Child Abuse

 (...)

In their relentless determination to punish, the family police have little regard for the rights of children (that elsewhere they claim to champion). Long and intrusive interrogations of children, with relentless suggestions of the alleged brutality and lust of their parents against them, poison their relationships with their parents, sometimes permanently. “Long, repeated interrogations by social workers—and the outright intimidation that sometimes accompanies them—forced physical and sexual examinations in some cases to determine if they have been sexually abused, and (essentially) forced therapy by psychologists, counselors,” is described by Krason (and others), who suggests they could be “considered torture under international human rights law.”311 The foster care into which children are placed after being taken from their parents is a far more likely setting for serious abuse than the children’s natural family, with more than 10 times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse of children in group homes than in the general population.312Like child support enforcement agents and other feminist gendarmes, child protective services blur the distinction between social work and law enforcement. In effect, they constitute another form of plainclothes family police. “Although spoken of in terms of social services,” writes Susan Orr, “the child-protection function of child welfare is essentially a police action.” Yet because they are not called police and do not wear uniforms, these social workers are not required to follow due process procedures; nor are the courts before which parents accused by them are summoned. Orr calls child protective services “the most intrusive arm of social services,” because of their power to remove children from their parents. Yet because the parents are seldom charged criminally, they are not afforded due process protections and are unable to defend themselves in proceedings that (like divorces) are usually secret and without public record. Like Orr, Krason argues that “child abuse and neglect should be treated as criminal matters to be dealt with in regular courts, where accused persons have the full range of due process and other constitutional rights.”313 Also like divorce proceedings, child protection blurs the distinction between civil and criminal law. It is “civil of a special type,”314 where officials can punish parents by taking away their children or incarcerating them without trial. For the few parents who do receive jury trials, “A verdict of not guilty in a criminal court will not effect [sic] the ‘true [substantiated] finding’ in Juvenile Court because that finding is based on a different and lower evidentiary standard.” So parents who have received their day in court and been found innocent are still guilty in the eyes of social workers and family court judges, who base their determination of guilt on . . . apparently whatever they feel like.315 “Even if parents are exonerated by a criminal court, agency actions and proceedings against them in juvenile and civil courts often may still go ahead,” notes Krason. “Criminal exoneration is no guarantee they will get their children back.”316Much like secret police operations in totalitarian states, the child abuse gestapo turns citizens into informers by providing for anonymous reporting, requiring mandatory reporting by doctors and other professionals of even suspected child abuse (whatever that might be), complete immunity from criminal prosecution or civil liability for knowingly false reports, and confidentiality of records and proceedings. “Much as we see in totalitarian regimes,” writes Krason, “The laws . . . have created a system driven to a certain extent by fear . . . Physicians, teachers, day care center workers, and other mandated reporters make reports—often on the slightest pretext—because they figure that it is better to speak up than not speak up for the sake of self-protection.”

Some US states mandate that every citizen must report even suspected abuse, and federal legislation has been introduced to require all states to do so. “This almost certainly would mean that, as with the mandated professional reporters currently, any person could face civil or criminal liability if he failed to report” something that has no definition.317 “Forcing the states to make every single adult a mandatory reporter with no exceptions will lead to a police-state environment, where every adult is forced to act as an informer against friends, family, and neighbors, or face possible charges.”318 As with divorce and other government measures to forcibly break up families, cases are shrouded in secrecy. Ostensibly, this is to protect family “privacy,” though in reality it provides a cloak to violate privacy with impunity. “Confidentiality laws are supposed to protect kids; instead they shield bureaucrats,” notes one commentator. “They were supposed to protect families; instead, they provide a basis for assaulting them.”319Also like child support agents, child protection officials are recruited largely from the ranks of divorced women and from graduates of social work and “women’s studies” programs, where they are trained in feminist ideology that is hostile to parents and especially fathers. It appears that homosexuals are also entering the social work profession in large numbers.320

Child abuse hysteria was carried into adulthood through “recovered memory therapy,” another fabrication by feminist theories in the psychotherapy industry. One eminent Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist describes “a craze reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts,” where wild, preposterous tales of lurid childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory and used to demonize and arrest mostly fathers (who, as we shall see, commit very little sexual or physical child abuse). As a result, “many men (and a few women) were being found guilty of crimes they never committed and receiving punishing prison terms.”321 In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison with no evidence that they had committed any crime or abuse. Yet it is embarrassingly clear that, as the price for getting published, Pendergrast must issue repeated, seemingly gratuitous protests, unconvincing and contrary to his own evidence, that this hysteria was not incited by feminist ideology.322 Yet no one should doubt the ideological subtext. “The abuse therapists were joined by an influential group of conspiracy-minded feminists,” writes dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. “When a few civil libertarian feminists . . . tried to blow the whistle on the witch-hunt, they were vilified by the conspiracy caucus as backlashers, child abuse apologists, and ‘obedient daddies’ girls of male editors.’”323

Feminist-dominated administrations in the United States have elevated child protection to a paramilitary operation. In 1993, US Attorney General Janet Reno used unsubstantiated child abuse rumors to launch military operations against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children that she was ostensibly protecting. The militarization of child protection was seen again in the largest seizure of children in American history, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without any evidence of abuse. “A night-time raid with tanks, riot police, SWAT teams, snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriff’s deputies—that is the new face of state child protection,” writes attorney Gregory Hession, “social workers backed up with automatic weapons.”

The media obfuscated the central role of feminist ideology in the action, which was nevertheless revealed when a spokeswoman for the state’s child protection agency described the “abuse”: “There is a mindset [among the sect] that even the young girls report that they will marry at whatever age, and that it’s the highest blessing they can have to have children.” As Hession comments, expressing respect for motherhood is “abuse,” and legally innocent American citizens can now be attacked militarily on their own soil by their own government for rejecting feminist ideology and practicing traditional values within their own homes.324As with other new gender crimes, the feminist gestapo’s “attempt to monitor and control vast numbers of people in the minutest of details about how they conduct their lives and raise their children is more than a touch of totalitarianism.”325

So does this mean that the entire child abuse epidemic is just another hoax? Stephen Krason and others do argue plausibly that, despite the  explosion of “reports” generated by the child abuse lobby, “the ‘epidemic’ of child abuse—real child abuse—that the American public heard so much about in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is just not there, and probably never was.”326Yet it may be more serious even than that. The plausibility of the accusations stems from the possibility that, ironically, there may indeed be a child abuse epidemic, and it is being created by the “protectors.” Britain’s notorious Baby Peter case demonstrated that child protection is virtually useless against real abuse, though the extensive media attention given to that case refused to confront the corollary victimization of innocent parents. Popular exposés by journalists like Christopher Booker have likewise highlighted the bizarre combination of abusing innocent children and victimizing innocent parents.327

The explanation once again appears to be that the radicals have not eliminated child abuse so much as they have politicized and bureaucratized it. For the child abuse phenomenon is almost entirely the creation of the feminist welfare bureaucracies themselves. Here is one more textbook example—albeit an unusually horrifying one—of radicalized government creating a problem for itself to solve.

Real child abuse correlates directly and demonstrably with the rise of single-mother homes that are the setting for almost all of it. This is very clear from unambiguous figures from the US government, the British government, and numerous scholarly studies.328 In fact, no reputable scholar even tries to deny it, though feminists confirm even as they try to excuse it (“battered women who maltreat their children”).329 Overwhelmingly, the most likely physical abuser of a child is the child’s own single mother, and the most likely sexual abuser is the mother’s lover. Contrary to the innuendo of divorce and child abuse advocates—who intentionally and knowingly use fabricated abuse accusations in family courts to remove fathers from the home—it is not married fathers but single mothers who account for almost all child abuse. “Contrary to public perception,” write Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks of the Heritage Foundation, “research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household.” Mothers accounted for 55% of child murders, according to a Justice Department report (and natural fathers for a tiny percentage). Despite  later efforts to disguise it, the US Department of Health and Human Services shows that women aged 20 to 49 are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: “almost two-thirds were females.” Given that “male” perpetrators are not usually fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers. A study by London’s Family Education Trust found children are up to 33 times more likely to suffer serious abuse and 73 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse in the home of a mother with a live-in boyfriend or stepfather than in an intact family.330In other words, the most effective protection for children is precisely the rival figure the feminist welfare and divorce bureaucracies love to hate and are most intent on removing from the home: the father. “The presence of the father . . . placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes one study in a typically defensive tone. “It is solidly clear that an ongoing, co-residential social and biological father decreases, by far, the dangers to that child of being abused.”331 The very concept of fathers as protectors is so politically incorrect that researchers must hedge their findings with politically acceptable weasel words: “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.”332 In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule. While men are assumed more likely to commit sexual than physical abuse,333 sexual abuse is much less common than severe physical abuse and is almost entirely perpetrated by boyfriends and stepfathers (who are falsely classified as “fathers” in most statistical studies).

Yet feminists would have us believe that father-daughter incest is rampant, and feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy, rationalizing the forced removal of fathers and creating  the very problem they claim to be solving. “An anti-male attitude is often found in documents, statements, and in the writings of those claiming to be experts in cases of child sexual abuse.” These scholars document techniques by social service agencies to systematically teach children to hate their fathers, including inculcating in the children a message that the father has sexually molested them. “The professionals use techniques that teach children a negative and critical view of men in general and fathers in particular,” they write. “The child is repeatedly reinforced for fantasizing throwing Daddy in jail and is trained to hate and fear him.”334 From the father’s perspective, the real child abusers have thrown him out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.

On the other hand, feminist groups consistently defend mothers, single and otherwise, who abuse and kill their children, such as the notorious Andrea Yates, who confessed to murdering her five children. “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women,” Deborah Bell, president of Texas NOW told the Associated Press. “We want to be there with her in her time of need.”335 Perhaps Andrea Dworkin’s view is illuminating here: “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.”336

It is implausible that judges are unaware that the most dangerous environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they themselves create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they have no hesitation in removing them, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable for any harm that comes to the children. On the contrary, if they do not they may be punished by feminist-dominated family law sections of the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose earnings and funding depend on a constant supply of abused children. A Brooklyn judge, described as “gutsier than most” by the New York Law Journal, was denied reappointment when he challenged social service agencies’ efforts to remove children from their parents. A lawyer close to the Legal Aid Society said that “many of that group’s lawyers, who [claim to] represent the children’s interests in abuse cases, and lawyers with agencies where [allegedly?] abused children are placed, have been upset by Judge Segal’s attempts to spur fam ily reunifications.” Though no evidence indicated that his rulings resulted in any child being abused or neglected, “most of the opposition [to his reappointment] came from attorneys who represent children in neglect and abuse proceedings.”337 An Edmonton, Alberta, judge was forced by feminists to apologize for saying, “That parties who decide to have children together should split for any reason is abhorrent to me,” in a case involving a divorcing mother whose two young sons were hospitalized for heat stroke after she left them in a hot parked car.338Seldom does public policy stand in such direct defiance of undisputed facts, to the point where the cause of the problem—separating children from their fathers—is presented as the solution, and the solution—allowing children to live with their fathers—is depicted as the problem. It is unambiguous and undeniable that if you want children abused, take them away from their fathers.

The logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the fathers, feminist officials can then present themselves as the solution to the problem they themselves have created. The more child abuse—whether by mothers or foster care providers or even by social workers themselves (which is often the case)—the only option on the table is to further and endlessly expand the child abuse bureaucracy. Even when the horrors are exposed, meaningful reform is then deftly deflected with the self-serving argument that the welfare agencies are “overworked and underfunded,” thus rationalizing expansion of the very machinery creating the horrors. “State agencies . . . frequently complain that they are understaffed and overworked—even while justifying more and more intervention into families.”339Whether it is evicting the father from the home, establishing visitation centers where he may see his children under the surveillance of social workers, protecting the children from the abusive single mother and her boyfriend, treating the emotionally devastated children with drugs or psychotherapy, or removing them altogether into the control of state-sponsored foster homes and, later, juvenile detention facilities—the solution to the problems created by each cadre of officials is to create more cadres of officials.

This appalling conclusion is simply a commonplace of political science: bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very prob lem they exist to combat. This time we have created a massive army of functionaries with a vested interest in creating as much child abuse as possible, and they are doing precisely that.

311. Ibid., 48. See also Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 4.

312. Cited in Krason, “Mondale Act,” 48.

313. Susan Orr, Child Protection at the Crossroads: Child Abuse, Child Protection, and Recommendations for Reform (Los Angeles: Reason Public Policy Institute, October 1999), 10–12; Krason, “Mondale Act,” 58.

314. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 40.

315. Child Sexual Abuse, Assault, and Molest Issues, Report No. 8, A Report by the 1991–92 San Diego County Grand Jury, 29 June 1992 (http://www.co.san-diego.ca.us/cnty/cntydepts/safety/grand/reports/report8.html).

316. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 38.

317. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 33, 3.

318. Internet site of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, 12 December 2011, http://www.hslda.org/Legislation/National/2011/S1877/default.asp.

319. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 34, partly quoting Trevor Armbrister, “When Parents Become Victims,” Reader’s Digest (April 1993), 106.

320. See Mary Pride, The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse and Everyday Rebellions Against a System that Threatens Every North American Family (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1986), 241, and Brenda Scott, Out of Control: Who’s Watching Our Child Protection Agencies? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1994), 58.

321. Paul R. McHugh, Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (New York: Dana Press, 2008), introduction, Kindle locations 820–21, 1302–03. McHugh acknowledges that “feminists attacked it [efforts to refute the accusations] because they believed ‘recovered memories’ confirmed their views about patriarchal oppression in family life.” Yet “90% of accusers are women,” and the main targets are “parents” (almost always fathers). Otherwise, like Pendergrast (see next note), he conspicuously avoids ideology. Kindle locations 815, 818, 820.

322. Hinesburg, Vermont: Upper Access Books, 1995. A writer who doth seem to protest too much on this point, Pendergrast never tells us who suggests that it is the creation of feminist ideology.

323. “Rape Culture is a ‘Panic Where Paranoia, Censorship, and False Accusations Flourish,’” Time, 15 May 2014 (http://time.com/100091/campus-sexual-assault-christinahoff-sommers/). As we have seen (above, under “Rape and Sexual Assault”), Hoff Sommers sees a parallel with the current hysteria surrounding “campus rape culture.”

324. Gregory A. Hession, “Whose Children Are They Anyway?” New American, 23 June 2008 (http://thenewamerican.com/node/8344#SlideFrame_1,).

325. Ibid., 61.

326. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 10.

327. See above, note 298.

328. Surveyed in Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 4.

329. Gregory Parkinson, et al., “Maternal Domestic Violence Screening in an Office-Based Pediatric Practice,” Pediatrics, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2001), e43.

330. Robert Whelan, Broken Homes and Battered Children: A Study of the Relationship between Child Abuse and Family Type (London: Family Education Trust, 1993), 29. Whelan’s findings led the British government to stop publishing figures. “Whitehall no longer wants them to be collected.” Melanie Phillips, “The Darkest Secret of Child Sex Abuse,” Sunday Times, 26 November 2000.

331. Nancy Coney and Wade Mackey, “The Feminization of Domestic Violence in America,” Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (October 1999), 45.

332. David L. Rowland, Laurie S. Zabin, and Mark Emerson, “Household Risk and Child Sexual Abuse in a Low Income, Urban Sample of Women,” Adolescent and Family Health, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 29–39 (www.afhjournal.org/docs/010110.asp).

333. Despite the ubiquitous stereotype of the pedophile male, it now appears to be female teachers who are engaged in an epidemic of raping underage boys. None seem to be seriously punished. The March 2006 issue of Whistleblower magazine is devoted to this problem. See “Another Woman Gets No Jail Time,” WorldNetDaily, 1 June 2006, http://www.wnd.com/2006/06/36416/.

334. Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield, The Real World of Child Interrogations (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1990), 127.

335. Quoted by Phil Brennan, “NOW Throwing Lifebelt to Mom who Drowned Five Kids,” NewsMax.com, 30 August 2001.

336. Cathy Young, “The Misdirected Passion of Andrea Dworkin,” Boston Globe, 18 April 2005 (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/18/the_misdirected_passion_of_andrea_dworkin/).

337. Daniel Wise, “Mayor’s Panel Rejects Brooklyn Family Court Judge for Second Term,” New York Law Journal, 14 March 2001, 1.

338. Gordon Kent, et al., “Judge Apologizes for Saying He Finds It’s ‘Abhorrent’ When Parents Split,” Edmonton Journal, 9 January 2003.

339. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 47.

THE NEW POLITICS OF SEX

The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power

by

Stephen Baskerville