But Mom! All the other kids are sleeping in cages!

This makes me fucking sick.
Ohio Woman Says Kids Requested Cages

Before I get to my reaction, I want to address my reaction to talking about my reaction. I feel very real trepidation about expressing myself here because I was abused. I even cringe writing that, not because I am ashamed of myself but because I know there is a very strong and negative stigma associated with people who disclose this. This is not pretense folks. There are numerous social punishments for expressing an honest and personal reaction to anything bad. It's just not polite. Heard any of these lately?
"Too much information!"
"You need to learn to let go of your anger"
"Ok, now tell me how you REALLY feel (hahaha)"
"You can't spend your life as a perpetual victim"

There are so many explicit ways we censure disclosure and implicit ways we threaten it. I usually assume those who do this to abuse survivors were not abused themselves, although the numbers suggest that some of them were. We tend to default to the false assumption that everyone has no history of abuse, which is ridiculous. Based on the stats of just the reported cases, each of us knows and is probably even close to an abuse survivor. The worst part is, we all are at least marginally aware of the high incidence of child abuse. And still we assume "everyone" or "everyone else" never suffered in this way. I blame that on the silence.

"Silence? What silence? This stuff is all over the news," you might be thinking. But the news is not real. It is a report of real. Real is the your coworker whose office is next to yours who you avoid because she's such a downer. Real is that your wife can't have an orgasm unless she knows you can't see her face. Real is the kid you wish your kid wouldn't hang out with. Real is a husband's distress when his inlaws casually chat about the sensationalized abuse story in the news and he knows he can't voice his honest reaction without risking the nearly physical pain of the family's most likely ignorant reactions to his explicit or implicit disclosure.

Hearing reports about abuse can elicit all sorts of negative emotions - disgust, revulsion, anger, sorrow, fear. We do not deal with those feelings well. We do not express them well. And I think we know this. So these feelings are more readily expressed as reactions to a remote situation. Utlimately, I think this is because the emotional impact of these feelings is easier to avoid if the issue is kept remote. We will acknowledge it in a public sphere - abuse is an ok topic for tasteless jokes, state and municipal budget battles, TV melodrama ("reality" or not), and controversial social-behavioral research. But it remains not an ok topic for the abused. Allowing that there is a large scale social ill of abuse but no real in the flesh abused people is more comfortable for most people, but it perpetuates a climate of dangerous silence. That silence keeps kids quiet while it is happening and sends survivors a message to "get over it" even before anyone has even had time to acknowledge an "it" to get over.

The stigma is there and felt quite directly at the personal level. There are countless mechanisms to keep it in place, to maintain the social silence. Today I'm chewing through the gag because I am just revolted at how the silence allows ignorance to guide personal decisions and public policy, thus putting and keeping children in high risk situations.

So, let me tell you how I REALLY feel about this fucked up situation and this fucked up couple.
What the fuck was this woman thinking? Not the locking her kids in cages part. I mean, I do think I follow her screwy reasoning for that. It went something like: The kids are getting up at night and causing 'problems'. I'll just put them in cages!" A normal person might have responded to the apparently overwhelming behavior problems these kids have by thinking "I'll not adopt 11 emotionally disturbed children whom I do not have the skills or resources to adequately care for." But she and her husband are clearly not normal.

What I want to know is what the fuck she was thinking when she declared in court that the kids wanted this treatment. She portrays the cages as cheerful little playpens. They were not. According to a local paper's Sept. 15, 2006 article about this family, the average dimensions of the cages were 4 feet long, 3.3 feet high, and 2.5 feet wide. Local police who entered the home also reported:
- "The insides of the cages were lined with "hardware cloth" - criss-crossed sections of what (a local police officer) called 'heavy-gauge wire'"
- "One of the bedrooms contained six cages, stacked two high upon each other against one wall"
- "In one of the cages, the wire lining had been partially ripped open from the inside"

I can't fathom that these people were allowed to adopt not one but 11 special needs kids. Today's news report says the mother claimed to have "sought help from...county social workers and received none". I have no way of knowing if that is true or not, I sincerely hope the state can check to see if she did. If she did and none was given, that would strongly suggest there is a massive problem in the state's child services program.

Clearly Ohio should re-examine it's adoption process since there is obviously something seriously wrong. Further, the state legislators in Ohio who recently proposed a gay couple adoption ban should be slapped, hard. Their ignorance, bigotry, and utter lack of genuine concern for child welfare is grossly apparent if despite the caged children story making national news, they are wasting time and tax payer money exploiting the issue of child endangerment as yet another means of criminalizing homosexuality.

The blame does not belong solely to the state. Support for adoptive parents of troubled kids would be a more tractable issue if our country had less fucked up attitudes about children and child rearing. The prevalent mainstream attitude of "breed til it hurts" is promoted although it is obviously destructive on so many levels. I see attitudes like this as strong contributing factors in the Ohio situation. According to the local report, a neighbor said "she thought it was unusual for them to have so many children but never noticed anything amiss at the home. 'Like anybody, you'd think that house wasn't big enough for 11 children,'" Indeed, you'd think. I don't blame the neighbor for not calling social services if all she saw were happy well fed kids playing outside. I don't even blame her for not thinking collecting 11 kids in a house that is too small to accomodate them is by definition a neglect situation. It probably was just something she saw as evidence of "low class", like having 11 cars up on blocks in the front yard. I mention her quote to illustrate that what can only be described as child hoarding is not seen as dangerously pathological in our culture.

Unless we tacitly agree that some kids are just made to be used, harmed, or destroyed, then we must assume responsibility for creating a social climate where child abuse is intolerable. Currently, social intolerance is skewed towards the victims, a sort of mean spirited "kill the messenger" attitude. Our intolerance should be directed at the beliefs and values that allow abusive situations to arise and persist in our communities. It should held for perpetrators who continue to breed, adopt, or be employed in jobs with child contact. It should be applied to government policies which promote pregnancy, child birth, and child rearing without concomitant programs to eliminate socio-economic injustice.