Isn't this Ed Ford's kind of control, or what?

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