Can we just… normalize teens loving their parents? Like obviously you’re not obligated to if your parents are shitty, but damn, I love my mom. She’s there for me all the time and sure we have rough patches but honestly she’s the greatest. Like. We need teens to know that they don’t have to hate their parents just cause.
It must be nice to come from a nonabusive family. One that doesn’t traumatized every emotional interaction to the point where you drive away any sign of love as a form of manipulation because that’s all that you were raised with. 🤷♀️
It is.
Reading Comprehension
but loving ur parents is already normalized and its the kids w/ abusive parents that actually have to deal with misunderstandings and ignorance from others regarding this topic.
Hey there, I’m talking about the trope where it’s seen as super uncool to like your parents that was literally pushed on teens through the media since the culture shift in the early 60s. The post has nothing to do with abusive parents. I was abused as a kid and honestly if the trope where teens have to hate their parents to be cool died, then kids with actual abusive parents would have an easier time recognizing abuse this has been a psa
“if the trope where teens have to hate their parents to be cool died, then kids with actual abusive parents would have an easier time recognizing abuse”
Teen with abusive parents: I hate my parents
Teen influenced by society: Me too mine are the worst
The takeaway for teen 1: This is normal and it’s supposed to be this way
The takeaway for teen 2: My friend’s parents are like mine
The takeaway for any adult listening: All kids who complain about their parents are just being rebellious
I am extremely glad to hear that Trump has signed an executive order to end the separation of families, but please do not think that the battle for justice ends here.
I mean, this is literally what Trump was referring to when he said it was ‘democrats’ law’ that was ‘making’ him separate families.
The law is the one says it’s illegal to incarcerate children for crimes their parents committed for any extended length of time. This is the law Trump wants changed.
The law exists because we realized this prolonged internment of innocent children was sometimes happening (in extremely unsafe conditions no less) and we understood that this was a horrible, inhumane, inexcusable thing to do to a child.
The conflict arose when this was paired with the Trump adminstration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, which drastically increased the number of people being prosecuted (far beyond our capacity to handle with reasonable speed and due process), and meant that refugees seeking asylum (much, much more likely to be families fleeing with small children) must go through sometimes months of appeals trying to see if asylum might be permitted.
The former USA stance was that we must not attempt to intern more people than we could handle humanely. The stance Trump’s administration is pushing for is that we must sacrifice humane treatment of these families to protect our own.
So for anyone who thinks the claims of child trafficking with kids separated from their families at the border are melodramatic and baseless, here’s some stuff you should look at.
For an example, let’s take a look at one of the places a number of these children were sent to: Bethany Christian Services, a global nonprofit organization based out of Michigan, who have federal contracts with the government for finding placement for refugee and immigrant children, which is why they were one of the first places these children were sent. Per their own website, they’re a faith-based organization that provides foster care, adoption, resettlement services and other assistance, and their only priority is the well-being of the children they care for.
Sounds good, right? Defenders of this organization have claimed that BCS is against the separation policy and have called for an end to it, but despite searching, I haven’t actually been able to find any such comments from any official spokesperson for the agency.
However, I did find this:
“Right now, we have 99 foster care beds at Bethany across the country, and we’re at capacity,” Dona Abbott, branch director of refugee services at Bethany Christian Services, said. “We’re now recruiting new homes and we’re approaching our government with the offer to provide more beds.”
Now, here’s where some eyebrows should start to be raised.
BCS is not simply a nonprofit charity organization that looks after children in need as best they can in accordance with existing laws. They also are extremely aggressive lobbyists who push for legislation in accordance with their personal religious views….views which most people would consider Christian fundamentalist.
As previously reported by PRA, this past summer Michigan passed a statewide religious exemption law that gives adoption agencies the right to claim a religious exemption from having to serve LGBTQ couples. The DeVos family donated $300,000 in 2013 alone to Bethany Christian Services, Michigan’s leading adoption agency and the main group that lobbied for the religious exemption bill.
So to make sure we’re still on the same page here, let’s be clear about that…..one of the first agencies the government relocated these children to due to existing federal contracts just so happens to be a primary beneficiary of a member of the Trump administration’s charitable givings….and also just so happens to be in the habit of using said funds in the lobbying of religious fundamentalist based laws that have successfully barred potential parents in at least one state from adopting children if they happen to be of a demographic that Bethany Christian Services (and the DeVos family) deem unfit to parent children.
But remember….these people are still clearly, definitely JUST in it to help kids in need.
Now keep going back further. Here’s a book that was written in 2013, called
When Jessie Hawkins’ adopted daughter told her she had another mom back in Ethiopia, Jessie didn’t, at first, know what to think. She’d wanted her adoption to be great story about a child who needed a home and got one, and a family led by God to adopt. Instead, she felt like she’d done something wrong.
Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.
So this book apparently is an investigative look into Evangelical missionary adoption and the links to illegal adoptions and literal human trafficking. Crimes committed by faith-based adoption and foster care agencies and parents who believe its their mission to ‘save’ children from third-world countries by taking them away from parents who they deem unable to properly care for them (and who are unlikely to raise them according to the Christian fundamentalist views these organizations and parents view it as their mission to spread, just like missionaries of past centuries).
I haven’t had a chance to read the book in full myself yet, so I can’t attest to everything in it, just various excerpts I’ve found online. Yes, it is biased – the author takes a clear stance against these groups and their views and actions, but she does not claim to be impartial, nor is she trying to be. The book is her research into proving why her beliefs these people have committed criminal acts are not unfounded. I mention this because this unapologetic bias is what the 20% of reviews on this book that gave it 1-star have focused on to discredit the author and her conclusions here, in the name of defending these various organizations. However, the 48% of reviews that gave it 5-stars frequently express how regardless of any conclusions made within the book, one thing that stood out for most of them is how exhaustively researched and detailed the book was.
And why did I come across this book specifically, and link it here?
Because Bethany Christian Services is one of the organizations the author investigated based on suspicions of child trafficking and illegal adoptions.
Please note….even if you personally do not draw the same conclusions as the author from her research into them, it should at the very least be deemed significant that this organization, one of those that the Trump administration has prioritized sending these children to due to previously established contracts, is
a) Ready and looking to recruit more homes and supply more beds for children the administration sends them, despite already being stretched to the capacity of their ability to care for the children they’re already responsible for.
b) Has an existing relationship with The DeVos family, many of whom (not just Betsy) are part of the administration’s inner circle, and this existing relationship includes lobbying for the advancement of legislation born of their religious fundamentalist views and the prioritization of child care that’s in accordance to what they think a good conservative upbringing should look like
c) has been under scrutiny due to rumors of child trafficking, illegal adoptions and crimes against children in the name of their personal religious convictions stretching back at least five years before these current events
And this is just ONE of the places where we KNOW some of these kids taken from their parents have ended up. It doesn’t even address the hundreds, potentially thousands of kids who’ve already mysteriously ‘slipped through the cracks’ with no official accounting of their whereabouts.
Also something to consider is what happens AFTER these ‘good Christian families’ open up their homes to these poor, disenfranchised refugee children who are just so desperately in need of their enlightened priorities when raising children to be good conservatives.
It shouldn’t shock anyone but people who don’t actually have the well-being of children in mind when they adopt, but rather are just playing into self-serving white savior bullshit and some religious fervor to replicate the missionary work they feel its a Christian mandate to spread……shockingly, many of these people end up ‘regretting’ these adoptions when the children traumatized by being ripped away from families who actually do love them and want them aren’t appropriately grateful. Who have attitude problems or behavioral issues or just aren’t receptive to the ideas and values these people try and drill into them.
That’s a link to a Reuters investigative article that delved into the practice of ‘rehoming’. Or when fucking pieces of shit who adopt children from other countries through legal or illegal means change their minds once the novelty of the living human being they vowed to guard and protect but really just view as a shiny new toy wears off…..literally just….give these kids away to whomever will take them.
Warning, the article can be triggering as hell not just because of what it describes, but how it describes it, frequently referencing these parents in much more generous language than what I just used and acting like there’s something worth empathizing with in their behavior. I think it’s worth the read if you can stomach it, however, because of the facts it does lay down about this downright EVIL practice.
An excerpt from the article:
Part 1: When a Liberian girl proves too much for her parents, they advertise her online and give her to a couple they’ve never met. Days later, she goes missing.
KIEL, Wisconsin – Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they’d adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days – by posting an ad on the Internet.
Also….three guesses what kind of people go looking online for ads about troubled kids people are looking to unload without any kind of paper trail.
Go ahead. Guess what kind of people those kids end up with.
So in conclusion…..fuck Bethany Christian Services, fuck the DeVos family, fuck the Trump administration, and fuck whomever defends any of this vile, despicable shit by harping on about how people are just being melodramatic and exaggerating and that nobody’s actually trafficking immigrant children here.
Our government is responsible for child trafficking.
Fuck. Trump. Fuck your congress. Your flag. Your government. Everything about it.
When news anchors can’t deliver news because it’s too horrible, we have a problem. News anchors see Some Shit, but this is too fucking much.
I have not seen this many reporters choke up, tear up, or outright break down on air since the first days after the September 11th attacks. Dear God, please let this be the turning point. Internment camps for children…where else is there lower than this?
The 2011 Korean film “Silenced” is based on actual events that took place at Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, where deaf children were the victims of repeated physical and sexual assaults by faculty members over a period of five years in the early 2000s.
A newly appointed teacher at the school alerted human rights groups in 2005, and was subsequently fired from his job. This teacher was the first to come forward about the abuse he’d witnessed, as the school specifically sought out poorer teachers who would be completely dependent on the school for their financial security and therefore less likely to turn against the administration.
Nine children eventually came forward, but more victims were believed to have concealed additional crimes in fear of repercussions or because of trauma. Children who were orphans or who had disabled parents were targeted specifically, and children who tried to come forward were sent back to school and disciplined by the faculty.
During the trial, the perpetrators received support from the local community, especially from the police and churches in the community. Of the six perpetrators, four received prison sentences, while the other two were freed immediately because the statute of limitations for their crimes had expired. Among those jailed, two were released after less than a year in jail. Four of the six teachers were reinstated in the school.
The film sparked public outrage after its 2011 release, which eventually resulted in a reopening of investigations into the incidents. The school was shut down, and several of the teachers pleaded guilty to sexual molestation charges, including the former principal, who was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The demand for legislative reform eventually reached its way to the National Assembly of South Korea, where a bill (named after the film) was unanimously passed in October 2011 to abolish the statute of limitations for all sex crimes against minors and the disabled.
The film’s ending scene is a protest that occurred following the suicide of a thirteen-year-old victim after the trial in 2005. As the crowd of human rights advocates and deaf people face brutality from the riot police, the fired teacher who initially came forward (who, along with a human rights activist, helped the victims through the trial process) repeats the name of the victim who’d committed suicide, saying “he cannot hear or speak.”
aspects of emotionally abusive parent/child relationships that i still can’t believe they included in tangled:
gothel appearing genuinely sweet and caring at times, enough to possibly even confuse the audience
the mumbling: just having that tiny insignificant little thing be something that gothel consistently, for no discernible reason, gets pissed about
having a special “i love you” exchange: seriously like idk if this is common but i had the same sort of thing with my abusive dad and the first time they said the whole “i love you more” “i love you most” thing i was like holy SHIT
when gothel says “oh great, now i’m the bad guy”: i cannot stress enough that 100% of the time any parent who complains about being the bad guy is abusive
and then later when she’s like “you want me to be the bad guy? fine” as if rapunzel’s making her do all this by not wanting to be locked up forever
when rapunzel tells pascal “shh, don’t let her see you”: why wouldn’t gothel want rapunzel to have a pet?? they never explain that, but they don’t need to, because of course she won’t allow rapunzel to have this harmless thing that makes her happy
rapunzel having an entire sequence where she struggles with finally feeling free and happy and also thinking that makes her a terrible person because her mother wouldn’t like it
On Friday, Hawaiian lawmakers moved to Make America Gay Again and passed a bill which would make theirs the 12th state to ban gay conversion “therapy” on minors. Hawaii News Now reports that Governor David Ige is expected to sign the ban into law. Maryland lawmakers also passed a ban earlier this month and are waiting for Governor Larry Hogan to sign it.
The move reflects a sweep of state initiatives to ban the practice based on a growing consensus amongst the medical and mental health community that conversion is psychologically torturous and fraudulent. The bill cites the American Psychological Association’s finding that “change efforts” can cause “depression, suicidality, loss of sexual feeling, anxiety, shame, negative self-image, and other negative feelings and behaviors.” In January, a report from the UCLA School of Law estimated that 698,000 American adults have been subjected to gay conversion therapy, about half of whom were minors at the time.
Unfortunately, the text of the bill applies only to licensed medical and counseling professionals, not religious or spiritual advisors; California is now considering classifying conversion therapy as a fraudulent business practice, which could help.
For updates, follow the LGBTQ youth suicide prevention initiative the Trevor Project, which is tracking dozens of campaigns to ban conversion therapy nationwide.
wupacing 