Every time we talk about the drama of “the little girl from Granby,” my body tenses, my muscles stiffen. Anyone who has worked in the field will tell you: his file was nothing special. There are thousands of them in Quebec, girls from Granby. Today, now, before your eyes. And you still refuse to see them, just as you refuse to see their families, for fear of recognizing yourself there. We can’t really think about these children because we are incapable of thinking about childhood without romanticizing it, purifying it, distorting it. Because we are incapable of thinking about our own childhood.
When I try to talk about it with politicized acquaintances, I always have the impression that youth protection is not seen as a real political issue. If there is a problem, it is the Direction de la protection de la jeunesse. The institution is the source of evil. My friends on the left reject the system out of hand, condemn it. I understand this reflex.
The State does not know how to do in the lace or in the relational. He arrives with his big clogs, targets those who don’t look like him, those who haven’t studied, those who are already struggling. He arrives with his stifling bureaucratic apparatus and shuffles people around like cards. The state has to make decisions, it cannot stand ambiguity, nuances. Its representatives also suffer from it, crushed by the responsibility of making choices, of deciding what is unbearable and what must be done in the face of the unbearable.
The youth protection system is an institution like any other: when it bases its response on a misdiagnosis of reality, it can create suffering instead of relieving it. The DPJ always does too much or not enough. By focusing on the institution, we lose sight of the phenomenon to which it is trying to respond. I am struck by the blindness in which one buries oneself when one does nothing but criticize the social response to child abuse. According to the prevailing rhetoric, it would almost suffice to eliminate the institution to eliminate the problem. The reality, however, is that the unbearable exists. And its threshold varies according to the particularities of each individual. I deeply believe that we have a collective responsibility in the face of the unbearable, and that we must learn to act collectively with more humility.
I believe that our inability to think about childhood is based on three main reasons. First, because our loyalties and invisible childhood terrors still bother us and we generally prefer to pretend that they don’t exist. We cannot think our beginning, just as we cannot think our end. Then, because childhood represents, basically, our greatest fear: falling into a state of almost total dependence, driven mainly by our emotions and our desire to live, without the ability to reason to distance ourselves from feelings, impulses and imagination. But, finally, it is also difficult to think of childhood, because “children”, socially, culturally, are women’s affairs. Women and children: one block. They have in common sentimentality, the domestic, tears, low things, weakness, the private and therefore hidden sphere.
Responding to child abuse requires recognizing that it is an eminently human problem, rooted in a vulnerability that we share in common. It also requires recognizing that human beings are unpredictable, and that we will always only do risk management. We like structural and systemic explanations on the left.
At the same time, however, in recent decades, it seems to me that we have abandoned the project of inventing a more human model of public services, putting our energy instead into criticizing the social control of the State, the punitive effects rules that it imposes, problematic standards that it renews. This posture, in constant tension, locks us into a binary logic which distinguishes, on the one hand, the individual, his space of freedom and his right to private life, and, on the other, the State which sometimes suffocates this individual, sometimes fails in the task of supporting him.
This binarity too often leads us to look away from concrete suffering, which generates social responsibility. The abused child not only does not have the means to understand himself as part of a larger phenomenon, he often does not even have the means to understand himself as a suffering individual. The issue of youth protection is accompanied by an imperative to act, right now: children, for whom time passes more slowly than for adults, cannot wait for the revolution. The challenge is to combine the necessary curative approach and prevention, in which the individualization of the problems of mistreatment will never be a solution.
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