What does it mean when the State goes to such lengths to avoid upholding even a facade of accountability? They’re afraid. Because it’s not just the cops, not just the courts, this runs to the heart of the USA, of America. From settler colonialism, to white supremacy, to capitalism, the Police exist to uphold these processes which are ongoing, under the guise of “Law and Order”. They’re scared that they can be stopped. They’re scared we can stop them.
why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.
unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses – they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominancewhich they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being.
for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves – that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful – because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
This is supposed to be a month of Pride. a month where the LGBTQIAP+ community stands up collectively to celebrate our identities, our worth, and our communities bravery as a whole. It’s a month to remember LGBTQ history, the things they don’t tell you in the history books: the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the assassination of Harvey Milk, the AIDS Crisis, the legalization of same sex marriage in various countries, people killed for loving someone, and most importantly: the worth of each queer individual and the validation of their identity. Instead I have kids on the internet and in real life (who barely understand who they are, who were just coming to terms with their identities) scared that they will be the next victim of hate. I have mainstream media ignoring the fact that this mass shooting, one of the deadliest in US history, took place at an LGBTQ nightclub on Latinx night. Instead they focus on the shooters ties to “extremist Islam”. They ignore the bravery that the victims held in choosing to go out and celebrate their truth, despite hatred still very real within the USA; the bravery the rest of the community has in still finding something to celebrate this Pride month. I have friends and strangers around the world banding together to spit in the face of this hate. So much love has gone around, but we are all so tired. Now people have to once again decide if their identity is worth dying for. Is it worth going to a Pride Parade if there’s a chance you could die?
Next time someone asks why there isn’t a Straight Pride, why “the gays” still need pride “they can get married now, what more do they need?” I want them to be gently reminded of this day where over 50 people lost their lives, and even more were injured physically and psychologically due to one man’s hatred of people he didn’t understand and did not want to understand. I want them to be reminded of the decades of persecution: from Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement, the LGBTQ victims of the Holocaust, the Lavender Scare, and now Pulse in Orlando (and this is just in Western culture, just a brush with the suffering those in the LGBTQ community have faced). To any of you still reading who are LGBTQIAP+, I applaud your bravery of living your truth, even if it is only with yourself. Stay brave, keep loving the world and especially yourself, and know that it has to get better because you and I and individuals like us are the future.
My deepest condolences to the victims and their friends and families, rest in peace and know that you are loved by many.
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 