Hopeless (Ritsuka/Soubi)

[sea_priest3ss]

Title: Hopeless
Author: priestess_grrrl
Series: Loveless
Pairing: Ritsuka/Soubi
Rating: PG 13
Warnings: angst, references to violence
Summary: Ritsuka gets a visit from your friendly neighborhood social worker.
Notes: Since I started reading Loveless, I've always wondered: why doesn't anybody call the Department of Social Services to report Misaki? This fic

Comments

[priestess_grrrl]

One of my good friends is a foster mom, and I mean, it's just awful what kind of stuff goes on. And Massachusetts is supposedly the best in the country! She gets paid pennies, and they try to give her more and more kids, like, "hey, can you take two? how about three?" I can't believe she's able to do what she does, honestly. Having those precious little babies for maybe six months, bonding with them and nurturing them, and then having to give them up to go live in rehab with their troubled mothers, and never, ever finding out what happened to them. I'd slit my wrists, I swear.

What my concern would be over in Japan, as someone pointed out in one of the comments, would be their cultural issues around family privacy. It's a problem enough over here, depending on your family of origin's culture, but I imagine it may be worse over there if nobody talks about it and nobody reports it. I could see it being considered an invasion of privacy to call DSS on a neighbor, for example.

In America, we're so damned litigious about everything, and everyone feels like it's their God given right to call up lawyers and get their "day in court". It's considered a triumph to rat somebody out. The archetype of "the concerned neighbor" who makes the phone call is held up and revered. My mother used to call the police every five minutes when we were little kids: someone driving too fast down the street, stray dogs, "suspicious looking" people... I mean, we're all up in each other's business all the time in this county.

In fact, it's a big problem for foster parents. My friend's dentist called DSS on her when one of her kids fell out of her baby carrier while she was getting her teeth cleaned. I couldn't believe it when she told me that. Luckily DSS knows her, so they threw it out, but still. It's crazy.

But that American "I'm gonna sue!" tendency at least has one good point: less abuse goes unnoticed, because everyone is in everyone else's business. From what I understand about Japanese culture, I imagine it's considered shameful to drag someone into court or what have you. So it would be my guess that a lot more goes on behind closed doors. Still, though, their system is probably better funded and better organized than ours, so maybe that makes up the difference.