Childism and the Grimms' Fairy

Tales

or How We Have Happily Rationalized Child Abuse

through Storytelling

A week ago I participated in a Huffington Post Internet

panel discussion about fairy tales with three people, who

began waxing poetic about the wonders of the fairy tale and

how it benefited children à la Bettelheim. I, too, was a

little guilty of this, not of waxing poetic about

Bettelheim, but about the utopian qualities of the fairy

tale. And then, at one point, I blurted out something like:

"We've been talking too much about the virtues of fairy

tales, while they're really terrible! They're sexist and

racist! They stem from patriarchal societies, and depict

white men as saviors and women as comatose and barbie-doll

princesses." Everyone laughed, and then we became serious

shifting the topic to discuss some of the negative qualities

of fairy tales, but we did not go far enough in our

ideological critique. We did not discuss the childist

aspects of fairy tales and how the tales reveal prejudices

against children and young people, and how they might

partially socialize children to accept the abuse they

suffer, even today, without realizing it.

So now I want to make up for a lapse in the Huffington

discussion, and I want to focus first on the subtle and not

so subtle childist aspect of the Grimms' fairy tales and

then relate the abuses that they reflect to Elizabeth Young-

Bruehl's significant work, Childism, which is one of the most

important studies of child abuse that has appeared in recent

years and has not received the public attention that it

serves. Of course, the Grimms' tales have never had to worry

about neglect of attention. It is almost as if they are

embedded within us despite their so-called Germanic

origins.Yet, there are childist aspects of the tales that we

have ignored, and I would like to begin by exploring how

numerous tales in their famous collection are geared to

rationalize the manner in which adults use and exploit

children and encourage children to devote themselves to

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parents and sovereigns without questioning how they are

treated. There are links between authors, authority, and

authoritarianism. Let me begin with two tales that may lay

the groundwork of our analysis of the childist aspects of

the Grimms' tales.

The Stubborn Child (1812)

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and wascovered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the ground with fresh earth, but that didn't help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child'smother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

The Stubborn Child (2008)

Anna Maria Shua

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In the section of their work dedicated to children's legends, the Brothers Grimm refer to a popular German story that in its time was considered an appropriate cautionary tale for children. A stubborn boy was punished by God with illness and death, but after all that, he still didn't mend his ways. His pale little arm, with its hand like an open flower, would poke out of the grave time and time again. Only when his mother gave him a good swat with a hazelnut stick, did his little arm slip below the earth again, proof that the child had found peace.

Those of us who have passed by that cemetery know, however, that it still creeps out whenever he thinks no one's looking. Now it's the strong and hairy arm of an adultman, with fingers cracked and nails encrusted with dirt fromstruggling to force its way up and down. Sometimes the hand makes obscene gestures, surprisingly modern ones, which philologists assume are meant for the Brothers Grimm.1

Shua is a contemporary Argentinean writer, who

brilliantly exposes the childist and sexist features of the

Grimms' tales, and I might add, she also speaks to the

resilience of the young still within the hearts of older

people as we seek to defy the cultural system that has

whipped us into characters with habituses that can be

manipulated in arbitrary ways. Indeed, a critique of this

tale requires us to question the arbitrary power of a make-

believe god who actively strikes down an independent child

and uses the child's mother to carry out his dirty work. And

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it is dirty work that the mother performs in the name of a

fictitious god. But in reality she must clean up and cover

up the crimes adults commit against children.

Most people have never read "The Stubborn Child" or are

aware that it is a Grimms' tale, and this is because we do

not want to read tales, especially a Grimm's tale, which

exposes the brutality of adults so openly. We prefer to

sugar-coat our selection of the Grimms' tales and seek out

those that end with happy endings. Yet, even those tales are

fundamentally childist, that is, they tend to undermine the

autonomy of children and young people, and overlook their

maltreatment because the young always triumph in the end or

find some kind of happiness and are in harmony with the

world. But happiness is also related to succumbing to the

approval of adult standards of success. Therefore, it is

important that we revisit the tales with a focus on the

initial abuse and remember how this abuse will be played

down and forgotten by the happy ends of the tales. Let me

1 Ana María Shua, Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction, trans. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, illustr. Luci Mistratov (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2008): 164.

5

give you some examples and also remind you that well over

30% of the 210 Grimms' tales involve some kind of child

abuse and/or abandonment.

1) In "A Tale about the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn

What Fear Was" a younger son is called a dumbell and

humiliated and then given to a sexton who intends to smooth

over his rough edges. The boy goes off to learn about the

creeps.

2) In "Brother and Sister" two children are beaten

every day and get nothing but leftovers for food. They go

off into the wide world. Eventually they find some sort of

happiness.

3) In "Rapunzel" parents give their twelve-year old to

a sorceress, who incarcerates the girl. After the sorceress

discovers that Rapunzel has made love to a man, she banishes

the girl to a desolate place where she is later re-united

with her blinded lover.

4) In "Cinderella" a young girl is treated like a slave

by her stepmother and stepsisters. She gets a prince, and

her stepsisters get their eyes pecked out.

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5) In "Mother Holle" a stepmother treats her beautiful

good stepdaughter cruelly. However, because she works like a

slave for Mother Holle and is industrious, she is rewarded

by the strange mother goddess, while the ugly bad daughter

is later punished by Mother Holle because she is lazy.

6) In "Little Red Cap" a young girl is eaten by a wolf

because she does not listen to her mother

7) In "Mother Trudy" a girl who is stubborn, curious,

and disobedient goes to visit the mysterious Mother Trudy

who changes her into a block of wood and throws her into a

fire.

8) In "The Juniper Tree" a young boy is killed by his

stepmother, who then chops up his body and serves the boy in

a stew to his father. He later returns as a bird to seek

revenge on the stepmother.

9) In "Snow White" a stepmother, originally a

biological mother, attempts to have her seven-year-old step-

daughter murdered because the queen is jealous of her

beauty. The girl flees to live with seven dwarfs and becomes

their housewife and later the castle wife of a prince.

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10) In "Sweetheart Roland" a stepmother, who is really

a witch, tries to chop off the head of her stepdaughter.

Instead she mistakenly chops off her own daughter's head,

while her stepdaughter flees with her sweetheart Roland.

11) In "All Fur" a king seeks to marry his own daughter

after his wife dies and to commit the sin of incest. The

Princess flees disguised in a coat all made of fur. She

basically forgives her father.

12) In "The Water Nixie" a nixie forces two children

who fall down a well to work for her. Eventually, they flee.

13) In "The Raven" there is a queen who has a daughter,

and because this child was naughty and wouldn't keep quiet,

the mother wishes her daughter would become a raven and fly

away so that she could have her peace and quiet. Indeed, the

daughter is transformed into a raven and flies into a forest

and eventually marries a prince.

14) In "Iron Hans" a king wants to execute his son

because he has disobeyed his orders. So, the son runs away

with Iron Hans and later is reconciled with his father.

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15) In "The Ungrateful Son," a son is punished for not

sharing a meal with his father. A toad leaps on his face,

sticks to it forever, and the son must wander the world

feeding the toad.

16) In "The Old beggar Woman," a young rascal invites

an old beggar woman into his house to warm herself, but he

doesn't do anything to help her when her rags catch fire and

she burns to death.

17) In "The Stolen Pennies," a child keeps returning to

a room as a ghost because he had stolen two pennies that he

was to give a poor man, and after the boy's early death, he

is not able to rest because of the theft he committed.

18) In "Eve's Unequal Children" Eve sanctions God's

unequal treatment of her ugly and misshapen children who are

assigned to lower-class roles.

19) In "The Poor Boy in the Grave" a poor shepherd boy

who becomes an orphan is placed in the house of a rich man

who beats him mercilessly and drives the boy to suicide.

20) In "The Maiden without Hands" a miller cuts off the

hands of his daughter to save himself from the devil, and

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she flees her home after this mutilation. But she does wed a

prince in the end.

Despite happy endings -- and not all of these tales end

happily -- and moral injunctions in the tales, none of them

question the right of adults to discipline children severely

according to principles that justify their arbitrary power

over the young. Often parents and adults act in the name of

a Christian god to justify their actions. Often the children

pray to god for help. Perhaps the two most insidious tales

that rationalize child abuse and abandonment are "Hansel and

Gretel" and "Faithful Johannes," and I say insidious because

they appear to be celebrating such values as faithfulness,

true devotion, and generosity, while perpetuating the

sacrifice of children to a patriarchal system of arbitrary

beliefs and values. "Hansel and Gretel," the more popular of

the two, assumes a sexist perspective by emphasizing that it

is the mother/stepmother, who wants to abandon the children

in the forest, not the father; that it is a witch who wants

to devour them, and that the children should return to their

father with a treasure and not question or reject him when

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he has played a negative role in their lives by abandoning

them. In "Faithful Johannes" the plot of the story and

situation of the helpless children is somewhat different and

more like the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which is

also in the Koran. The question raised by these stories is:

Should we kill our children to demonstrate our devotion to a

god? And the answer in the Bible, the Koran, and stories

like "Faithful Johannes" is quite simply, yes., and Alice

Miller, the perspicacious psychiatrist and defender of

children, explains why in her book, The Body Never Lies:

The tradition of sacrificing children is deeply oriented in most cultures and religions. For this reason it is also tolerated, and indeed commended, in our western civilization. Naturally, we no longer sacrifice our sons anddaughters on the altar of God, as in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. But at birth and throughout their later upbringing, we instill in them the necessity to love, honor,and respect us, to do their best for us, to satisfy our ambitions – in short to give us everything our parents denied us. We call this decency and morality. Children rarely have any choice in the matter. All their lives, they will force themselves to offer parents something that they neither possess nor have any knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine, unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify theneeds of the recipient. 2

2 Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting, Trans. Andrew Jenkins (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.

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********************************

It is now time to turn to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and

the theses in her book,

Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children.3

Every single thinking person in the United States, and

not only in the United States, must take it upon

herself/himself to read Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent

book, Childism. It is especially a must for those of us who

work with and live with children. Young-Bruehl's major

thesis is clear and simple: "People as individuals and in

societies mistreat children in order to fulfill certain

needs through them, to project internal conflicts and self-

hatreds outward, or to assert themselves when they feel

their authority has been questioned. But regardless of their

individual motivations, they all rely upon a societal

3 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

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prejudice against children to justify themselves and

legitimate their behavior." (1)

Given this widespread prejudice almost every adult in

America tends to act against children while thinking that he

or she is actually doing what may be best for the child. In

other words, we all live in a contradictory relationship

with children. We dictate what they should learn and how

they behave without listening to their needs and wants and

without paying attention to their developmental capacities.

We are all to a greater or lesser degree guilty of childism,

and Young-Bruehl argues for the necessity of using terms

such as childism and childist so that we can more

consciously overcome our common prejudice.

Some people might ask skeptically whether we need

another ism. After all we have racism, sexism, ageism, Anti-

Semitism not to mention all sorts of other isms such as

communism, socialism, fascism, and so on. Can't we just

continue fighting for children's rights and legislation to

protect them without fostering another ism. But Young-Bruehl

argues that to confront a prejudice that has been repressed

13

or not fully articulated, we must name it, identify the

motivations and causes, and articulate ways to overcome the

prejudice. As she says, " The word childism could. . . guide

us to an understanding of various behaviors and acts against

children and childhood. . . .Childism could help identify as

related issues child imprisonment, child exploitation and

abuse, substandard schooling, high infant mortality rates,

fetal alcohol syndrome, the reckless prescription of

antipsychotic drugs to children, child pornography, and all

other behaviors or policies that are not in the best

interests of children. The behavior of adults who are

childist -- most of whom are parents -- harms directly or

indirectly the huge human population under the age of

eighteen, which is now close to a third of the population

worldwide, and in some places more than half." (7)

Understanding how we are all complicit in childism is

crucial for us to adjust our behavior and to contend with a

prejudice that we all have and that we don't fully

recognize. It is to Young-Bruehl's credit that she opens up

a discussion of a prejudice that we do not acknowledge

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enough. But before I continue to discuss some of Young-

Bruehl's notions of childism, her historical and critical

analysis of adult motivation and rationalization, and her

proposals for confronting the prejudice against children, I

want first to present some statistics and facts about

childism that are illuminating or need more illumination:

1) America incarcerates more of its children than any

country in the world. Half a million American children are

currently in juvenile detention centers where many of them

are victims of abuse and neglect.

2) The United States was the country that pioneered

strategies to prevent child abuse and now spends more money

fighting it than do all other industrialized countries and

has the highest rate of child abuse in the world. More

children are reported for child abuse and neglect in the

United States than in all the other industrialized countries

combined.

3) America lags behind the rest of the international

community in its care for children. U.S. Laws do not meet

children's developmental needs or defend their rights, and

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the United States has yet to support the 1959 Declaration of

the Rights of the Child or ratify the U.N. Convention on the

Rights of the Child.

4) The number of children and families experiencing

homelessness in the United States is alarming.  The Urban

Institute estimates that 1.35 million children will

experience homelessness over the course of a year (Urban

Institute, 2000); and the number of children and youth in

homeless situations (PreK-12) identified by State

Departments of Education increased from approximately

841,700 in 1997 to 930,200 in 2000 (U.S. Department of

Education, 2000).

According to the Wilder Research Foundation, in 2009,

the study counted 9,654 homeless adults, youth, and children

and estimates the overall number of homeless people in

Minnesota to be at least 13,100 on any given night. the

number of homeless children with their parents, now about

one-third of the homeless population, increased from 2,726

to 3,251 since the last study. Nearly half (47%) are age 5

and under, the average age is 6 and one-half.

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5) The Child Defense Fund's new report The State of America's

Children 2011 finds children have fallen further behind in

many of the leading indicators over the past year as the

country slowly climbs out of the recession. This is a

comprehensive compilation and analysis of the most recent

and reliable national and state-by-state data on population,

poverty, family structure, family income, health, nutrition,

early childhood development, education, child welfare,

juvenile justice, and gun violence. The report provides key

child data showing alarming numbers of children at risk:

children are the poorest age group with 15.5 million

children—one in every five children in America—living in

poverty, and more than 60 percent of fourth, eighth and 12th

grade public school students are reading or doing math below

grade level.

I am mentioning these sad statistics and facts to set

Young-Bruehl's book and my remarks in a socio-cultural

context of an insidious civilizing process in America. I use

the word insidious because, despite the fruits of this

civilizing process for privileged groups in America, it is

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seductive and harmful at the same time. In fact, though

appealing, it is like a viral disease that works its way

into our habitus, into our customs and behavior that become

second-nature to us, so that we act against the very little

and defenseless people whom we love most. Childism, in this

regard, is more than just a prejudice but also a disease,

and I believe that Young-Bruehl's book is a diagnosis of the

disease and a proposal for a cure.

Let me briefly summarize the contents of her book

before I suggest ways in which we might incorporate her

ideas into our own daily praxis of mediating tales with

children, especially the Grimms tales, that is, telling the

tales and fostering interest in the tales in a socially

responsible manner. Let me also briefly mention some facts

about Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who unfortunately died in

December of 2011. She had studied at the New School with the

great German-Jewish philosopher Hanna Arendt, and after her

graduation, while teaching philosophy at Wesleyan College,

she wrote a biography of Arendt as well as one of Anna

Freud. During the 1980s she enrolled at the New Haven Child

18

Study Center and eventually became a psychotherapist

receiving a degree in psychotherapy from the Philadelphia

Association for Psychoanalysis in 1999 and starting a

practice as a psychotherapist in Philadelphia and later New

York. Her major book during her work on psychotherapy was

The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996). She was also the author of

books and essays on feminism and psychotherapy. In 2007 she

moved to Toronto, where she continued her work as a

psychotherapist and was engaged in the struggle for

children's rights until her death in 2011.

Young-Bruehl's book is divided into seven chapters: 1)

Anatomy of a Prejudice; 2) Three forms of Childism: Anna's

Story; 3) Child Abuse and Neglect: A Study in Confusion; 4)

The Politicization of child Abuse; 5) Mass Hysteria and

Child Sexual Abuse; 6) Forms of Childism in Families; 7)

Education and the End of Childism.

What is new and original in her study is her approach: she

combines a psychoanalytical perspective with a socio-

political and historical analysis of our present insidious

"civilizing" of children. I shall not review all the

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chapters, only those that are applicable to storytelling and

to the Grimms' tales and to the social-cultural-political

context in which we use tales for children, including the

cinema, television, and internet.

In chapter one she argues that children are a target

group of prejudice and that in order to understand how the

prejudice works, we must explore the various motivations of

the victimizers, something that is rarely done. The

foundation for prejudice against children can be traced back

to Greek civilization that laid the basis for the prejudice

in the Judeo-Christian tradition. To quote Young-Bruehl:

"Aristotle's assumptions about children -- that they are

possessions and lack reasoning ability -- are childist.

Nonetheless, they fit well with the common assumptions of

the Greeks, and they were easily built into the European

tradition after Aristotle, where they continued to

intertwine with sexism and justifications of slavery (which

eventually became racist). The idea that children are by

nature meant to be owned by their male parent and that they

lack reason has justified treating them like slaves and like

20

immature, unformed persons without the active qualities, the

developmental thrust, the proto reasoning and choosing, and

the individuality that contemporary developmentalists now

recognize in them." (25-26).

Prejudice in general is a belief system, not a

knowledge system about a particular group, and as a belief

system, stereotypes of the targeted groups are formed based

on some obvious distinguishing appearances, but more on

activities and functions attributed to the group by way of

fantasies. Young-Bruehl maintains that there are three

elementary forms of fantasy, related to sexism, racism, and

anti-Semitism, and childism can involve all three forms of

fantasy, belief, and action, and they are: 1) fantasies

about being able to self-reproduce and to own the self-

reproduced offspring; 2) fantasies about being able to have

slaves -- usually sex slaves -- who are not incest objects,

and 3) fantasies about being able to eliminate something

felt to be invidiously or secretly depleting one from

within. (35). "At the more fundamental motivational or

fantasy level," Young-Bruehl argues, "childism can be

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defined as a belief system that constructs its target group,

"the child," as an immature being produced and owned by

adults who use it to serve their own needs and fantasies. It

is a belief system that reverses the biological and

psychological order of nature, in which adults are

responsible for meeting the irreducible needs of children

(until the adults grow old and, naturally, reciprocally need

support from children). Adults have needs of various kinds

-- and fantasies about those needs -- that childist adults

imagine children could and, further, should serve. The belief

that children as children could serve adults needs is a

denial that children develop; the belief that children

should serve adult needs is a denial of children's

developmental needs and rights." (36).

Young-Bruehl maintains: "Our characters are the sum of

our inherited or inborn characteristics interwoven with

psychic habit we develop from childhood on into adulthood.

Our habits include habits of working over in ourselves

traumas we have undergone, habits of assimilating to what we

have been taught, and habits of projecting. Our characters

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encompass both our biological nature (sometimes called

temperament) and our 'second nature,' acquired in and from

our familial, social, and political culture."

These comments should be related to Pierre Bourdieu's

notion of the habitus.

Using Freud's classification of character types -- the

hysterical, the obsessional, and the narcissistic -- Young-

Bruehl maintains that we all have the tendencies of these

character types that we endeavor to balance as we engage and

interact with the world. Since it is impossible to retain

peace and harmony, we are constantly seeking to balance

certain urges and fantasies as we mature and form our

characters. At times, there are breakdowns and we cannot

contain a particular tendency or any tendency and we become

neurotic. Young Bruehl writes: "a neurosis could be

described as a breakdown or a running off the road (to a

greater or lesser degree) during a characterological journey

toward maturity. Characteristic distortions result, and I

would add that characteristic prejudices result, as a person

struggles to regain harmony. A prejudice is a neurosis or

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developmental problem played out projectively in the world,

among people. . . . One of the key ways people have of

keeping themselves on an even keel is projecting their

conflicts onto others; they throw their baggage overboard in

a storm. The result is a prejudice rather than a neurosis."

(48-49)

Young-Bruehl moves from a discussion of individual

character types to discuss how entire families and societies

are affected by people with these characteristics. As she

remarks (53): "there are families and societies where

hysterica , obsessional, and narcissistic people predominate

or control the main social, economic, and political

institutions, organizing and operating the institutions

according to their characterological needs and prejudices.

So there are, then, societies organized around hysterical

dramas, scenes full of conflict, and moral panics or mass

hysterias; societies organized around obsessional rituals,

control mechanisms, and paranoid ideas; and societies

organized around grandiosity, identity-assertion propaganda,

and efforts to dictate the future. Sometimes societal

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character is lasting, staying relatively constant over

generations, but sometimes -- particularly under

contemporary conditions in which the media have such

influence - societal characters shift and change in less

than a generation." For instance she cites that what is

known as a generation gap is a time of rapid social

character shift, often spurred by a group revolt of the

young against the prevailing characterological constraints

of their elders."

Chapter Four, "The Politicization of Child Abuse,"

begins this way: "By the end of the 1970s , with the defeat

of the progressive Comprehensive Child Development Act and

the field of Child Abuse and Neglect in disarray, the damage

being done to the nation's children was becoming evident to

many Americans. Money to fund Child Protective Services was

minimal. The child poverty rate was rising year by year, and

the nation was declining on international measures of child

well-being in almost every area. Daycare was scarce and

often of poor quality -- unless you could afford a nanny or

send your child to a private program. The nation's divorce

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rate was rising, too, but there was no help for the children

of these divorces, no resources outside their immediate or

extended families. As the number of broken families was

rising, Ronald Reagan capitalized on the widespread anxiety

in his presidential campaign of 1979 with a platform that

called for reaffirming 'family values' and reinforcing

parents' rights over children's.

Conflict of generations during the latter part of the

20th century emerged and is still ongoing. On p. 165 Young-

Bruehl writers: "Child sexual abuse has become a site of

contestation between children and adults; a political and

legal battlefield, it stands at the crossroads of

generational conflict and transmission of trauma.

Understanding adult motivations and their legitimating

belief systems (childism) is of great importance in helping

children who are reported as physically abused or neglected,

but it is critical to helping children reported as sexually

abused because those children will be caught up not only in

the drama of having their families investigated and probably

prosecuted but in a vast social-political drama of adult-

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child relationships. How to deal with a family in which

sexual abuse has taken place becomes a key social and

political question. (165-66)

This situation has to be seen against the background of

a general rule about childism: sexual abuse serves the

childisms of hysterical role manipulation and narcissistic

identity erasure, but it seldom serves the childism of

obsessional elimination, while acts of physical and

emotional neglect often do. Sexual victims are kept in the

house, not eliminated; their service is required, their

availability is bound up with their abuser's desire and

fantasies. Sexual abusers manipulate sexual roles and

confuse the child victims, making them doubt their own

identity, and this is part of the abuser's purpose, a source

of their pleasure and their satisfaction. Sexual abusers may

also erase the child's self, including his or her capacity

to tell the truth of the experience, so that they can

control the story.

This last point is extremely important, and Young-

Bruehl goes on to support the notion that it is crucial to

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believe what children say about what they have experienced.

Children do not fabricate stories of detailed sexual

activities unless they have witnessed them, and they have,

indeed, been witnesses to their abuse.

Toward the end of this chapter Young-Bruehl discusses

the conservative and narcissistic turn of Baby Boomers,

"Child sexual abuse represented a direct challenge to the

fortress of the family and to the 'family values'

ideologists, but it also constantly challenged claims to

'the truth' that came from all political directions

including that of theorists who were primarily focused on

sexism and its harms, which were thought to fall similarly

on women and children. A narcissistic culture is one in

which claims to possession or ownership of 'the truth' go

along with claims to ownership of children and ownership of

the future that children represent. And a narcissistic

culture is one in which denial and lying become so accepted

that all statements -- including children's descriptions of

their abuse -- are said to be lies. Like the adults around

them, children can learn in such a culture to say as a

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matter of self-protection -- protection of their identities

-- what they think others want them to hear." (186-87)

Young Bruehl concludes this chapter by stating: on p.

194: "Sexual abuse is the type of abuse that depends most

for its discovery on the verbal testimony of the victim, and

the victim alone, so it is not surprising that in this area

of study questions about the reliability of children's

testimony have been more important than motivational

questions or definitional questions about what acts

constitute abuse and what penalties should be legislated.

One of the crucial questions Young Bruehl asks

throughout her book is: What makes parents turn against

their children? What are the motivations? She argues on 226:

"A person who believes that children are owned by their

parents and that their identities can be shaped and molded

at parental will can use any type of act to bring this

about. The acts are weapons in a war between the

generations. And it is impossible to understand the war

through inventories of the weapons or by counting the number

of children who have themselves become weapons. Nor is it

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possible to work for peace and the prevention of further

wars. She concludes her book by discussing the necessity for

better education to end childism. She argues that "child

advocates of all sorts must address not only the conditions

of the specific abuse but the conscious and unconscious

justifications for it: the childism of the abusers and the

childism within American society. They need to legislate and

enforce a national comprehensive child development program,

drawing on the best Child Development science, that

articulates a minimum standard of attention to each child's

needs. And they must articulate a platform of children's

rights like the U. N. Declaration and Convention on the

Rights of the Child, and find ways to monitor and enforce

them. . . crucial to achieving these political aims is the

education of both adults and children about prejudice

against children and how it is manifested within individuals

within families, and within American culture.

Seven irreducible needs:

1) Loving, attentive interaction between the child and its

caretakers.

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2) Physical protection, safety, and regulation.

3) Avoidance of standardized or over-ritualized childrearing

or education. For instance testing is about failing and

being tracked according to failure. Children are shamed and

humiliated by such an approach.

4) Each child should be provided with an emotional and

intellectual environment appropriate to the child's

developmental stage.

5) No physical discipline or corporal punishment by limiting

setting, structure, and expectations.

6) Stable communities and cultural continuity. Greater

parental participation of parents in school and community.

7) Protecting the future -- adults must keep in mind not

just their own children, or their community's children, or

American children, but all children.

Finally, Young-Bruehl discusses the history of American

schooling and its transformation in the late 20th century.

p. 289 -- Historians critical of American schools and

schooling have described how the nineteenth-century common

schools -- which began as one-room schools without any age

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differentiation, much less tracking of abilities -- turned

into huge factory like institutions that directed students

toward their future occupations on the basis of their class,

sex, and race. Progressive educators reacted against the

privatizing vision from the start, emphasizing its

authoritarian and utilitarian purposes: the majority of

children were being schooled to fulfill adult needs and to

fulfill particular low-level positions in adult enterprises,

not to develop their potentialities and their characters.

The teaching methods were producing generations of role-

reversed children, eliminated from opportunities,

manipulated into preset roles in workforces, and deprived of

encouragement to independent thought. The schools practiced

all kinds of childism at once -- eliminative, manipulative,

and erasing -- under the rubric of 'tracking."

Because they were well financed, American post World

War II public schools were, despite their basically childist

organization, consistently ranked higher than schools

elsewhere in the developed world. That ranking lasted until

the late 1970s, when a decline began that has not been

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remedied. Without corporate funding, the inherent inequality

of the tracked schools grew worse, at the same time that

inequalities within American society were growing. When

parents and legislators woke up to the crisis in the school

system, they once again turned to standardized testing and

teaching as the solution -- though this time students were

tracked into different types of schools at both the

elementary and high school levels. The U.S. educational

system now consists of public schools, some well-endowed and

some with almost no funding, private schools, and recently

the hybrid charter schools, which are corporately owned but

funded with a mix of public and private money.

At the bottom of all the agendas at these schools is the

childist notion that children are to be trained and educated

to fulfill the needs of adults not according to their

developmental needs.

Comments on using storytelling to counter childism

As Young-Bruehl points out, children who are abused

physically and psychologically have difficulty telling their

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own stories because they are afraid to tell the truth, do

not know how to articulate their feelings that are often

confused, are prompted to tell adults what the adults want

to hear, and know that they will not be heard or that there

will be no adequate response to their stories. Yet, they

need to and are eager to confide their stories in some one.

Their best hope is an understanding therapist or some one

outside the family such as a social worker. But sometimes

therapists and social workers are not responsive. Therefore,

knowing how to tell a story with confidence and integrity

may enable a child to confront his or her difficulties.

Knowing how to use stories to navigate oneself through life

is crucial for any child. Our contribution to the

development of children with whom we work is to assist them

in developing their capacity to tell their own tales to help

them learn the art of storytelling.

I began this talk by discussing how "terrible" the

Grimms' tales are. I should have probably used the

adjectives "terrifying," "dangerous," or "loaded." But I

didn't mean to or don't mean to dismiss these tales or argue

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that they are inappropriate for children. In fact, the

Grimms' so-called fairy tales and all the folk tales

gathered in the nineteenth century as well as in the

twentieth and twenty-first are vital for our understanding

of childism, and we should continue to study them, use them,

and create new stories based on what they communicate about

child abuse and abandonment. The Grimms' tales are also

reminders that childism is world-wide, not only part of

American culture, and one of the reasons we continue to

tell the Grimms' tales and other folk and fairy tales is

that they remind us what we have done to our children and to

ourselves in the course of our civilizing processes. To keep

telling the the Grimms' tales -- and other canonical and

traditional tales -- as they are without questioning and

changing them and encouraging children to appropriate them

according to their needs, howeveer, will only further

childism. The answer to childism demands critical soul-

searching and a radical grasp of the nature of

authoritarianism and narcissism. In raising and teaching

children we must educate ourselves and change our

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pedagogical practices. On a cultural level in the realm of

storytelling, we must exploit the deficit of traditional

tales such as the Grimms' tales for the benefit of children,

their creativity, and their critical skills.

In my own work with teaching artists at the Children's

Theatre Company of Minneapolis I have made the following

suggestions as guidelines for our collaboration with

teachers and children in the classes in which we tell the

Grimms' tales and other stories:

1) We must try to understand how we are complicit in

childism and acknowledge that we are living and working in a

society that does not cater to the developmental needs of

children. This does not mean that we must confess mea culpa

and atone for sins. It simply means that we must be

attentive to the children and their stories as best we can

and try to understand their individual needs as best we can.

It also means that we must be conscious of how we at times

may be imposing our will on the children.

2) We must find diverse ways to let the children's stories

breathe.

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3) We must help children hone their art not just because we

want them to become artists and to create beautiful stories,

but also because we want them to be effective with their

art. All art is political, whether we are conscious of this

or not. To tell a story is always a political act, a

socially symbolic act, no matter what the speaker is

conveying. A story is an intervention into ongoing conflicts

and struggles. It offers a narrative perspective. It

intervenes in traditional dialogues and challenges belief

systems. And of course, little stories are always

challenging master narratives. Little stories have just as

much right to be heard as master narratives.

4) By respecting the stories that children create and

encouraging them to learn about different perspectives, we

help them sharpen their critical and creative skills.

5) We must recognize that we do not have to address their

abuse directly. They know it. They feel it. Their artful

stories can be an effective way to confront their problems.

Their discussions, for instance, of "Hansel and Gretel" can

help them learn about the motivations of adults and child

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abandonment. Their discussions about the arbitrary power of

gods can enable them to understand authoritarianism and to

understand how belief systems are foisted on them.

6) We can never be neutral and should not be neutral when

topics such as abuse, abandonment, and social justice arise

in the course of a teaching situation or session. This does

not mean that we are to impose our ideas on children, but we

must somehow, through our own stories, communicate to

children that there is no such thing as neutrality and that

safeguarding the rights of children is one of the highest

priorities any society should have and maintain. Social

justice can only be reached by speaking out civilly in

public places and guaranteeing that all voices are heard.

7) Finally, we should all try to recall the enlightening

tales of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans

Christian Andersen that give us courage to dispel the magic

spells of our present religious, educational, and political

organizations. We must be able to listen to and to speak

with children then they say kings are not wearing any

clothes.

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Endnotes

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