Protecting children from parents

In both neglect and murder cases, there is an element that is common to both; children suffered because adults did not treat them as would be expected. But what is expected? The expectation could reasonably be seen as the obligation to provide children with the necessities for life. These necessities in the neglect cases are quite simply food, and in the latter, the simple requirement to allow them to keep living. But why would a parent be so remiss to providing such necessities?

How then can this abuse by the ones that are supposed to be the source of sustenance and safety be explained? Basically, it appears quite evident that these children were not seen as persons in their own right, with no rights to food, safe surroundings and life itself. They were instead viewed as objects, despite the appearance of sentiments of love. The dynamic of domestic violence gives insight into why this is so.

Domestic violence is the dynamic where the symptoms are often mistaken for the problem itself. To analogise with the disease process, when a person has cancer, symptoms emerge that will indicate the underlying disease. No one doubts that weight loss, nausea, pain or dizziness are symptoms of the cancer, not the cancer itself. In the same way, when a person abuses another person, whether by physical force or verbal denigration, what this demonstrates is the symptoms of an underlying dynamic - the attempts by one person using tactics across a broad spectrum of behaviours to try and get the other person to do what they want, that is, the attempts to control the other person (PDF 351KB).

This very dynamic has deep ideological and value laden implications. Australian society has liberal values with assumptions that all persons are “equal”.

For example, in contract law parties are seen as making free choices to enter into contracts that are made on a supposed level playing field.

In personal relationships, couples are presumed to be in the relationship as equals. However, in the case of domestic violence, one party will not “see” the other person as equal in the relationship, thus the dominant person will use a variety of methods to impose their will and choices on the other. Despite the presumptions in contract law and personal relationships that there is a level playing field, the reality is that in many cases, it is not.

While it is without doubt that some women can be violent and abusive to males and other females, in personal relationships and due to the imbedded patriarchy of most cultures, it is more likely the victims of domestic violence tend to be women and perpetrators tend to be men.

This dynamic is dangerous because in the attempts to control and dominate the other person, the abuser ignores or refuses to see the other as equal to them and in doing so, will violate the victim’s rights to their own free choices. In effect, the other becomes a “thing” and things don’t have rights. The very act of coercion reveals the dynamic of inequality. This being so, the behaviours of the abuser will reveal both care and abuse, a factor that correlates with the observed cycle of domestic violence and child abuse. The abuser will both nurture and violate the other because victims are held in a relationship as possessions. Just as people take care of possessions, it is rational when one no longer cares for certain possessions, they will be disposed with.

Herein lies the danger. At some point, the “thing” will outlive its use and be dispose of because the “thing” was never seen as an equal. Hence, you see parents killing their children while having actually cared and showed “love and warmth” for them and you see parents neglecting the basic needs of children.

On a report of the Dalton story by Four Corners Liz Jackson stated that, “No one now denies that they cared for the children well”. Yet not long after that he killed both children. This is illustrative of a parent both caring for and disposing of what in his mind was “his property”, not persons.

This is reminiscent of times prior to the early 20th century where wives and children were seen in law as the property of the man. Although women in Western societies have been able to gradually remove themselves from this “ownership” by men and to assert their legal identity. However, legislative amendments in Family Law has prioritised “meaningful contact” and “rights” to have both parents involved in the children’s lives in a court where domestic violence and child abuse are core issues as to why the case is being litigated. Allegations of parental abuse “rarely results in the denial of parental contact”.

This in effect may relegate children back to an abusive parent as “property” by court orders, at great personal costs to vulnerable children who need protection, not “meaningful contact” with a dangerous parent.