Navigating the Justice System Part I: Alone at 9 Years Old

Trigger Warning: please click away from this page if you will be triggered by content that deals with child maltreatment and its consequences.

If this is the first Feminist in Spite of Them post you have read, please consider reading this either before or after.

When I was about 9, my parents were investigated by Children's Aid. Social workers came out to talk to us. They met with us and found out that my parents spanked as punishment - which made sense since my parents had posted "The 21 Rules of This House" next to the dining room table. They came back a few times and spoke to each of us children. My parents homeschooled and they questioned whether we were getting an adequate education

A Call for Inclusion in the Survivor Community

There has been a bit of a ripple this weekend regarding a post that was published on Homeschoolers Anonymous. This post is written by someone who was homeschooled in a positive way, and has attained a higher level of education. He gave some recommendations for how survivors should be writing their stories. His main points are not false, he gives a solid explanation of the difference between narratives, philosophical statements, and empirical evidence. From a casual reading, his content is solid. However he goes on to explain that these claims need to be kept separate, or the movement will suffer.

We need to recognize

Two Messages that Children Internalize that Contribute to Bullying in Patriarchal Church and Homeschool Groups

Homeschooled children sometimes experience bullying from peers. Part of this stems from the messages that children absorb about themselves.

1. Children respond to the tiered authority by owning the message that they are the not as good as other people and exist to serve people who appear to be more powerful than they are;

2. Children respond to the opposite message that they are the best and brightest and most privileged and enact that power on others. 

I have mentioned the issue of bullying in homeschool groups in passing in a previous post, but bullying in homeschooling families and homeschool groups is a serious issue. In a well-meaning homeschooling family from a conservative background, there are several patterns, such as adherence to patriarchal family systems and the sense of responsibility held by the parents to teach their children to succeed in life and grow up to be adults with the same mindset and goals as the parents. There is also often a commitment to having a large family. This creates

The Trailer

Let me tell you about the trailer. My family got the trailer from another family, I remember them, but I don't know why we got the trailer. I was very young - a few years old probably.

The trailer was a little camper trailer - it used to be white - with a table in the middle that became a bed, a bed on each end, and a little kitchen set up across from the table and a little bathroom. It was fun at first to go camping, it had a green awning but it broke. It had two little steps that pulled out. We went camping in the trailer in Ontario, it was near my fifth birthday and I think we were travelling to Nova Scotia but I'm not sure. There were four kids then.

When we moved to Nova Scotia we lived in the camper in a camp ground at first. Then we lived in a rented house and my started homeschooling, I think with something called ace or a beka. Then we lived in the trailer in a little sandlot for a summer

An Open Letter to My Former Highschool Teachers

Dear Teachers,                                                                                            October 15, 2013

When I came to the high school at age 17, I had absolutely no idea how to be a student.  Many of you know by now that I had didn't know what a teacher-student dynamic was. I hope you understand that up to that point I had been around adults who mostly made stuff up as they went along, and expected respect from authority that was derived simply from being bigger and older, not from legitimate accomplishment. To a scared 17 year old, it looked the same at first, because of the authority aspect. In the three years I went to high school, I learned to respect you for the knowledge and expertise you represent. I think I was supposed to respect you simply for being teachers, adults, and authority figures, but instead I respected the time and effort it took to become teachers, and the skill and patience that kept you there.

    I remember sitting in my first class, which was a grade nine math class. That was a difficult thing for me, to enter a class with people three years younger than I was. But to the teacher who taught that class, and the

The Psychological Cost of not Being Provided For

Children not getting what they want certainly does not constitute child maltreatment, and historically isn't uncommon. The societal construct of childhood has changed several times in last few centuries, with ebbs and flows in the level of freedoms, rights, and responsibilities children have at various ages.Children have not always had childhoods. However, children have always depended on their parents to provide for them. Sometimes children who are not cared for are removed from their parents, and historically some children who were not cared for died. Children who are not provided for, know. It is a painful realization that through choices made by parents of their own free will, a child was not given what was needed.

My siblings and I had more responsibilities and less rights than is considered typical in current society. Part of this including not really having our own possessions, and not being given new belongings except for a few
notable occasions. We were not entitled to our own space, in fact having a right to possessions and space was contraindicated because of my parents' belief that having too many rights would make a child feel entitled and cause corruption.

Differentiation and Emotional Cut-offs

Murray Bowen's theories on differentiation of self, and emotional cut-offs provide an excellent lens for viewing the complex relationships that exist between family members who were raised in quiverfull and Christian patriarchal families, where the family roles are artificially skewed by religious influence and the necessity for sibling-parenting due to sheer numbers in the family.

Bowen's theory on differentiation of self describes how people are inherently dependent on each other, but how each individual needs to balance how much to conform to a group for acceptance which is a universal need, and to what extent to be emotionally independent in order to deal with unavoidable conflict without having to take sides or dissolve emotionally (you can read more about Bowen's theory here: http://www.thebowencenter.org).

Bowen's theory of emotional cutoff describes how sometimes people with complex relationships in their families may choose to create distance from family members or declare a permanent separation from them. The theory explains that this is not always a good solution because there are patterns of relationships that are formed in childhood that dictate how the individual relates to new people in life, because they may look to new people to fill emotional roles that are inappropriate to the relationship.

I left my quiverfull family when I was 17. I was the oldest daughter (second child) of nine. For a while I remained in contact with many of the people who contributed to the safety of the patriarchal environment, including my father and leaders of the church he attended. Acceptance in a group is a universal need, but the problem arises when the cost is too great. I had not really found a new group yet at this point, but the cost of acceptance in the former group was to return home and submit to my father. That was not an option for me.