[LJ Idol: Topic 5] Ritualized abuse of children. The real thing.
It seems like there must always be some great fear, some moral outrage, regarding the harm that Bad Bad People want to cause to Innocent Little Children. The modern version, of course, being the scary Internet pedophiles. However, it wasn't so long ago that the big deal scare and outrage was all about ritualized sexual abuse alleged to be occurring at day care centers and preschools, either for the purposes of the perpetrators getting rich from kiddie porn or for the purposes of fulfilling the requirements of some secret Satanic ritual.
Many of these cases started when either an innocent event was mistaken for sexual abuse, or a child who was suspected to have been sexually molested by someone else was persuaded to accuse a day care worker instead. For example, in the Fells Acre case, a preschooler mentioned a teacher "pulling my pants down." This was true - the teacher changed the boy after he wet himself during naptime. In the Bernard Baran case, a boy had tested positive for gonorrhea, but he had previously made a credible disclosure of sexual abuse implicating someone else entirely.
When these cases went to trial, children were asked repeated leading questions until they said something to indicate they had been sexually abused, at which time they were praised for being good and telling the truth. Never mind that many of the crimes the children accused their caregivers of were physically impossible, or at least could not have happened without causing severe injury someone would have had to see. For example:
- Flushing children down toilets to be molested somewhere else, then cleaning them back up and returning them to the day care center as if nothing had happened.
- Ordering 4-year-old boys to amputate their own penises.
- Putting kids in a room with an R2D2-like robot that would bite them on the arm if they did not submit to being sexually abused.
- Photographing children as they were being sexually molested by lobsters.
- Changing a child into a mouse.
- Anally raping preschoolers with hot curling irons, screwdrivers, 12-inch hunting knives, etc.
People were convicted of these crimes and spent years in jail. In some cases, they're either still in jail or being forced to register as Level 3 sex offenders because they are unwilling to admit to the harm they've (allegedly) caused.
It's patently obvious that the incidents as described could not have happened. I don't believe the children intended to bear false witness (most of the time - there was a noted exception in the Baran case, with one girl admitting later she had lied "so Mommy would get lots of money" from a lawsuit). I am even willing to accept that the motivations of many of the adults whose suggestions left the children believing these things had happened were good ones. But, well, y'all know what the road to Hell is paved with. And the young adults who were once these kids are left in their own personal Hell, with memories of atrocities that did not and could not happen but are nonetheless vividly real.
Unfortunately, I learned about these cases - these miscarriages of justice - before I learned about the far more common actual ritualized abuse of children that goes on in many homes. At the time, I might well have dismissed it as another conspiracy theory, had I even heard of it. It was too big, too outrageous, too heartbreaking, too - dare I say it? - bizarre. It was not until my older daughter "failed to thrive" due to medical problems that I learned about it. My search for a solution to her difficulties led me to websites speaking out against this form of child abuse, and in turn led to my learning that even my spouse had been a victim of, thankfully, some of the milder forms.
Please understand that what I am talking about here is not any and all corporal punishment. I personally do not use corporal punishment; as a Quaker and thus an advocate of non-violence, I genuinely believe it is against the key tenets of my religion to do so. However, I acknowledge and accept that my religious beliefs and practices are not everyone's religious beliefs and practices, and I can even understand why a parent would rather punish once "cleanly" with a spanking than withdraw privileges in a way that implies withdrawal-of-love in a more long-term way.
I am talking about the ritualized practice of "switching" or "Biblically chastising" very young children and even babies for every possible offense, every exercise of free will, every independent action, every action and inaction that is less than "obedience the first time, all the way, with a happy face and a happy heart." I've read To Train Up a Child in its entirety, and I do believe that the discipline style it advocates is nothing less than criminal assault of children. I know of many other parenting books popular in the "Christian homeschooling" community that advocate the same or similar assaults.
I am talking about the deliberate choice to homeschool as a means of avoiding the teachers and other school professionals who serve as mandated reporters of child abuse. I am talking about educating children with a curriculum that not only teaches "creation science" but also avoids higher math because set theory is somehow sinful, teaches children to say "hiney" instead of learning the correct words for buttocks and genitals or even the euphemism "private parts", and says that boys and girls have no need to know anything about sex beyond the reproductive cycle of a flower until their wedding night. The lack of knowledge about sex, in particular, may leave these children uniquely vulnerable to sexual abuse because they literally do not have the words to describe what is happening. In fact, not having the words to describe sex and sexuality is the explicit intent of this form of "moral education".
I am talking about families with parents that decide to have as many children as physically possible, regardless of the damage to the mother's body or the emotional well-being of anyone in the home. I am talking about older siblings (especially older sisters) being required to act as parent-figures to younger siblings. The very same people who believe that becoming a teen parent out of wedlock is unspeakably immoral are essentially creating "teen parents" out of their own children without acknowledging what they are doing. I see this as emotional abuse of both the older children, who are being robbed of their own childhoods, and the younger children, who are being denied attention from their parents. (No, I'm not saying every single large family is like this - I speak here of the ones that deliberately set themselves up in this fashion.)
I am talking about medical providers banding together in a group that sounds an awful lot like a legitimate group, advocating practices that are not backed by sound medical science and condemning those that are. For example, there is the American College of Pediatricians. Sounds a lot like the American Academy of Pediatrics, doesn't it? Except this is a breakaway "Christian" organization that wants to reassure parents that there is nothing wrong with "Biblically chastising" their kids but there is everything wrong with LGBTQ kids and with same-sex couples parenting children. I am talking about kids like "Paul" in the movie Milk getting sent somewhere "to fix" them, about young people getting kicked out of their homes by unaccepting parents and forced into survival sex on the streets, about some kids just giving up and ending their lives.
Why am I talking about this? Because these are the reasons that the United States still has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, something that every other member of the United Nations with an even marginally functional government has managed to do.
Because, to be blunt, abusers want to keep the right to commit ritualized abuse of children, in the name of "religious freedom." And, as our President said while he was on the campaign trail, this is a national embarrassment.
I can only hope that, in the name of placating religiously conservative individuals (something he does far more often than I would like), he does not bear false witness to child victims of ritualized abuse.