FAMILIES THAT ABUSE

If we could only stop thinking of families in terms of agrarian practices in Europe and America and instead think of them in new ways. What ought they to be?  What arrangements would prevent the abusive and neglectful child raising that re-produces adults with unmanageable cravings for sex, drugs and money that in turn cause them to abuse and neglect others.  What can we imagine?   Think big, think future. 

Some of us are searching our own families for clues and are disconcerted to uncover what we were never told before about unwanted babies, strange afflictions, people who disappeared, convicts, embezzlers, rejected races, alcoholics, and -- there’s no end to it.  Much of it about stigmatized issues.  In the past the idea has been to evict the offenders or lock them into the attic, pretend they never existed, and deny anything happened at all.  Enforce this with punishment for those who blab or go prying.  The de-cloaking of sex has finally allowed us to talk about the unspeakable in constructive ways.  Maybe we can treat social dysfunction calmly as the trouble-making disease it is and show that making it secret only makes it impervious to change so it festers in the dark.  

Recently a survey of SE Asian men asked whether they had ever raped women.  Almost one in four men surveyed said they committed rape at least once. Researchers interviewed more than 10,000 men at nine sites in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The article was published in  The Lancet Global Health journal.

This quote is from the Bloomberg version:

One in 10 men said they had raped a woman who wasn’t their partner, the researchers found. When partners were included, the figure rose to 24 percent. Just under half of the perpetrators said they had raped more than one woman. The rates of violation differed between the sites: 11 percent of men questioned in Bangladesh said they had committed rape, compared to 60 percent in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

The most common reason men gave for the violence was sexual entitlement, followed by entertainment and the wish to punish the woman. Rates for men raping men ranged from 1.5 percent of those surveyed in Indonesia to 7.7 percent in Papua New Guinea.  No reasons given.

I suspect that the rates of rape and violence around here are comparable, though if you sorted out the populations a little bit they would range from the low figure to the high one.  Certainly there appears to be high rate of abuse of women on the reservation, whether or not either victim or perp is tribal.  But abuse is not uncommon in Valier or anyplace in Montana, even in high-income high-status neighborhoods.  Sometimes it’s not recognized as abuse or even as sexual.  They say “dysfunctional families.”  Privately dealt with.

The head of the Montana Highway Patrol just abruptly retired after making offensive comments related to sex about women and race.  Two University of Montana Bozeman fraternities have just been suspended because women were raped on their premises.

Consequences vary extremely.  A recent scandal concerns a judge in Billings who sentenced a rapist to thirty days in jail.  The particulars are that the girl was 14, the rape was statutory, the rapist was her teacher (in his late forties), she thought she was having a romance, the rapist had been in trouble for similar issues earlier, had been sentenced to a sex offender therapy group which he had left, and the judge said that in his opinion the girl was in as much control of the situation as the older man was.  (The older man was not presented as being in love.)  The community rose up in dissent, the judge is on his way out, and the Montana legal system is looking for a way to jigger the law in order to overturn the verdict and impose a much longer sentence.

At about the same time in Great Falls a fifteen year old boy baited an eleven year old girl into an alley and raped her.  His sentence was sixty years, with thirty suspended.  The despairing boy hurled himself off a courthouse rotunda balcony and is now recovering from the damage, which includes brain trauma from cracking his skull on the terrazzo floor.  Everyone has confused sympathies, which is why the law is not based on sympathy -- technically. 

In May a 26-year-old Great Falls man was found guilty of raping a 4-year-old girl, his biological daughter.  I haven’t been able to find his sentence online.  Perhaps it was appealed.  All of these have in common the power dynamic that feminists say is at the heart of rape: not just the violence, not just some irrepressible erotic urge, but the need to have power over a lesser person, to assert some kind of entitlement, and to impose a punishment, a humiliation and a stigma.  The common remark about uppity females is "she needs to be laid."  A toddler?

These are extreme and shocking examples, but local.  In Missoula it’s big-time athletes and in Great Falls it’s often live-in boyfriends stuck taking care of inconsolable babies they try to shut up with violence, breaking bones and occasionally killing them.  No sex involved except that the guy is there because of sexual services to the mother who is earning a low-level income.  This is NOT a family.  

What I know from animal control work is that if women are abused, then children and animals are also being abused. As my social psych prof used to say in the late Fifties, the boss yells at dad at work, he goes home and yells at his wife, she yells at the kid and the kid kicks the dog.  It was a relatively accepted attitude of hierarchical entitlement mostly awarded to the male, keeping the family in line with violence, which is excused as the marker of a powerful man so long as he’s a good provider.   He feeds 'em so he's entitled to beat 'em. The woman is supposed to just suck it up.   A man’s home is his castle and his family are his chattel.  This entitlement to use smaller, weaker beings (who may or may not be female or even human) has become twisted and inflated, partly in pushback to women’s empowerment and partly to the related attempt to legally end all discrimination.   A steady stream of reinforcement for the pushback comes from the media.  (The guys in Indonesia said they raped for "entertainment.")

Works of art, consciousness-raising projects, religious codes, and simple decency seem unable to counter the dynamics of domination-by-penetration with instead long-term sustaining care for children and intimates.  In fact, competitive sexual penetration is part of the violence of war: “shooting-off” equated to gun-fire.  Since men are defined by their ability to defend their “owned” female, children and animals, hurting the living "possessions" of a man is a way of humiliating their owner -- demonstrating his weakness.  Viagra is a kind of armament increment, a gunpowder.  

There are so many neglected, un-socialized, damaged children that foster homes and group homes are overwhelmed and infested with opportunists looking for victims.  Even if there were a good way to sweep up these kids and move them to happy circumstances where they had food, shelter, meds, and so on, they could not settle down to conventional families for a long time, if ever.  They are used to being self-determined, enjoying a certain level of excitement, and a circle of tightly bonded -- if exotic -- friends.  They would rather be free than safe.  So what do we do with them?  Maybe we should ask THEM.

What makes families dysfunctional?  Rigid and out-moded beliefs about what a family is, economics that stress families beyond coping, war, famine, natural disasters, and cultural confusion like that rampant in America today.  Blaming is part of the problem, not the solution.  We’re in no position to be fussy about gender or skin color and anyway those are not proper criteria for happy families anywhere.   So what ARE the criteria for arrangements that will nurture kids who will grow up able to nurture their own kids?