2009-07-16 09:25 | "Well, what about them?"
From my previous post:
On the one hand, feminists will more likely be women, so the prevalence of "mother" over "parent" makes sense. On the other hand, grr.
In my own anx-fueled way, I was reading up on child protection services here in Oregon. I got to one document that said that CPS tries to work with the family, since it's frequent that the abuse a child is receiving isn't occurring in a vacuum – sometimes, there's abuse going on from one parent to the other, and the recipient continues it on down to the child.
What tripped me up was the assumption that the person on the receiving end of the abuse would be the mother. I kept seeing "Your child deserves a healthy mother" and equivalent sentiments, and it kept bugging me. There are men who are abused – regardless of the gender of the abuser – and assuming that the recipient will be a woman just marginalises them. It wouldn't take a big leap to s/mother/parent/g, and the actual content would not be lost. The focus is to help children in abusive situations by recognising the abuse between the parents and working to resolve that. Degenderising the content would not mangle this content, so far as I know.
Not to mention, it kind of assumes heterosexuality, unless lesbian parents routinely only have one person use the term "mother".
(I really need to find this doc again, I swear.) Found it!
What is tripping me up about this is it sounds remarkably like "What about the men?", coming from myself to myself. Which is just inficreepy, if that's what's going on.
I don't think so. I checked by this Feminism 101 post just to be sure, and I was correct, the main way in which the WATM response sucks is when it's used to derail an active discussion about women, usually in a feminist space. My intent is not to say that women aren't important or anything related. My intent is mostly to make sure that as many people as possible get the assistance they need, including men who are abused. I don't think that takes away from the document's purpose.
But I could be wrong! Maybe it's derailing and I should close my damn mouth! I don't know!
xtina@blog ~$ start endless-self-doubt
One Response to “"Well, what about them?"”
I'm with you there. On the Mosaic forums, one of the ladies is participating in a "Shoes Exhibit" to show how many women have died by domestic violence. A quick look and I found that 33 of the "women" were actually men (out of 131). As she was a victim of domestic violence, she wasn't comfortable with that revelation. I do understand though.