As a survivor of child abuse, and as an activist who helps kids, it’s a little bit worse than that.
The biggest risk of abuse isn’t the family, it’s the activists who are trying to help kids.
Adoptive parents are far more likely to be abusive than real family. Foster parents are more likely to be abusive than real family. ‘Independent living situations’ managed by the gov’t, an NGO, charity group, or activist group are far more likely to be abusive or bad situations than real parents. (ex: I just sent a kid $50 so they could buy food that they can store and eat in their room, because in the apartment they’re sharing with two other kids, (all funded by an NGO), who ran away/were kicked out of their family homes, the kitchen is overrun with mold and insects to the point of imminent hospitalization if you eat anything that’s been stored or cooked there . . .).
((Even putting aside the kid I’m helping, the other two kids are certainly suffering from some shade of negligence and should be taught to, and how to, clean and keep clean, at least enough for hygiene's sake)).
So in the field of ‘people who deal with nonrelated kids re:abuse’, you have a mixture of: people like me, who are pretty much screaming internally all of the time, knowing that none of the systems that exist are, statistically speaking, better for the children than the family you already know is abusive, (yes, not just ‘children are more likely to be abused’ in a non-blood-family arrangement, but also ‘children who are already abused have, on average, worse outcomes when removed from the abusive blood family, even accounting for similar profiles’.).
You have people who think more action on their part = more goodness, and just do all of the tampering, removing children immediately from the family type of thing, and that always leads to horrible outcomes.
You have people who constantly have their hands tied by the system, and are required to do certain things, and either feel horrible about it, or numb to it.
You have people who relish in having power over other people, and they’re generally the ones that cram the most kids possible into the fewest possible group homes/foster arrangements.
You have the outright racists who’ll become good friends outside of their job/volunteering with the obvious (white) monsters, but seize kids from non-white families for the slightest, often complete bullshit reasons.
You have the police and police sympathizers, and their solution to everything is juvie.
So what I’m getting at here, is that the abuse of children, not just about queer and trans issues, is systemic on many levels. On the level of society and our mode of child-rearing. On the level of the gov’t, and the formal laws and institutions around it. On the level of the individuals acting as activists who will support parents and their abuse, and will actively conflict with activists trying to actually, like, help children. On the level of individuals whose job it is a part of to look into abuse, be that social services or reporting to social services.
And not in a subtle way, either; the system of abuse present even within anti-child abuse activists is such that they both actively encourage and enable parents to abuse, and, when studied insofar as they perform childcare or form alternate parenting systems, are directly more abusive than known abusive families.
jbbartram-illu
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
