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).
12
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
14
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
15
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
17
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
21
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
25
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-
26
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
29
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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