As proof of that perfect adjustment, according to F. Hacker, this is the pattern of thought in French families—I mean in the families of American persecutors:
all criminal parents consider the family model of their existence to be a natural and eternal institution that represents and expresses moral and traditional values. Blindly and uncritically they transmit the laws in force. Inside themselves
, these parents
have completely and blindly adhered to the schemas and frameworks of society.
Doctor Hacker thinks that in a great number of cases, this rigidity is due to the fact that the persecutor parents have themselvesendured a battered childhood, a very severe and very brutal education. As confirmation of this, it is asserted that mistreated children who don’t die
remain attached to their parents despite the pain and disfigurement they’ve endured.
They even admit
having deserved the punishment; they accept the abuse with fatality, as evidence of affection and interest.
Even better: these battered children
show signs of a bad conscience, they’re persuaded that they are guilty of disobedience and thoughts of rebellion, even though they don’t remember them.
And Doctor Hacker concludes:
the feeling of guilt instilled in the child’s mind by his father and mother works to rehabilitate and legitimize his parents.
I don’t think I need to add much more. The situation of the battered child, the way parental power is exercised, the oedipal deal of survival it imposes in an authoritarian way, the child’s libidinal and emotional investments in the figures of the familial bell jar, are strictly the same, whether it’s a matter of the worthy and happy child and his nice worthy parents (
Hachette Encyclopedia),
or the persecuted child, subject to the violence of his “too normal” parents. The child-reward is exploited limitlessly, “discipline” is instilled in him, he is made the privatized object of dad-mom’s pleasure—he is purely and simply robbed of his life. If he seems to still be alive or has to be buried, the difference is a completely formal one: inside it’s the same.
If I called parental abuse “oedipal,” it’s primarily because of the age of the victims—less than four. These children are undergoing oedipalization, but in a context in which the castrator deal has no compensation for them. Authoritarian, cold parents, showing very little affection; puritanism and discipline; the child is cut off and receives nothing, and over time begins to appreciate the abuse itselfas a kind of emotional and sexual bonus: ultimate adjustment of his desire to the parental sources. Without this adjustment, these deprivations are going to disrupt his behavior: physical disorders, a lack of discipline, capricious appetites, screaming, tears, insomnia, masturbation, all these things provoked by the severity of the parents, who’ll increase it more. Those who “wanted” the child find out that he’s not what they were told he’d be but is instead a little insolendy alive being, abominably organic, infernally corporeal, irregular, selfish, amoral. Such “nature” isn’t what they had been taught; so their child is abnormal, monstrous, he has to be straightened out as soon as possible.
They’re like every parent who exists: they insert the child into a market they’re not conscious of (food and well-being for submission of the body and suppression of sex); only, their rigorous convictions keep them from fulfilling their part of the bargain, since in their eyes the normality of the child is not something that you buy for him over time, but an immediate “natural” element that comes before any possible deal. When you have several kids, the child that you torment, explains Doctor Hacker, is the one you
prefer to his brothers and sisters
; he embodies the values in which you believe more than everything, he is the superego image that you develop of yourself and others: he has to be irreproachable since he represents you.
Such a passionate investment prevents you from having the mixture of patience and indifference toward him that you have toward other children in the family. You forget that it takes six or eight years before a child knows how to refrain from all exterior signs of a corporeal, or “deviant,” existence; and you go too far in the job of bringing back the youngest to healthy ideas about the human-being, or, should I say, “human-seeming.”
This kind of parental violence is a maximum tensing of the diffuse violence inherent in “normal” adult-child relations. Parents who don’t persecute are content with moderate violence, non-excessive mistreatment, invisible psychic abuses and sexual torment that seem affectionate on the surface. This is how they transform the newborn into a boy or girl, a copy that conforms to the child slave that is wanted. Brutal parents, on the other hand, prove to be incapable of putting up with the little one’s “deviance,” and the child must resemble the correct model right away: every evening, he is coldly retouched with blows of the hammer. If familial education strives to eliminate the child, to associate the new human being’s humanity with a capacity for stifling himself, for obeying, for putting up with things, for
conforming blindly and without criticism to the rules in force, for seeing the familial form of his existence as a natural, eternal institution,
then it is quite obvious that education that normalizes the child and that which destroys it are one and the same thing. The implicit axiom of parental power is that there is only one kind of child: a dead child.
If he can stick to the crushing psycho-sexual role assigned to him by the family without a problem, everything will be alright. But if he rebels, if his eyes open, if he
criticizes the rules in force,
violence is immediately permitted: both gentle parents and brutal parents are entirely in agreement about that, and so are educators, psychiatrists, nice moms, and all the decent people who are upset by the sight of a slap but who, in their own way, also persecute children for the slightest irregularity. You’re afraid that the child will slip, you’re afraid that he’ll imitate you wrongly, you’re terrorized by the thought that, because of him, or because of you, tomorrow will be different from today—and everything that you consider “natural” and “eternal” will be nothing more than dust in your hands.
For the immense majority of adults, the order that they transmit and that does harm is also the one that keeps them going; and they fear its destruction much more than they suffer from its rule. This is why we keep from interfering when we hear the neighbors straightening out their brats. They know what they’re doing, they’re working for the common good.
There is a surprising contrast, by the way, between those people who refuse to heed the wails of a kid who is being persecuted by his father and those passersby who “understand immediately” the first call of children who are being bothered by an adult. What a quick response to justice on the one hand, and what hesitation on the other!
No mystery, however: the unknown person on the street is a thief, while the persecutor at home is an owner. It’s up to him to manage his property as he sees fit. He can count on others to keep watch over his progeny when its outdoors and to remain noninquisitive when he gets it back safe and sound and gives it a pounding. “And then, parents can’t be cruel, only wicked men are, the ones who give others’ children the eye. Look at who they are talking about in the papers, they’ve been talking about it for months: a strangler, they’ve been showing the photo of the little girl on the news every night, she was so cute, what a monster, what are the police doing about it? But those thousands of children killed by their parents, I don’t believe it, that would have to be around twenty-five a day, that’s got to be made up: for one thing, you never read about it, and you don’t see the faces of the kids on TV, not twenty-five, not one. There’s your proof.”
Parental crimes are covered up by general consent of the adults protecting the family. It was only in 1971 that the French National Assembly passed a law that in theory opened a breach in the secrecy concerning parental power. On one hand, doctors are absolved from the obligation of professional confidentiality when theyobserve “abuse or deprivation inflicted upon children of less than 15 years.” (Hmm, you stop being a minor awfully fast when it comes to abuse. That would be O.K. if adolescents had the right to have sex at the same age as they have the right to be tortured in peace— or at least the right to leave.)
On the other hand—and within the framework of Article 63 of the penal code, which punishes those who do not come to the assistance of those in danger—“those who are witnesses of the said abuse and deprivation” are expressly required to report them.
One would hope that his would remedy the silence of doctors and the cowardice of neighbors. In practice, this law hasn’t had any effect. Doctors have the
right
, according to their code of practice, to report abuse, but they’re not obligated to do so and they continue to abstain. Sometimes, even, in the interest of the children: the parents would be afraid of being reported by the doctor and would no longer dare contact him to take care of the victim. As for those famous “neighbors,” they don’t do any more denouncing than they did before and prefer to risk going to prison—they’re mostly afraid that the reported parents will get even and come kick their ass. {
16
}
To put it briefly, the persecutors make terror reign and keep the situation well in hand. The kindness of the order is taken as a trap for the respect for order. The neighbors let brutal parents act out of fear of being beat up: let that happen to the kids, not to me. And the doctors let the abuse go on so that they’ll have a chance to intervene later. Two weird reasons? As soon as it’s a question of parental power, everything becomes weird.
The statistics I was citing, for example—or, rather, what’s missing from them. There are deaths, serious injuries, but where are the simple acts of violence? Those that lead to less bleeding or that don’t disfigure the victim? And what about their frequency? How long each time, how many times a day, how many days a year, how many years during childhood? All of that is a family secret, a secret about property, a secret about the private life, a secret of education, a secret about the rights of the adult, a secret of power. You don’t measure it unless it boils over. It’s only “with the greatest reticence” that facts like I have cited are divulged, bit by bit. The real mores of the silent majority are still almost empty of any exploration; it’s not even scientific to talk about them, impossible to draw from them a sociolog with equations; so let’s put up with them and kick the bucket since they’re not good material for theses. Silent majority? Well protected, rather; well covered up by an enormous conspiracy of silence.
A few conjectures. The family situation that corresponds to the statistics for “filicide” and the abuse that we’ve managed to record has certain characteristics. Husband 20 to 30, children of an early age. So this is a mediocre privatization of the nuclear family, closed though it may want to be. In a household of the young, the neighbors are less embarrassed about intervening than in one with settled adults; less embarrassed about reporting it, as well. We spy on couples with a baby, whereas we lose interest in flesh-for-coddling if it’s aging; they’re children without diapers and less grope-worthy. What is more, the little ones make a lot more noise than the others when you hit them, and for a lot longer; it’s noticed, it moves us more—and even if it’s just some teething, we get worried, lend an ear, interpret it, it gets under our skin. Finally, the very young child who has endured extreme abuse could have problems recovering by himself, you’re afraid that he’ll end up inyour hands—croaking—you’ll need a doctor, or the hospital. There are so many reasons for revealing tortures, none of which exist in the years that follow early childhood.
By then, the parents have aged, we respect them. The children have grown, the neighbors are hardly preoccupied with it any longer: a baby was a bit like the common good, the older child is their business. He’s reached a state in which he exasperates parents less than the “deviant” life of the very small child appalled them. He doesn’t soil himself any more, he gets by, he has some discipline, he goes to school, he no longer has sex organs, he knows how to play the game. He’ll no longer stir up any abuse but the institutional kind—punishment for transgressing codes; laziness, lying, being impolite, damaging his clothing, the home, small thefts, prohibited sexuality, irregular kinds of leisure activities, etc. Thus parents have fewer opportunities for killing him. And besides, if they do keep beating as often and as hard, well, the child has become robust, he dies less easily. It’s an advantageous kind of strength: no need for a doctor after a session, you can fix him up at the house, no leaks. A few daubs of make-up on some black-and-blue marks, some burns to put ointment on, bandages to hide the rest, or shutting him up for a few days so that he won’t be seen too soon at school: he had a “fever.” He “fell,” he got into a “fight”; this is the age for cuts and bumps, even if they didn’t happen as we say. The familial privatization of the child and the abuse is now at a maximum. Heartfelt philanthropy remains at the door, or, rather, only dares open those of the poor, who are meant to be “butchers”—even though they don’t beat up any more than people in the middle class do.
Another hypothesis: little by little suicide takes over for parental murders. The deaths will be allocated to other statistics, a kind that will be even more difficult to establish and interpret: this is—parexcellence—the domain of the familial secret, of guilt and parents’ shame, as if those who died were denouncing more serious abuse than you can do with a poker. Or as if the parents were discovering, to their amazement and incredulity, that exercising even physically nonviolent power over someone, that suppressing, training, normalizing them, can also kill.
Suicide of those 10 to 14 is “only” the
11th cause
of death. It becomes the
3rd cause
from ages 15 to 19. For young adults age 10 to 24, it will be the
second cause,
accidents topping everything in all three cases (and I won’t have the bad taste to bring up the problem of the responsibility of or intervention by parents in those accidents, which are the first cause of the mortality of minors of all ages—hyper-family-centricized as France obviously is).