if you want to actually materially address child abuse, the single most important thing you can do to start is give children the legally enforceable right to leave any situation they no longer want to be in.
church, extracurriculars, summer camps, school classes, their biological family's houses. notably, these are the places that child abuse is enabled by the child's inability to just fucking leave if they need to. they can't walk out of church if their youth pastor touches them inappropriately; they'll get punished for leaving. if they walk out of their house because their dad hits them, the cops pick them up and give them right back to their dad.
children need the legal autonomy to leave abusive situations in order to even begin to usefully materially address child abuse.
original post by qweerhet because it's unrebloggable but very important
& that should include foster care, psychiatric care, facilities for homeless youth, etc. Going from one abusive situation to the next is a known pattern. If the 'rescue' you're being offered isn't actually safe, you should be able to leave and you should have other options.
i sympathize with the message but the second part confuses me, what does it mean to have a "legal right" to leave homeless shelters, foster care and psychiatric institutions? Like where do they go then? The streets?
Like, ok, police wont force them to go back to abusive situations, im with you there, what is step two?
Surely a more actionable course of action is "fix institutional failures that allow abuse in foster care, shelters, and medical institutions"
You still need the right to leave those places as a stopgap against abuse; we can fix a lot of the causes of abusive relationships but cannot prevent all them, and so we have as a final stopgap the ability to leave your partner at any time.
Similarly, if someone is leaving behind 3 hots and a cot for the street, it's probably because something is gone wrong enough that sleeping on the street looks like a better deal.
"children should have the right to choose homelessnes"?
Im not being sarcastic or trying to gotcha, if this is the genuine position i can respect that
Yes, that is the bullet I'm biting here; I really do think there are situations where a child is better off running away from home, and they should not be brought back by police.
Theoretically, it would be nicer if we had e.g. a children's shelter in every city where any minor could go and have a very small private room they could stay in and not have to go home and eat shitty oatmeal, all no-questions-asked, until and unless they were willing to go home or get put into foster care or whatever.
But even without that, yeah, I think the alternative is de facto locking up people with their abusers with no escape.
this is often where my sorta anarchisty/libertarian intuitions come from. a lot of the time when you point out that some practice or institution is horrible or abusive and propose literally the most obvious measure- making it optional- people will go "oh but then [thing institution ostensibly prevents]! shouldn't we focus on fixing it?". and every time it's like sure! but im not gonna hold my breath! why should the people subjected to this thing have to? if people willingly choose to brave the thing you're trying to prevent in order to avoid your "help" then that's that. revealed preference. if you do actually manage to fix anything then people will choose to avail themselves of your services. not everything is 10d decision theory chess, it's actually pretty rare that more choice can make a person worse off
