#.child abuse

[creepy-crowleys]

Venting, rambling, you know the drill, I'm sure.

I’m scared.

It feels ridiculous to think about when there are so many seismic, life-changing, world-altering events going on in mine and so many other people’s lives. This is all so minor and selfish in comparison.

My aunt abused me for most of the time I lived with her.

Ha… I doubt that’s much of a revelation to a lot of people here but… It’s hard to say. She could have been so much worse than she was. She… Well. Mostly she didn’t like me very much, haha.

It feels small and stupid to complain. But.

She abused me. I was abused.

Nothing I did would ever be right or enough in her eyes. I was ruined and ugly, an expense she’d taken on because nobody else would have bothered. The least I could do was be grateful and try to make myself useful.

When my family and I were attacked, after everything happened… I cracked my head open pretty good. There were concerns that I wouldn’t be… ‘Right’ after. I know I struggled sometimes; I couldn’t always keep the real world separate from my nightmares and I got confused and lost easily for a long while.

It was difficult. And I'm fighting myself even now to not say that it was difficult on her, like it was perfectly fair and normal for me...!

I've never seen her angrier than the night I tried to kill myself. And then we never left again. I couldn't be trusted to take care of myself and not to abandon her. She hated me so much, haha!

I want to be better than she was.

I don’t know where to start.

I thought maybe I had an idea once, and I thought I was doing the right things. But. I don’t know. Everything ended so badly, and I still can’t identify what I should have done better to even begin trying to fix myself.

So... I'm scared.

I don't want to be looked at the way he did the last saw him by anyone I love ever again. I don't want to be caught up in this cycle I've ended up in. I want to be able to promise something worthwhile if... if my family ever wants something more. If 'family' is even what anyone wants.

But wanting to break the cycle isn't enough. Loving someone isn't enough. And if I ever let myself think that maybe something is enough, then I'm probably ignoring something important and I'm going to fuck it all up again.

I don't know how to begin patching holes I can't even see.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this either. Ha.

[theconcealedweapon]

Parents think it's a sin for their children to disobey them. Parents think it's okay to assault their children in order to instill the fear of God in them.

Those parents are prime examples of using the lord's name in vain. But they don't want their children to know that. So they instead invent some bullshit definition.

[motherofplatypus]

This is how many bullets they shot on a fucking kid.

This post has been compiled in Record of Genocide.

[teaboot]

Adult ProTip, from a security professional: If a kid tells you, "My parents are gonna kill me / kick my ass / kick me out" for something relatively minor, don't respond with shit like "Really? ;) that sounds a little extreme, don't you think sweetie?" because that shit really does happen.

Instead, respond as though whatever threat they are afraid of is fully valid, and offer whatever you can do to help- ask if they believe they are in danger of being hurt in any way, and work accordingly.

If they're overreacting, they'll usually realize and dial it back, self-correct and begin thinking a bit more rationally.

If they're not overreacting, and the danger is real, then they'll need a level-headed adult in their corner, not another condescending authority figure who doesn't believe them.

[fnord888]

Child abuse is a big problem, so it's important that we don't let children communicate with adults except their parents and other official authority figures. Everyone knows the best way to prevent child abuse is to keep children isolated and ensure all their communications are controlled.

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

I decided to clean up an old comic of mine! A thirty something year old Tintin reflects on his childhood with Chang.

[star-anise]

In a sick way I find it really funny how toxic estranged parents say "in the old days, people had to stick around and work their issues out!"

Things People Did Back in the Old Days to Escape "Working Things Out" with Their Parents, A Short List:

Murder them!

Marry literally anyone who'd get you away

Fisticuffs

Change your name and pretend to be an orphan

Move out and feud with them for several generations

Join a monastery

Move to the city and get a job in a factory

Buy passage on a boat to some other continent

Convert to a different religion

Join the Navy

ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING

It's incredible, the number of things people would do to get away from shitty parents. Then and now.

[the-knife-consumer]

Had a dream last night about a gravity falls game where you play as young Stanley having to sneak around and lie to stay out of trouble with Filbrick. It wasn't really a horror game but it had a lot of horror game-like mechanics and there was a general sense of discomfort the entire time.

The only quest I can remember is one where Stanley gets a bad report card while Stanford gets a good one. Filbrick is out doing business until tomorrow so you have until the morning to try and make it look like you got good grades. There's an option to use white out on Stanford's card while he sleeps and write your name instead.

You could also get future readings from mom, who would give hints on what will happen to you next so you can start setting up lies and stealing in advance instead of scrambling to cover yourself last minute. (If you could figure out what the readings were hinting at. They got progressively more vague as the game went on, going from "I hear" and "I see", to "I feel")

You didn't get to see what happened when Filbrick caught him, it just cut to a game over screen. You could be caught and sent to your room three times before this happens (which ends the quest you're on. Because you failed to lie well enough). There is no way to win. The game would just keep going with scenarios until you lost or gave up

There was a vending machine on the board walk that had warped reflections in the glass that corrected itself when you looked at it head-on

[creepy-crowleys]

04. the emperor : how much respect does your muse have for authority ? why is this ?

major arcana headcanons

I... have respect for my superiors, both in terms of workplace hierarchy and being better than me at things, haha! They've earned it!

((Crowley is afraid of her workplace superiors.

For the most part, she's happy to defer to people that are more experienced than her, or have more presence in a community. She generally isn't looking for confrontations or to disrupt the existing order - at least until someone proves themselves unworthy of that respect.

And then it becomes: How much harm can they do - to her or to people around her - if she chooses to ignore that authority?

The answer has sometimes been "quite a lot really."

So she vacillates when it comes crueler authority figures between simmering resentment and simpering fear.))

[theconcealedweapon]

If you're a teenage boy and you're trying to learn how to interact with girls the right way, one of the most important rules is that you can't treat your interactions with the women you meet in the same way that you treat your interactions with your mother.

If you were raised by authoritarian parents, it's very likely that you walked on eggshells to prevent setting them off. One wrong move and they became violent. You may expect that your interactions with your mother will model your interactions with other women.

But around other women, the roles are pretty much reversed. When you're around your authoritarian mother, you have to watch how you act around her in order to prevent setting her off and making her violent, while the worst she has to deal with is not getting her way. But when you interact with women who are your peers, they're the ones who are watching how they act in order to prevent setting you off and making you violent, and you're the one whose worst case scenario is failing to get your way.

When a woman is uncomfortable around you and feels like you're disrespecting her, she's not going to unleash her anger on you in the same way your mother does. She's going to be afraid of you. If a woman says that something you're doing is bothering her but she "doesn't sound serious", it's because she doesn't have the luxury of being able to safely sound serious in the same way your mother does. When your mother is serious, she can strike fear into you by just giving you a threatening look. But you could easily go your entire life without any other woman ever being able to strike fear into you the same way. It's important for you to learn how to take someone seriously without them being able to make you afraid of them.

[self-loving-vampire]

Problem #1 regarding child abuse is that a lot of people seem to struggle to imagine normal, respectable-looking parents and other authority figures ever doing it despite the statistics so instead they do the stranger danger panic and completely overlook some of the greatest threats.

Problem #2 is that even when people understand, even if in an abstract way, that parents can be abusive they just... don't seem to actually register that as something that can apply to real life. It's just hypothetical to them and doesn't actually guide their ideas of how to prevent child abuse.

Problem #3 is that even after overcoming the above biases a lot of people have a very narrow image of what abusive parenting is where they imagine like... people doing violent things basically out of sadism and without provocation. They don't seem to think it's "real" abuse if the victim did something that "justifies" punitive violence, like disobeying the parents.

In fact, most people think parents have a right to do a whole lot of awful things to their children beyond just hitting them, like violating their privacy, controlling their access to information, and deciding what/when/if they eat, among other things.

[vague-humanoid]

[star-anise]

I really wonder if trauma theorists who say things like "Humans are the only animal that will be in a fright state when physically safe" or "the rest of the animal kingdom doesn't get PTSD" have ever, like

Do you think they've actually ever met an animal?

[theconcealedweapon]

When you're autistic, it's impossible to miss how much society normalizes child abuse.

I could dedicate my entire life to studying how to interact with people and I'd still never master the social skills that young children are expected to have on command.

Say the wrong thing? That's disrespectful and you're punished. And you don't even have to actually say anything wrong. Pretty much anything you say can be considered "giving lip" if your parent wants some excuse to punish you. But if you say nothing, then you get punished for ignoring. You also have to calculate your response to their mind game quickly because taking too long to respond is considered ignoring. Also, if you're being wrongly accused of something, saying nothing is considered a confession. And even if you somehow manage to say exactly what your parent wants in exactly the correct tone, they'll still punish you for "sarcasm" or "not really meaning it".

[lostmf]

[self-loving-vampire]

Extremely dangerous how "grooming" in the context of child sexual abuse went from being a very specific pattern of isolation and trust-building with the aim of abusing someone to "telling children anything that contradicts their parents' ultra-conservative worldview is grooming" to "selling rainbow flags in a store is grooming" to "literally anyone I don't like is a groomer".

These days the word seems to most often be used by people who don't care about what it actually means and just want an easy "this person is irredeemably evil, kill them now" button.