Isolation & Fear Will Not Keep You Safe
Most abuse happens within the confines of the family, the church, or romantic relationships. So why are we so afraid of the outside world?
Most abuse happens within the confines of the family, the church, or romantic relationships. So why are we so afraid of the outside world?
In the name of protecting vulnerable children from a supposedly menacing, corrupting outside world, much is done to render kids restricted, uninformed, and powerless. This despite the fact all evidence demonstrating that when children are well connected to a broader community, and have access to education and exposure to a variety of different lifestyles and points of view, they are far more likely to flourish. Most child abuse happens within the private confines of spaces we’ve been told keep them ‘safe’; the home, the family, and the church.
Last summer, a family friend began circulating Q Anon-adjacent rhetoric about the presence of dangerous, pedophilic messages encoded in popular children’s media. This friend has been pretty isolated during the pandemic, at home raising her kids and spending a lot of time in conspiracy theory groups on Facebook. In that time, she had become convinced that the Disney films she grew up watching had actually been “grooming” her to support child abuse. Why were so many of the kids in these films orphans or runaways, she wondered? Why are heroines like Cinderella and Mulan assisted by alluring strangers with magical powers instead of their parents, and lured away from their homes?
Q Anon followers believe in a far-reaching conspiracy of child abduction, assault, and abuse. They claim wearing masks in public makes children more susceptible to being kidnapped, because the cloth coverings obscure their faces. They think child abuse dungeons exist in random neighborhood spots, such as the basements of pizza restaurants. Like all effective cults, the cult of Q encourages its adherents to pull away from anyone who challenges their worldview, in this case anyone who fails to take “children’s safety” seriously enough to join in on their collective delusions.
In part because of her embroilment in Q Anon, this family friend refused to get vaccinated for COVID-19. She believes the shot is the mark of the beast. In hopes of ‘protecting’ her children from an imaginary threat that looms large on the internet, she has left them vulnerable to a virus that is increasingly infecting young people. Because she works in a field where the risk of exposure to COVID is very high, her choice to eschew vaccination has limited her work options, too. If vaccine cards ever become a requirement for travelling or attending school, her decision will limit her children’s educational and social opportunities even further.
On top of it all, this family friend has a husband who pretty deeply homophobic. Since marrying him, she’s said her fair share of intolerant and bigoted things too. If either of their children turn out to be gay or trans, the real peril toward the child will exist in their home, not out in the outside world she has become so afraid of. The more she circles the wagons around her children, the more dangerous their lives actually become.
Fear of the vague, shadowy danger of the outside world has long been used to isolate the vulnerable. For decades women have been taught to carry their keys between their knuckles and to avoid going out alone at night. These warnings contradict the statistical reality that a woman is most likely to be abused when she is alone with someone she knows. The people most likely to be charged with ‘protecting’ women from violence (their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, and male mentors or bosses) are the very ones most likely to abuse them.
The fear of the outside world does not line up with the crime data, which has repeatedly shown that random attacks from strangers are both rare and have been on the decline for decades. “Stranger danger” is a distraction; it serves to manipulate women into not engaging in public life with the ease that men do. It actively furthers their second-class citizen status.
If instead of isolating, women chose to band together and go out at night, walking at night would rapidly become a lot less scary and significantly safer. Instead we have trained women to withdraw and avoid developing their collective power. This has made them more easy to victimize, not less. The more scared you are of a random shadowy criminal attacking you in a back alley, the less likely you are to walk out on boyfriend who is screaming at you.
When I was trapped in an abusive relationship in my early 20’s, there were moments where I found myself running out into the street at four in the morning because I recognized it was safer to be out in the world than it was to be in my house. I’ve stood alone, shivering on a Roger’s Park train platform in the middle of the night while my abuser shrieked at me from the window of our shared apartment. I have also been a helpful stranger a few times, not a dangerous one, and rushed to help a woman being abused by a man she knew.
Though I’m a man, I used to be read as a woman, and I’ve been street harassed, cat-called, and even groped by strangers in public a number of times. Those experiences were awful, but they were far easier to escape than the abuse that happened to me when I was in private with a man that I knew. I was always able to fight random attackers off, to scream at them or throw my groceries at their heads or enlist the help of bystanders. It was a lot harder to escape the stalking and sexual coercion an ex-boyfriend tormented me with, or to stop my dad from making inappropriate sexual comments at me when I was a child.
The outside world is far from perfect, but for me the real danger has always been in the places I’d been told were safe. The church I attended as a child was the place where I was taught my desires and identity were wrong. My school was where I was threatened with violence for being gender nonconforming, and where school administrators told me that being out as any variety of queer could be considered to be “provoking” such violence. It wasn’t the broader community that taught me to stifle my emotions and bottle up every complaint of discomfort I ever experienced, making it incredibly difficult for me to provide or revoke consent. It was my family that taught me that.
When we believe that the outside world is filled with danger, we cut ourselves off from other people. We become more powerless, less connected, and more vulnerable to harm when we do so. As I’ve written about in my book, when people are afraid of crime and ‘stranger danger,’ they spend less time out in their communities, don’t get to know their neighbors or make new friends, and find themselves exposed to a narrower range of points of view. Fear makes your world small. It makes you ignorant. It makes you compliant and easy to exploit.
We know that when children are less educated about sex and consent, they are more vulnerable to sexual abuse. Predators benefit from ignorance and lack of empowerment. A child who knows what their body parts are called, and what sex is can name when something untoward is happening to them. A child who is part of a broad, supportive network of adults is also more likely to have someone safe to report their abuse to. An isolated child, locked away in the home and denied access to any age-appropriate sexual knowledge or non-family adults has nowhere to turn. If they have no connection to the broader world, they have no alternate framework for understanding their rights, other than what their parents or religious community preaches to them.
The rhetoric of ‘stranger danger’ is used to further the abuse of both women and children. And now, that same rhetoric is being directed at queer people, particularly trans youth.
A number of transphobic laws targeting children are being proposed throughout the United States. In Arkansas, a bill was passed this week to ban youth access to gender-affirming healthcare. The state is also currently considering a bill that will encourage educators to ignore trans kids’ identities and call them by incorrect pronouns and their former names. This flies in the face of mountains of evidence showing that respecting a trans kid’s identity is the easiest and most effective thing a caring adult can do to reduce their risk of suicide.
Similar bills targeting trans kids are moving forward in South Carolina, West Virginia, Florida, Montana, and Alabama, and are being considered in several other states. In North Carolina, a bill currently under consideration would not only ban people under the age of 21 from accessing transgender healthcare, it would also force school employees to inform families of any sign of transness or even gender non-conformity in their children.
That last bill is so egregious that even some of the people whose rhetoric inspired creation of such bills, such as journalist Jesse Singal (whose 2018 article on detransition in The Atlantic has been cited by many lawmakers proposing transphobic bills) are aghast at it.
“You want the government to be monitoring little boys to make sure they don’t walk too swishy and to report them to their parents if they do?” Singal wrote, incredulously, in response to the bill. Yet by feeding into a moral panic about youth transition for years, and centering transphobic radical feminists in his writing, Singal himself contributed to the culture of isolating children from supportive adults that resulted in such a bill.
The North Carolina bill and others like it are supported by conservative Christians as well as trans-exclusionary “feminists.” Both groups purport to care about protecting impressionable children from exposure to dangerous ideologies about gender. They claim they want to prevent kids from altering their bodies in ways they might go on to regret. In the name of protecting kids, these movements have pushed to isolate them from their peers (lest they catch “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” from a trans friend) and from supportive teachers (whom they accuse of “grooming” children simply by teaching that queer people exist).
The proponents of transphobic laws aim to keep vulnerable children confined within homes that are actively hostile to their existence. They present the vibrant, gender diverse external world as a menacing, corrupting realm, and cast even the most abusive and bigoted of families as the only safe refuge. In short, they’re are no different from adherents of Q Anon, or the sexist victim-blamers who have long taught women it’s better to remain trapped at home with an abusive boyfriend than to claim one’s agency and walk home at night.
Don’t let this fear-mongering rhetoric manipulate and mislead you. Alienation does not keep a person safe. Access to a broader community does. Ignorance is not empowering. Knowledge helps children (and adults!) develop a strong sense of body autonomy and consent. And any promise of ‘protection’ that renders a vulnerable person more dependent and isolated is only going to make their abuse all that much easier to shroud.
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