#.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.

[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.

[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".

[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.

[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.

[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.))

[akanemnon]

I don't like this place. It's turning everyone edgy and sad.

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MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[lostmf]

[tododeku-or-bust]

In the same vein as the grounding question, just because I was confused by it, this is a much more direct question:

I recognize whooping runs the range of a swat or two on the leg to.... Well, some of us got beat fr😅. So imma give a preemptive Trigger Warning for Child Abuse if people decide to elaborate in the tags.

[furiousgoldfish]

my mother, right after giving birth: and now... you owe me one. you will spend the rest of your life paying it back. stop crying its annoying me.

[serial-unaliver]

I think one thing that's hard for people to grapple with is it's impossible to eliminate all abusive individuals from any given society. Of course certain systems encourage and make it easier to achieve, but there is no perfect world in which no one is abusive, so prevention of abuse shouldn't be punitive measures but rather creation of an environment in which abuse is hard to get away with--an environment more focused on community support than individualistic isolation of families. The fact that there are horrifying child torture cases that occurred in average suburban homes by neighbors who suspected nothing just because they haven't even talked to or acknowledged the people living right fucking next to them is crazy.

[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.

[sayruq]

“One of them put his boot on my mouth while stomping on my chest with his other boot,” Majd said. The military vehicle stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint located at the northern entrance to Azzoun. Majd was taken out of the vehicle, forced to stand still and a soldier repeatedly assaulted him with the stock of his rifle on the chest, head, and waist while directing insults at him. “I was begging him to stop hitting me but to no avail. He then wrapped his hands around my neck, pressed with all his strength, and said to me in Arabic, ‘I'll kill you by strangulation.’" Majd passed out and regained consciousness around 5 p.m. and found himself in a room, lying on the ground and surrounded by a soldier, a cat, and a military dog. “I felt really scared, mostly because the sounds made by the dog were terrifying. I started screaming out of fear because the cat scratched my face many times,” Majd told DCIP. “The soldier said in Arabic, 'I will let the dog eat you.' "Israeli forces continued torturing Majd until around 2 a.m, slamming his head against a wall several times, causing him to collapse and ask for water, but his request was rejected and they forced him to remain silent. Israeli forces transferred him to Emmanuel Police Station for interrogation at 3:30 a.m where his tie and blindfold were removed. The interrogator accused him of throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles and then allegedly subjected the boy to physical violence for two hours, forced him to sign an electronic screen with an electronic pen, and tied his hands and blindfolded again, according to documentation collected by DCIP.

Between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2023, DCIP documented 838 cases where Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military were systematically tortured, handcuffed, blindfolded, strip searched, and denied access to food and water during the interrogation period. In nearly all cases documented by DCIP, Israeli authorities interrogated Palestinian child detainees without the presence of a lawyer or family member, and children were overwhelmingly denied a consultation with a lawyer prior to interrogation. Israeli forces use coercive tactics, including the use of informants, resulting in children unintentionally making incriminating statements or even false confessions.