FLIES (which actually strikes me as
a remarkably close description of English public school life
as it has been reported to me), and they'll accept the
Chinese Communist idea of turning in parents just to get
even for legitimate exercise of parental control. Besides,
we have been so loath to interfere in the privacy of
parental control over children that we have neglected to
invest our adult selves in our communities in creating safe
loving shelter for children who don't want to go home alone
with mommy or daddy, and we certainly don't have pools of
adults willing and able to move into the home if the child
consents to staying with the parent in the presence of a
third party. So when a child says, "Help me, I can't stand
to go back alone with Daddy," we freak, we feel helpless and
embarrassed to intercede, we shy away from even getting into
such "sticky" matters and so for instance lawyers and police
traditionally avoid and back out of family disputes like the
plague.
Last night Jonah and others including me in the class also
reported that children come through and prove trustworthy--
given the chance--far more readily than adults. Again,
fractally, this seminar is a case in point. In the
undergraduate section this spring, the waiting list to get
into the seminar was three times the enrollment. The
undergraduate section closed for the fall the first day of
preregistration this spring.
This spring only three students enrolled in the graduate
section. They have been fully as wonderful to learn with
this spring as the undergraduates and Jonah--one each from
criminal justice, from school counseling and from law
school. But in my own department my graduate enrollment has
dropped dramatically this year as "my" feminist justice
seminar turned into "our" children's rights and safety
seminar. I promise you that we have no shortage of graduate
students interested in working with youth. I can only infer
that students in post-graduate work have become more trapped
in acting out adult status than undergraduates, and are
therefore closer to encapsulating themselves in denial and
abstract learning like Judge Huckabee in "Women on Trial"
than the younger cohort. And I get nearly universal
feedback that undergraduates particularly think "a class
like this should be required of all students." (Of course
to me REQUIRING this class is oxymoronic.) This way and
that they affirm "how much I have learned this semester."
And I know they have, because they have taught me so much.
The only reason that happened is that I dared to let the
children loose, to relinquish my grading power as visibly
and powerfully as I could figure out how to do (beginning by
announcing in the syllabus that grades rest purely on word
counts, not on content, which I comment upon liberally IN
LIEU OF grading). Students last semester recommending
bringing in Rick Doninger and introducing satanic ritual
abuse early in the semester. We did, and students this
semester have no complaints. It is real, and as yet another
student put it last night, therefore for each student in the
seminar it becomes "deep." And the other half of what makes
the seminar real and deep--beyond my resistance to
disciplining my students and in fact beyond my wildest
imagination until this semester even more than last--is that
I reached out and brought in as full partners people who are
actively, informedly living the horror of denial of rights
to abused children. The seminar gained power as I
surrendered curricular power, not by dropping out of the
seminar, but by engagement as a partner with seminar
members.
At a national level in the U.S. today the big bucks and the
flashy political power belongs to adult survivors of child
abuse. All the research on implanting false memories,
hypnosis and such focuses on problems presented by victims
who have survived into adulthood. Adults have standing to
organize politically. Adult survivors are not asking any
longer to be taken out of some adult's custody. Issues
presented by adult survivors are much safer for us all to
discuss, to study, to fund and on whose behalf to legislate
than child victims at hand. Instead of exerting effort to
free children from abuse as early as possible, we focus on
studying how to heal the damage done to adult survivors. We
do laboratories and speculate as to how memories MIGHT be
implanted, we look for markers like testerone levels to help
us identify the cause of abuse instead of figuring out how
to empower children telling us that whatever his testerone
level, the abuser at hand gives us the real problem to
understand. We seek adult consensus on defining violence
and abuse FOR our children, instead of listening to what
they tell us frightens and hurts them so. We do anything
but let the children at hand be our guides, our teachers,
and our clients.
Mary and Debbie had just gotten back from a weekend of
national child protection planning in Washington last night.
After class Mary worried that she had gotten too angry over
how adult concerns always seem to supersede responding to
evidence children at hand present. Some of us reassured
her. By now all of us who have sat through class together
this semester know pretty damned well what she's mad about.
Most of us share her anger.
If we assumed the duty to provide safe optional shelter and
granted children one right alone--to refuse to go alone with
any adult, any time, we'd come as close to eliminating child
abuse as I can imagine. All we have to do is to grant that
children are full human beings, and as such enjoy the
primary right as stated in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration
of Human Rights:
All human beings are born equal in dignity and respect.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should
act towards one another in a spirit of [sisterhood and]
brotherhood.
What is the root or radical cause of all child abuse as far
as I can see? For all the reasons that hold us back, we
cannot accept that children deserve to be heard and
respected like adults. The seminar students seem to know
that full well. If only adults could learn as fast...
Love and peace, Hal