The subject of child abuse has been in the news and on this blog quite often lately. Just today on the morning news I heard about a freak in Austria who imprisoned his daughter in his basement, that 31 of the teenage girls from FLDS were either pregnant or had already had a baby, and that Mylie Cyrus went topless in Vanity Fair with her parents watching (way to kill the golden goose, folks).
So, last week, I asked what grounds were sufficient to terminate a parent’s rights over a kid.
Harry B. at Crooked Timber fleshes out an argument he made in my comment section about parental rights. He says that parents should have a great deal of latitude to raise a kid as they see fit, however those rights end when a child is abused or neglected. He says that a child’s interest is probably more involved that just getting a decent breakfast and avoiding a beating, but he doesn’t elaborate in this blog post.
The problem, according to Harry B., is that the remedy for the situation may be worse than status quo. The disruption of families, even bad ones, can lead to other serious problems for the kids. The foster care system in our country has an uneven track record.
Harry throws out a final, and excellent question.
What kinds of public policy will make it more likely that more
parents will meet the (in my view quite stringent) conditions on
retaining a fundamental right to raise their child. How, in other
words, can we arrange policies so that events like this one with the FLDS don’t arise in the first place?
In the interest of not confusing the conversation, respond to Harry at CT. All other random and less serious comments can be left here, as always.
Apt. 11d 
It’s going to be very hard to figure out the FLDS girls’ ages, probably even with their cooperation. An added wrinkle is that the mothers were told that they could stay with their small children in state care if they were underage, but if they were adults, they would have to leave. So, that’s a huge incentive to (at least for the moment) either admit to being a younger mom or (most problematically for the court system) to claim to be younger than one actually is.
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Another side of this that has not been discussed is that 55 years ago (in the Short Creek raid), there was a very similar mass assault against a polygamous community, with very similar accusations made against the group. I’d like to read more about it, but from what I’ve read, despite mass arrests, the community eventually was reconstituted.
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MILEY!!!! Not Mylie!
My god, woman, this is HANNAH MONTANA we’re talking about! 😉
And hey, you didn’t mention that Roger Clemens started an affair with Mindy Macready when she was 15.
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In a rape case, it would be the state’s responsibility to prove the age of the victim. But, in this dispute, I suspect that it will be the girls who have to prove their age (as one does when opening a bank account, or buying a drink).
(And no one has been arrested in the FLDS case, right?)
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I’m just going to reprise a comment I made on an earlier thread on this topic, Laura, which is that in all these cases these girls — and they are always girls — are being abused because the dad decides the girl is now a woman. And a woman can be treated like property. It all falls out from there, every bit of it. Even discussing when the state can take the child is, in my view, missing the point.
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“(And no one has been arrested in the FLDS case, right?)”
That is an oddity of the case. Anybody with a bad conscience has had a couple of weeks now to hop in a car and head to Mexico. It’s true, the last I heard, there was minimal participation of FLDS men in the DNA collection process, but I hadn’t heard that any of them had made a run for the border.
On a related topic, I have heard talk that there didn’t seem to be enough boys, including younger boys, and there’s been a lot of confusion with regard to the kid count. My (completely reckless and irresponsible) speculation is that the initial round up didn’t get all the children on the ranch, and they’re either still at the ranch, or have left for some other polygamist haven. A ranch like that would have lots of outbuildings, sheds, and barns, and it would be literally childs’ play to evade capture for a few hours.
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But Jen, the problem is that the women have to say that they’re not being treated like property for the state to step in. I thought along these lines, too, that the women seem to be submitting to a form of slavery — they agree to give up their autonomy and submit to the decision making of another. But, although there are laws against “involuntary servitude”, there are no laws against voluntary servitude, offered by adults. However degrading I find it, a person is allowed to decide they’re going to do whatever someone else tells them to do.
Their promise is meaningless, from the laws point of view, and the state can step in to protect any woman who says that her servitude is involuntary, but the state can’t do anything if the woman asserts that the relationship is consensual (even if supremely icky) unless the “woman” is a child, in which case, the state can step in. That’s why it matters, from a legal standpoint.
I further admit that the videos of the women reminded me, sickeningly, of videos of prisoners of war, who have been coerced into making statements. Someone else even wondered if the women were cognitively impaired in some way. But, the state’s ability to step in for those reasons is extremely limited. One could consider involuntary institutionalization, but, do we really want to broaden those rules, even those of us who are truly disturbed by what we’re seeing?
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I’m not arguing for blaming these women individually. I’m more noting that *sexism* is the problem at the root of all of it, and I find it interesting that no one seems to be talking about the fact that all these victims are female. Everyone’s all “the state should take the kids!!!” And then it immediately devolves into a conversation about civil rights, really. Not even a pit stop at the sexism! Absolutely no connections made to, say, other organized religions’ approaches to women’s rights.
Katha Pollitt did finally make this point in an op-ed in today’s Chicago Tribune. But I’m still utterly annoyed that the conversation immediately focused on making sure that no one lost a civil liberty. (That is to say, in a world where women could lose their civil liberties or their freedom/personal safety but men have only civil liberties to lose, should I be surprised that the thing *men* could lose is what everyone focused on?)
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“men have only civil liberties to lose”
In prison, a man loses his freedom and his personal safety, too, so those things are also on the table.
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Amy, do you really believe everyone talking about the danger of parents losing their children is worried about going to prison? I don’t think so.
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Jen,
I thought you were talking about the FLDS people, not the general public.
Laura,
The artsy semi-topless pictures aren’t even half of it. Rod Dreher has up a video of the shoot, and by far the creepiest material are the father-daughter shots.
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Women in the US didn’t get the right to vote until a mere 88 years ago. There are women alive right now who were born into a world that would not have allowed them the vote.
118 years ago the mainline Mormon Church was acting much like FLDS, certainly the marriage age range and the polygamy and the dresses and the bizarre pseudo-theology, though they were forced at that time, in order to get legal status as a state, to renounce it. So they did.
Not because it was unfair to the women in polygamous relationships. People in those days didn’t give a damn for the rights of women – as noted the 19th amendment was still to be fought for – no, polygamy was offensive to the men who dominated the larger society, and to the women who benefitted from their men’s domination.
Forced to choose between the material benefits of legal acceptance into the US and the genetic benefits to the male elders of the church of polygamy the Mormon leadership chose statehood.
Nothing moral or enlightened about it, just pragmatic choice.
120 years ago most rural women, of whatever faith or none, in the US dressed in long dresses and bonnets. That’s not that long ago. But television and a mushy educational system have given us a sense of it’s always having been like this. Modern, enlightened, free.
This enables the rejection of sharia law, because it seems so entirely alien and inhuman, though the only real differences between your a lot of those 19th c. rural American Christians and adherents of sharia would be color and style and language.
Equating statutory rape with actual physical rape is a symptom of a very real and pernicious pathology in mainstream sexuality. Like most pathologies it seeks to preserve itself at the expense of the host, and uses whatever it can to do that.
The difference between a 19 year old having consensual sex with a 13 year old and forced rape is only minimal to people who know deep down that sex is dirty and bad and only for properly married couples.
The biology of that is traceable right back to the mind control techniques of organized religion. Which work to enforce their own survival. Which is what sex is about, which is what all this is about.
Survival.
Polygamy works for the males involved. It spreads their genes out and down the timeline.
Slavery works for slaveholders and their families.
Capitalism works, for the upper tiers of the capitalist elect, and for at least a little while the large middle, though that’s shifting dramatically now.
None of these strategies show a clear parallel between morality demand and biological function, in fact they hide the connection emphatically, but what they’re entirely about is biology.
We’ve inherited a few millenia’s worth of a low-grade hatred of the natural world, and the symptoms of that sick inheritance are everywhere around us.
It shows in the awful death counts of species and systems, and it shows in the weather and in the seas.
It shows as a very common fear and revulsion/fascination toward biological events and conditions that involve sex or death. Even though that’s pretty much what evolution is and what life itself is about – sex and death.
Even rape can be an effective strategy for procreation – check out the Viking raids on England and Ireland and the subsequent introduction of Nordic genes there.
We can say that rape is always a terrible thing, but then when we’re looking at a child of the act of rape, a complete condemnation becomes a further act of violence, it compounds the wrongness and doesn’t alleviate anything, because it exists only to make us feel better about ourselves and our own prejudices and pathologies.
As does most of the hot air blowing across this bizarre event in Utah.
In a society that accepts the deaths of thousands children every year, every single year for the last 50, and the maiming of hundreds of thousands more every single year – because it’s random and mechanical and most especially because it gets cleaned up after right away, except for those touching constellations of mementos and plastic flowers – most of the outrage and shrieking horrified condemnation of the FLDS is nothing more than hypocritical self-approval by people whose own bizarre ideas go unchallenged except at the very margins of discourse.
The FLDS is creepy and alien, but its weirdness, minus the welfare checks, looks an awful lot like the Biblically-recorded activities of Abraham and his descendants, and it looks almost note for note exactly like the activities of the early mainline Mormon Church.
Is time all that’s necessary to make these things okay?
How much time?
How many people have to be involved to dissipate the blame?
Or are we actually doing something else? Something an awful lot like what motivates these people we condemn. Trying to preserve our own genetic presence in the wild and unpredictable flux of the real world.
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I’ve just started the book “Escape,” by Carolyn Jessup and Laura Palmer. Jessup was an FLDS “spiritual” wife, who eventually escaped. She’s thirty-six today. From her description, at the time of her marriage, at eighteen, girls were married at the age of 18–not 13.
That is, the underage marriages are a recent development.
Amy P, the raid on Short Creek, Arizona, in 1953, were enacted on this same group, the FLDS. In Jessup’s telling, after the raids, the sect chose to restrict women’s freedoms. Women were increasingly married off to older men, not to men their own age.
Many commenters have ignored an important point. According to Jessup, the marriages are decided by their religious leader, not by the parents.
If you Google “Attleboro Sect,” you will find newspaper accounts of the treatement afforded the Massachusetts cult The Body. After an infant starved to death, the state of Massachusetts removed sect members’ children from their parents’ custody permanently. In that case, most, perhaps all, of the children were placed with a parent who had left the cult, or with aunts who were not sect members.
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“Amy P, the raid on Short Creek, Arizona, in 1953, were enacted on this same group, the FLDS.”
One of my biggest concerns about the YFZ case has been that no matter what the state chooses to do, the group will probably reappear (bigger and better) in some other location, if not in the US, then maybe in Mexico.
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Fritzl story goes on
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/fritzl-tells-of-underground-cellar-terror/2008/09/10/1220857636579.html
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