Child Abuse — The American Way

#WhereAreTheChildren is a very old question

Michele Sharpe
May 28, 2018 · 4 min read
A crying child wearing a shirt that says “happy.” Photo by Arwan Sutanto on Unsplash

Children are vulnerable — physically, emotionally, and legally. And they are powerless. That’s why those in power can exploit children, hurt children, and use children for political and economic gain.

I remember my childhood frustration at not being heard, my fear of being at the mercy of unpredictable grown-ups, and my vow to never forget how powerless I felt, even when I became one of those horrible adults.

And yet, I’ve had to remind myself of that vow over and over again.

Children should be seen and not heard. An old saying, but one that still permeates the fabric of American culture. Children are held cheap in America. Their voices too often go unheard.

The question on many people’s minds this week is #WhereAreTheChildren, a hashtag in response to news that 1500 children are “missing.” The news was generated by a release of ACLU court documents, which reveal that the Department of Health and Human Services lost track of 1475 children who arrived at the U.S. border as unaccompanied minors between 2009 and 2014 and were placed with sponsors.

In a Twitter post, author and activist Rene Denfeld correctly states that this shameful situation, and the separation of children from families by ICE is not something cooked up by the Trump administration. ICE’s practice of separating young children from their parents has been in place for a long, long, time.

The “good guys” have never been in charge when it comes to children. In fact, the American government has been in the business of separating very young children from their parents since the country was founded. And it’s also been in the business of abusing and killing children.

Families were torn apart by slave traders on the auction block. The “owners” of the children forced them into labor and sometimes physically and sexually abused them. Anti-Native abusers ripped children from their homes to populate “Indian Schools” where thousands of children were not only subjected to forced labor and assimilationist techniques designed to wipe out their culture, but also physically and sexually abused. In the second half of the twentieth century, unmarried pregnant women were shamed and coerced into giving up their babies to the adoption industry.

I’ve written elsewhere about the tragedy of the six children adopted by the Hart couple, whose cries for help were ignored because their adoptive parents were clever abusers. But these six children are not unique. Children in foster care suffer abuse and neglect at higher rates than children who live with their own families. And our government has placed thousands of children into foster care after deporting their parents in the name of nationalism.

Headline from http://immigrationimpact.com/2011/11/04/thousands-of-children-stuck-in-foster-care-after-parents-deported-report-finds/

School shootings may seem like a modern tragedy, but America has been in the business of sacrificing children’s lives on the altars of nationalism and capitalism for hundreds of years. And like people in more “primitive” cultures, we rationalize those deaths.

Brick industrial building. Photo by Daniel Hansen on Unsplash

In the textile mills of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, death and dismemberment were commonplace. And yet, some rationalized that life in the mills was an improvement for poor white children. One would-be reformer commented that “that to most of these unfortunate people, factory life is a distinct improvement over the log cabin, salt pork, and peach brandy, white-trash and Georgia-cracker type of life.

White children died working in the coal industry, too; studies found that children under age 16 who worked in the mines were three times more likely to die than adult workers and that about 75 percent of slate pickers who were killed were children under 16.

Half of all infants of African descent who were born into American slavery died before their first birthdays. The mortality rate for enslaved African-American children was more than twice that of white children in the same time and place. These deaths were often rationalized according to the same faulty logic as the deaths of poor white children — that enslaved children were “better off” in slavery. Similar rationalizations excused the deaths and tortures of Native American children forced into boarding schools, which were often poorly-disguised forced labor camps.

New directives from the Trump administration promoting criminal prosecution of people who cross American borders illegally has already resulted in over 700 children being separated from their parents. Where will those children be cared for? And by whom? And who will pay for the resulting trauma?

I imagine it will be the children.

Today, the separation of children from their would-be-immigrant families is either rationalized as necessary to preserve nationalist or racist agendas or explained as the work of an unusually cruel administration. The truth is that we are all culpable in the ongoing American tradition of child abuse.

The truth is, we are a country that eats its young. We push that truth away, as we always have, by appealing to humanity’s basest instincts: greed, fear, and racism.

Maybe my childhood instincts were valid. Maybe the solution is power to the children.

Michele Sharpe

Written by

Words in NYT, WaPo, Oprah Mag, Poets&Writers, et als. Adoptee/high school dropout/hep C survivor/former trial attorney. More at www.michelesharpe.com

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