When I was eleven years old, I lied to a social worker. She had come from New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services, or DYFS (pronounced “dye-fuss” with a scornful tone) as I knew them at home. I had been called down to the principal’s office out of my language arts class and they had the woman there to ask me questions about home. The principal sat in on our meeting.
I had been summoned unexpectedly with typical middle-school melodrama from my favorite class, so I was upset and embarrassed. It also didn’t help that my undiagnosed social anxiety disorder often manifested in an extreme unwillingness to speak to others. Thankfully for my anxiety, this wasn’t the first time someone had come to school to talk to me and I knew the drill: tell them nothing, make the problem go away.
I’ll never know what had gotten them called that time, but I think someone found out about my dad threatening to shoot my oldest brother’s dog as a punishment—complete with a shotgun’s warning blast after letting her into the backyard. I had a sense that the threat was an alarming response to whatever argument they had, but it was a normal enough occurrence for me that I can’t remember what caused the escalation.
My brother loved his dog most, so it was natural that my father would try to kill her when angry. A punishment wasn’t supposed to be easily borne. That was simply what he had moved on to by that time: break or burn or smash whatever caused the distraction and disobedience. Threatening to shoot a dog was certain to get a faster response than getting out the wooden spoon or convincing my brother to put on a shock collar for a few zaps.
If the dog died before my father had been mollified, it was unfortunate but ultimately my brother’s fault. Speaking up would only put my own dog in the line of fire. This is how I rationalized my silence as I had huddled into my mom’s side to escape the damp winds of that spring. Self-preservation and cowardice are hard to disentangle.
Writing this story today was difficult, so I can only imagine the difficulties that I would have had processing it verbally in front of a stranger right after it had happened. No, I knew better than to talk about the real punishments. After all, the contents of this conversation would eventually get back to my dad and he would not be happy if I went around twisting his actions. He had threatened to shoot a dog as a punishment, not actually killed her without warning. Other people wouldn’t understand that the action was actually quite generous.
Instead of explaining, I told the social worker something vague about having computers taken away. It was an answer that anyone could have given and I knew it wouldn’t upset anyone. If I had been totally honest, I would have said that the computer was “smashed in a fit of rage when dad was mad,” but that was, ultimately, the same as having it taken away until a replacement could be found. It was enough of a truth that I could say it without sounding untruthful, but enough of a lie that I remember that interaction vividly.
Part of the reason that I was so comfortable lying was that I knew that I did not receive the worst punishments anymore. While mine were still emotionally or mentally deleterious, I had been avoiding physical ones for some time. I think it was because I was the youngest, the only one assigned female at birth, and the best academically. A smashed computer or burned novel is nothing compared to being forced to hold a zap collar to yourself as a shock is administered or to watch as your dog’s life is threatened. I had also been complicit in my brothers’ punishments, whether by fetching the zap collars or by watching the dog be let out, so I felt conflicted tattling. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I also didn’t say anything, so I was just as guilty.
In the end, I didn’t say a word about dogs, and eventually the social worker and principal thanked me for my time and honesty. I was sent back to class feeling shaken in a way I’m still not certain how to describe.
I often think back on that conversation, that question, as a chance to change my life that I threw away. Would I not jump and curl up at sudden noises? Would I be able to carry conversations easily, talking about myself without expecting the details to be weaponized? Would I willingly embrace others and enjoy physical contact? Would I stop feeling a desperate urge to apologize any time someone looked the least bit angry? They’re questions best left unanswered.
That afternoon one of my brothers, to whom DYFS must have also talked, mentioned his conversation with my parents who were enraged at what they saw as meddling from the government. If it happened behind closed doors, it was a family issue which they needed to stay out of. Both of them reminded me to never speak to DYFS and coached me to ask for a lawyer if it ever happened again. They reminded me that if I did talk, I could have the responsibility of breaking up our family on my shoulders.
I was eleven.
With the Catholic Church perpetuating the lofty premise that family is the fundamental unit of society since medieval Europe, we now live in an era where “family values” are central to social order. Some people assert that the nuclear family—one man with one wife and two and a half children—is essential, while others argue that is merely the kinship structure which most benefits post-industrial capitalism. Academics can dispute endlessly about the origins and merits of it, but these conversations do not make the system any less violent. Despite the conservative argument that the nuclear family is the ideal system for raising children, we need to acknowledge that it often does not benefit minors and that better systems are possible.
The flaws of the nuclear family model are not unexplored. If not patriarchal in nature, the nuclear family has become inextricably linked to heterosexism; its justification comes from a dark pseudo-scientific past as (white, colonial) evolutionary superiority. Victorian social scientists claimed that it was the most evolved family structure and used that to both rationalize colonial intervention and exploit cultures with other kinship structures through sensational anthropology. It allows people to scorn economically and socially marginalized groups as bad parents without accounting for the effects of mass incarceration, privatized healthcare, and other sources that contribute to differential outcomes. It facilitates the transmission of biases that it then cultivates into racist, sexist, etc. mindsets. Most importantly to me, lifting up the nuclear family as the ideal model leaves the safety of children unchecked.
The nuclear family is the best kinship model for child abuse. One angry parent married to one meek parent with two and a half ungrateful brats is the perfect recipe for maltreatment. The harm is categorized by experts as either physical, sexual, or emotional/psychological. In the United States, the federal definition of abuse according to the “Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act” is “any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation,” while “an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm” constitutes neglect. However, these definitions can be too vague. For instance, there is no good way to differentiate between corporal punishment and physical abuse. Moreover, “serious harm” to the individual, especially one that is still developing, is hard to gauge.
I went from speech therapy in elementary school for talking too quickly to therapy in high school to help me be comfortable ordering at a restaurant, but it is legally ambiguous whether I was abused. In the UN Secretary-General’s “Study on Violence Against Children,” “forced ingestion” was considered corporal punishment. Both examples, “washing” a mouth with soap and swallowing hot spices, were benign parts of my early childhood. I didn’t think it was odd that someone who cussed or spoke disrespectfully had to clean out their mouth with foaming watermelon hand soap. Similarly, coating my thumb with red chili powder was meant to help me stop a bad habit for my own good. Since I didn’t have allergic reactions or choke to death, one could argue that there was no “serious” physical harm—and psychological harm is, of course, elusive. To this day, however, I cannot eat anything with artificial watermelon flavor without gagging. This fits the larger pattern of my childhood: I never went to the doctor’s office with broken ribs but I struggled and continue to struggle with depression and anxiety and odd tics that were fostered by a toxic environment.
In a society where destroying the nuclear family is sacrilegious, a couple instances of forced ingestion is no reason to tear children out of a home. What about when coupled with hitting with the hand or an implement? By the time we add burning or scalding, we’ve definitely crossed into certified abuse territory—but mostly because it is not normalized for Americans in the same way as routine “spankings.” It’s even more complicated when we consider that the abuser might be a sibling. For example, one of my brothers tried to sexually assault me a couple of times when I was younger and both brothers sexually harassed me for many years which would not be solved by transplanting us into a different house together. At what point should we disregard the importance of family to protect a child? The US Children’s Bureau reported that approximately 47 percent of the nation’s children received an “investigation” or “alternative response” while only around nine percent of children were considered “victims” in 2017 (note: it was unclear how repeat interventions were classified, so this may be slightly inflated). A study by Professor David Finkelhor concluded in 2008 that fifteen to twenty-five percent of “women” and five to fifteen percent of “men” were sexually abused; if we assume that there was not a massive reduction in abuse in the decade in between, children are falling through the cracks. Despite growing fears about an overbearing government trying to cleave the nuclear family, it becomes clear that they may be erring on the side of preserving harmful situations.
The stakes are high and the effects are long-lasting. As early as 1991, researchers in the introduction to “The Effects of Child Abuse and Neglect” highlighted the generational ripples of abusive childhoods: ninety percent of people who abuse and neglect children were themselves abused or neglected. In my case, I’m certain that both of my parents’ fathers used similar methods. As I was being told that I would not be allowed to leave the house at a time when I only left about once a week, I remember being given the impression that I had it better than my parents, that they were kinder than my grandparents would have been. Social isolation was not as bad as being beaten black and blue in their eyes since it left no physical scars. The nuclear family cannot fix what it has caused and to expect that strengthening the institution that causes the harm will solve it approaches the definition of insanity. With the foster care system being traumatic as well, how can we prevent child abuse, neglect, and harm broadly defined?
The answer, as opposed to “free range parenting” and increased removal, may share roots with the anti-policing movement: stronger communities. The worst parts of my childhood happened when I was on a dairy farm precisely because the physical distance made accountability difficult. If no one is around to hear a child crying because they’ve been forced to do their chores naked in late autumn for procrastinating, do they really make a sound? Having suburban neighbors who would hear my parents’ screaming and throwing matches forced them to learn how to manage their tempers to avoid social pressure. You can’t threaten to shoot a dog in your backyard with Mrs. Smith peeping over the fence and no fields to bury her in. What if the accountability for child welfare was more formally distributed in a community? Redefining the basic family unit to be an apartment building floor or suburban block or rural square mile(s) instead of one man and one wife is both more realistically the fundamental unit of society and more productive for safely raising children.
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