“Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you ‘in love’ with you. It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.”
Two things I loved about the representation of abuse in the Christmas
Special:
1. A survivor/victim who handles talking about the subject better
than those around her do.
2. A survivor/victim whose response to find out that their tormentor
is dead is, more or less, “Ah… [pause] Good.”
Both are very, very true to life, but not often seen in fiction.
Perhaps because a lot of non-survivors like to think of victims as still being
in crisis. For some reason, the way we are changed by what we go
through, and find a new – especially a hardened or selectively hardened – normal,
makes them very uncomfortable, despite it not being them it’s
happened to.
I’m always interested, though, in the way that the programme
presents the main characters when storylines like this come up.
I don’t have a huge amount of experience of abuse cases from that
perspective, but in what I have, the professionals involved have
usually seen it all – or most of it – before and have a grim, depressed air rather than
a distressed one.
Do you think their upset represents a time when
abuse – or what was considered abuse back then, of course, which is
a whole other subject – was less likely to be discovered, and thus
wasn’t got used to in the same way? Or is it dramatic license? Or
are my experiences of the people who work with cases like that
unusual?
An idea that won’t leave my head: in some far-off uncharted corner of the Marvel world, Emily Lyman cheats on her abusive husband with a strange man who claims to be an alien. Maybe he can help her leave Norman, she thinks, but he doesn’t. Through what seems like no fault of his own, he leaves her alone and pregnant. Luckily, Norman never suspects that the baby isn’t his.
Emily gives birth, names the child Harry and promises she’ll do the best she can for him. But, when Harry is still an infant, she’s stricken down with cancer. She dies in despair, but clinging to a shred of hope that Harry’s real father will reappear one day and take Harry away from Norman. But Ego – for it was Ego – is of course far from the man Emily thought he was. He never loved Emily and won’t love her son.
By the time Yondu comes to pick the eight-year-old Harry up, he already knows in his gut that something’s terribly wrong with Ego’s planet. He looks at Harry, looks at Norman, looks back on his memories of the last couple of kids he delivered, and thinks “fuck this”.
Suddenly, Harry Osborn is a space pirate under Yondu. A couple of years later he gains a brother called Peter. (He likes that name. He had a childhood friend with that name.) What’s going to happen next? What has the universe got in store for him? Harry doesn’t know, but he’s kind of glad about the way things turned out.
the stupidest thing in the entire harry potter series was when they go down to the slytherin dormitory and it’s all dark and slimy and freezing and shit. as if lucius malfoy would let his son live in squalor like that. the house with the highest concentration of spoiled purebloods are happy to live under the goddamn lake? no.
wow this is the #1 best harry potter criticism i have ever read
Actually this is much more realistic than you might think (and not remotely in a good way).
The British upper class have long since had a reputation for sending their kids to terrible boarding schools to “toughen them up”. And to put it mildly, uh… for those kids who found themselves swept up in the grand tradition and packed off to boarding school like their fathers had been… things far worse than squalor were there, and parental intervention was usually rather low. The boarding school horror story is virtually an entire subgenre of British literature, they were that bad. So despite the privileged background of the Malfoys, oh yes, I can absolutely believe that Lucius would let his son live in a dungeon, because Tradition and Discipline and Stiff Upper Lip and all that nonsense.
(In recent years, unsurprisingly, there’s been an absolute explosion of abuse stories coming out of elite and prestigious boarding schools, which is why I know any of this, it’s always on the news :( )
Saving Face (2012), acid attacks on women in Pakistan
Meanwhile, in America, feminists are complaining about how dress codes are oppressive.
You idiots have never experienced oppression, and pray you never do, because this is what it looks like.
As a South Asian American feminist, let me remind everyone that oppression is not a competition.
Just because we fight one type of sexism doesn’t mean we don’t care about other instances of sexism that don’t affect us directly in our day to day lives.
My heart goes out to this woman and the hundreds of other victims like her. I want to educate people about these kinds of incidents. I support organizations that help women like this.
You may think that dress code issues are trivial, but they are related to a larger issue of women’s bodily autonomy, which affects women’s health and safety.
So please, let’s try to bring awareness and bring about change instead of insulting entire groups of people because they are facing issues that are less scary than the one presented.
“oppression is not a competition”
thank you so much for this wording
Every time someone, usually a guy, complains about feminists not experiencing oppression, I can’t help but see what they are really trying to say.
“This is how men could be treating you, be grateful it’s only as bad as it is now.”
And that’s actually an attribute of abusers, I believe I read somewhere. To compare you to someone being treated worse and tell you you should be grateful you have it so good. It convinces the victim they should be silent in the face of their abuse.
It’s literally an abuse tactic.
Every time someone says something like, “You […] have never experienced oppression, and pray you never do, because this is what it looks like.” What they are saying is, “shut up, we could treat you worse if we wanted to.”
^^^^^^^^^^^
Boom.
Not to disregard this very valid argument, but does anyone know if the woman (and her children) in the set ended up living away from her abusers? It breaks my heart to see that she was forced to live with them.
I did a bit of poking around and it looks like – although she was promised a lot of stuff from the filmmakers that she didn’t get – she did get a house. That was back in 2012 though….
I’m going to preface this post with a content warning. This post is about child abuse. The video I’m going to link includes actually video footage of child abuse. It is one of the most upsetting videos I have ever watched. My post includes in depth descriptions of child abuse.
This morning I watched a Youtube video discussing and highlighting what is happening on another Youtube channel. If you have the stomach for it, I’d suggest watching the video because Phillip DeFranco does a much better job of summarizing the situation than I can.
For those of you who can’t watch, I’ll give you a very brief rundown.
The Youtube channel DaddyOfFive is a combination family vlog and prank channel. In a recent video, the parents pull a prank where they pour invisible ink on one of the kid’s floors and then make him think that they believe he poured ink all over the floor. They scream and swear at this little boy, shouting things like “What the fuck did you do?” while the boy cries and cowers, looking genuinely terrified. Even the best child actors could not pull off looking as genuinely devastated as this child does.
As DeFranco highlights in his video, although all the children are pranked, it seems that this one child (Cody) takes the brunt of the cruelty. In many videos he is seen being hit, kicked, pushed, and pinned down by his older siblings. In one video his father pushes him face first into a book case. In one video Cody begs his family to stop, saying that he’s tired of this. In another video his parents scream at him and tell him he’s the only one in the family who can’t “take a joke”.
In response to some of the flak they have been getting, the parents uploaded a video about “Blocking All The Haters”. They goad the children into saying on camera that they aren’t being abused. Now keep in mind, the kids have been told that all the “Cool stuff” they have been getting is because of the Youtube channel. They know that if the pranks stop, the cool stuff goes away. Most of the children chime in that they are not being abused. Cody hardly says anything. The oldest boy says, “At least you aren’t beating us”.
What is happening to Cody is child abuse. It is emotional, psychological and physical abuse. It is torture. And the worst part of it all is that it is monetized. The parents are being paid by advertisers to abuse this child under the guise of “It’s just a prank, bro”.
So what can we do?
First of all, we can report the videos on DaddyOfFive’s channel for containing depictions of child abuse. If you decide to help by doing this, please be sure to flag the specific instances of abuse such as Cody being pushed or the parents screaming vulgarities at the children.
Second of all, we can let the companies advertising on this channel know that we won’t be buying anything from a company that sponsors videos of child abuse.
Finally, if anyone knows this family in person, they can make a report to CPS. Now the family is claiming that they’ve already been investigated and “cleared” by CPS, but that’s not how this works. Repeated reports mean repeated investigations. You do not give up and look the other way when a child is being abused just because CPS failed to act the first time. When my neighbors were abusing their children, I had to call CPS every week for over a month before something was done. Don’t give up.
His name is Mike Martin, his Wife’s name is Heather Martin and has a YouTube channel of her own called MommyOFive. They live in Maryland, the children’s names are Jake, Ryan, Alex, Emma and Cody.
Anyone living in Maryland please report them to CPS and show them the YouTube channel as evidence
Censorship of sexuality, especially while simultaneously violence, particularly sexual violence, is left uncensored, and the harmful implication this juxtaposition has on our collective sexual wellness, is something I’ve written a lot about, like here and here. Hell, I’ve even written a book about it.
So when I found out there is a new “kid safe” search engine called Kiddle designed to block adult search returns for children, I feared it had sex-is-bad-and-violence-is-normal disaster written all over it. When I learned the results are handpicked by humans and not a computer broadly banning based on keywords, I was extra curious to see if I was still right. I was.
I typed in a bunch of different searches that a child might reasonably want or *need* to anonymously ask the Internet. Well, I’ll let you see the results for yourself:
My girlfriend hits me” is also a bad word.
Inquiries about vaginal discharge are, you guessed it, also bad words.
Related bad words: menstrual care, menstrual pads, menstruation, and uterus.
When avoiding a gay dating website in the search results is considered a higher priority of “safety” for children than their homelessness, and you recommend confronting their abusive parents, we have a tish bit of a problem.
If I was 12, typed this into a search engine, and instead of results got a “bad word” finger wagging, I would take the answer to the “is it ok to be bisexual” question as a big fat NO it’s not OK :(
But the human censors apparently allows kids to search for this one under their “kid safe” censorship policies.
So questions about puberty, health, identity, and seeking help for sexual abuse is not “safe”, but kids buying guns is. I feel like a broken record, so I’m going to let you all unpack it this time. Discuss:
why would a child need to know about oral sex?? it’s obvious most of these words can lead to some pretty heavy adult stuff and, emphasis on CHILD. like this isn’t even made for teenagers, it’s for kids. babbies. what kind of fucked up world are you living in where children under the age of eleven have romantic relationships and search google for information on their vagina?? are y’all mad???
Mad? I’d go so far as “furious”. Because they don’t necessarily have romantic relationships, but they sure as hell sometimes have abusive relationships. Why would a child need to know about oral sex? So they know it’s not “a special way daughters kiss their daddies to say they love them”.
And a fair number of people with vaginas start bleeding out of them before they turn 11. And want to know why. And aren’t getting told by the people who think they need to have a “safe” search engine.
