Thinking About "Abuse"

Part of the reaction to All God’s Children by Rene Denfeld, this month’s in4y.com Readers Club selection, has been much discussion about the homes that street youth were raised in -- specifically, whether or not the majority of street youth were raised in abusive homes. One of the problems with this entire debate is the assumption that the term “abusive home” has any useful meaning.

The word “abuse” means to treat in a harmful, injurious, or offensive way. It does not indicate any specific type, degree, or (perhaps most important to understand) intent. Yet often you run into belief systems that minimize the impact care giver’s actions can have on young people. If you can’t concretely demonstrate evidence of a bloodied, sexually molested body, and a drooling maniac of a parent, then the home wasn’t “abusive” and there must be something wrong with the kid.

I once found myself in the position of advocating for an adolescent girl with her CSD caseworker (CSD, or Children’s Services Division, was the old name for our state child welfare agency here in Oregon). The CSD worker was insisting on returning the youth to her home based on the fact that the worker had met the parents and didn’t believe the allegations of abuse. My position was that I did believe the allegations, but it really didn’t matter -- the girl would simply run if returned home, so what was the point? Anyway, it got down to us debating the abuse allegations when the worker made an incredible statement to me. She actually said; “Oh, I believe there may have been some abuse, but I don’t think it was a bad as she says it was.”

What can one even say to a statement like that? I mean, really, just how “bad” does it have to be before it counts?

In fact, does it even have to be “bad” at all? One of the big mysteries in working with street youth (and, incidentally, one of the issues raised in Ms. Denfeld’s book) concerns young people on the streets who don’t have obvious abuse in their background. Granted, some of this can be explained by hidden abuse, but not all of it. Why would a kid who hasn’t fled an “abusive” home end up on the streets?

Personally, I think the reason we have such trouble understanding is because we have made “abuse” into a black and white boogie man. Either it is horrible things done to a child by evil people, or the kid had a “good” home. But things aren’t always black and white -- sometimes there’s a lot of gray. The fact is that young people develop to a large degree in response to their environment, and there are an awful lot of “little” things that may not qualify as “abuse” in our consciousness, but, particularly over time, may be received as harmful, injurious, or offensive.

Take, for example, just a few things I’ve heard over the past months. A mother drives her 11-year-old son in the car and allows him to ride without his seatbelt. A father pulls his 9-year-old daughter on an inner tube behind his truck in the snow. A mother allows her 5-year-old daughter to ride her bike unsupervised in the street with no helmet. A father takes his 6-member family to the beach in a 4-passenger car -- so two of the children (12 & 13 years of age) get to ride in the trunk.

A state services investigation of these 4 homes would likely not find them to be “abusive” even though the individual actions might be found to be illegal (riding without a seatbelt), inattentive (unsupervised bike riding), stupid (pulling an inner tube behind a truck), or ‘what were you thinking’ (putting the kids in the trunk). However, outside of these specific events, the homes would be considered “normal”. But if these events took place, how many other little “events” occur over the 18 years of the young person’s development within that family, and how does this culmination of events impact the child as they grow up?

Unfortunately, we sometimes don’t have to wait that long to see the impact, because 3 or the 5 children described above don’t get to grow up. The 11-year-old boy was killed when the mother wrecked the car. The 9-year-old died when the truck made a hard right and the inner tube slammed into a bench. The 5-year old died after she ran into a pickup that was traveling at 10 miles per hour -- she fell from her bike and hit her head on the pavement. Only the father of the children that lived was arrested. I’m not saying the other parents should be arrested; I’m just pointing out that “abuse” may not always be the easy black and white issue we'd like to think it is.