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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 9, Abolition Addresses Violences Against Children

Crystal  0:15  

Abolition is for Everybody is a podcast that tackles the sometimes-difficult conversations around prison abolition. I’m Crystal. 

Ra  0:22  

I’m Ra.

Adam  0:23  

And I’m Adam.

Ra  0:24  

In this season of Abolition is for Everybody we talk about harm.

Adam  0:27  

What creates it, what recycles it and how we could find our way to meaningful means of repair.

Ra  0:35  

Just a reminder  friends, in this episode, and every episode, we dive into very sensitive issues. This season is frameworked around violence. And though the title of this episode may give you some warning, remember that harm itself tends to create situations of alternate harms. There will probably be other painful topics brought up too. Take care of you.

Crystal  1:02  

This episode is called Violence Against Children and we’re going to step back and focus on the big picture of harms against children. Things like poverty, home abuse, and hunger. We know the media centers sexual harms against children, and organizing communities often center children in juvenile facilities and it is important to address these things directly. We will make a space for those issues. Later on on Abolition is for Everybody, we’ll be joined by experts and folks who have caused these harms, but today, we wanted to start here first.

Ra  1:37  

If you have a child, live with a child, work with children, or even just no one, you’ve almost certainly been in proximity to violences against them. Through this episode, think of what children need. What did you need as a kid? Okay, let’s get started as best we can. I know none of us are children anymore. That is something I know, but one thing you know, we’ll talk about today, and that we talk about a lot actually is how the experiences we have as children really shape our worldview and who we are. I know we started with this question of what did you need as a child? And maybe we should like, answer it before we dig in Adam, what did you need, as a child?

Adam  2:21  

It was several things that I needed as a child and like you said Ra, we are not child, we are we are not children anymore, although sometimes I can act as so. But what I needed as a child was just it was just a whole variety of things. But I can give an example of something that that that kind of shaped and and introduced me to, I guess you can say harm, right? Coming from school, it kind of just being in class and you know, getting in trouble having to be sent to stand in the corner and I remember standing in the corner and just feeling so humiliated. Right? In front of this class. It’s about 40 overs in there and I’m standing in the corner because I was just clowning. I remember that feeling. And when I went to prison, and to me, that was the same feeling of humiliation, everything that I went through. And as a kid, then what I needed was someone to talk to me and to share with me what I was doing wasn’t okay, rather than punishing me and just putting me in a corner because what that did was kind of added to me being a little bit more resentful towards teachers, and eventually things that I was doing at school, I started doing at home. And it really, it was just hard.

Crystal  3:37  

And that is a practice that is used all the tim time in schools like, you know, timeout, and sitting in like the red couch away from all of your friends. Timeout after timeout after timeout. As somebody who worked in a children’s school, it was like an everyday thing, honestly, with multiple children all the time. And one of the things that I thought about in preparation for this episode were the hundreds, if not thousands, of letters that I read from incarcerated individuals, and whenever they tell me their story, and they have that same, that same insight, and those same thoughts as you, Adam, a lot of the time they talk about the root, and the different things that they needed as children and the different things that they know would have changed the trajectory of their lives. And I know earlier this season, I shared about, you know, my nephew, running inside every time he sees a cop and you know, being so anxious that he like plays with his shirt to to comfort himself and I always wonder how these things will affect him later in adulthood and I think of all of the children in my world, and of the different violences that they’re they’re experiencing on a daily basis.

Ra  5:13  

Yeah, I think, I think the most shocking thing, I guess, for me as a, you know, a child free adult, and as someone who still has a lot of proximity with children, because I have, I have 12 nieces and nephews, they’re, they’re plentiful in the family, right? And their friends are always like, welcome at our house and things. But it’s just, it’s surprising to like, think about the sheer number of harm done to children, compounded with the fact that we rarely hear about it, because there really isn’t like a situational place for kids to come up to you and be like, hey, I’m struggling with extreme poverty, and it’s having a negative impact on my life. 

Adam  5:55  

Right.

Ra  5:55  

That isn’t something a six year old says, you know, they just know that they’re hurting. And most of the time, even that discussion is something that because we’re so punitive systems are so ingrained in our culture. Usually, that’s not even something you’re allowed to say, as a child. Because if you’re like, hey, I’m scared, we say be brave. And if you say, hey, I’m, you know, suffering, we say, chin up, toughen up, grow up all- these things. And it just like

Adam  6:22  

Right.

Ra  6:22  

Oh, it just drives it home. But it’s hard to think about the voices we don’t hear, you know, and even this episode, for obvious reasons, we can’t have an actual child here with us today. We’re not trying to like drag them through the harms that they recognize. We are not, we are not therapists. We are not trained psychiatrists, but but even now, like we’re having a conversation about them without them in the room.

Crystal  6:49  

Yep.

Adam  6:50  

Yeah, and it’s so true, what you said, as far as that undertone, you know, if a child is crying, and you know, if an adult, right, gets tired of that, tired of hearing the child cry, they say, stop crying, you shouldn’t be crying, right? But it’s a reason that the child is crying, right? So we have to be the ones to give access to the children to share what is what it may be in getting back to the undertone of a child crying, and him saying, Oh, you shouldn’t you shouldn’t cry, and just think that a child should just always play. But I think we fail to realize that children are little human beings, right? And something that I told someone when I was at the park working out, their kid came to play on the equipment and he was like, oh, you know, go back over. I said, it’s okay. I said, you know, kids is being kids, I said, because they little grown people, and he just started laughing. And he walked off. But once again, you know, rather than me saying, yeah, man, take your kids over there. You know, this is where grown folks be. So like, if I would have responded like that, then I think that would have been something that we talked about earlier, where it says been in the proximity of violences to children, like that may not have been super violent, but that would have been very, very harmful. If I would have responded like, yeah, man, take your child, and y’all go there, because this is for adults only. So I think that we always have to consider and include our children because they are our voices. And sometimes we can we can or I can get into an adult manner because we always think like that, that we tend to kind of overlook.

Ra  8:26  

Yeah it’s, it’s so incredible, that we can overlook it because the magnitude is so immense, you know, like, when I got home from prison, everybody wanted me to read the book, The Body Keeps the Score, like I feel like that came up all the time everywhere. And I read, I think it’s like the second paragraph of the book, I’m just gonna quote it. “One in five Americans was sexually molested as a child. One in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body, and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mothers being beaten or hit”. So obviously, that wasn’t like the best book to recommend to someone who just came home from prison. That was-

Crystal  9:11  

Right. 

Ra  9:16  

Seven years later, I can comfortably quote that and sit with it for a minute. And really think about what that means for the children that we’re looking at. And, and those aren’t, those are like more direct violences. But as we’ve talked about, already in the season, poverty is a violence too, hunger is a violence too, and those are on a massive scale in this country as well.

Crystal  9:40  

And I just want to take a moment to emphasize just how massive that scale is. There’s an estimated 17 million children today struggling with hunger in America, and that is 6 million more than before the pandemic started. So those are 17 little humans, as Adam called them, going to sleep hungry, you know, being hungry on an everyday basis. And as someone who experienced that, when I was younger, I know what that’s like, you know, you, your stomach aches, you can’t think straight, can’t concentrate on schoolwork and it’s just an added stressor on top of all of the other stressors that that little humans experience every day.

Adam  10:33  

It really is. And even to the point where, you know, children, or anybody I say, we’re focusing on children, we go to extremes to feel that to fill that hunger. I remember just maybe like earlier today, or whatever it was, I was kind of just, you know, scrolling through my Instagram page, and I seen somebody posts, something that was showing a little boy that allegedly was stealing a bag of Doritos. 

Crystal  11:01  

Yes. 

Adam  11:01  

And you have all these officers come to this call for an eight year old child, that’s stealing a bag of Doritos. And one of the first things that I thought about, as a lot of us thought about in this work is why is this child being arrested? Rather than ask what’s going on? Or what do you need? Like, how can we give? Once again, how can we give these children access? And when we talk about the pipeline to prison, that is a perfect example of the effects that it has on children at or at a young age that continues to continue to cycle and then, you know, later on when you have people that to be incarcerated, excuse me, when you have people that that are incarcerated, a lot of the same effects that happened in a childhood is even amplified inside. And it’s nothing that’s being talked about, it’s nothing that’s being addressed, it’s no help to going back to that childhood trauma that have taken place that have kind of grown on to us over the years.

Ra  12:02  

Yeah, absolutely. It’s, um, I saw speaking of social media things, I mean, that video particularly was horrifying. And if anyone’s going online to look it up, who hasn’t seen it before just you know, take care of you. 

Adam  12:20  

Please, please take care of you.

Ra  12:22  

But one thing I saw on Twitter was this idea that we always say that children are resilient. And they were asking if children are so resilient, why does every adult need therapy? Why does every adults need trauma care? Like we are recovering from our childhoods? All of us? And I think obviously, there is, there are some really significant differences and how some of us experienced childhood, I think, there are lots of kids who steal a bag of Doritos, and no one calls the cops on them and that has something to do with demographics. You know, in this case, you know, there was a racial and poverty level demographic at play, which is two times the harm. And I feel like, I mean, we know these things, because of the data. We know these things because of our lived experiences. But I think it’s important to emphasize, you know, in Crystal’s story, her nephew, stress stressing out inside his house where he feels safe. And in your story, this child, you know, being confronted by a bevy of police officers and this kind of just reaffirms this distance that children have, and discomfort they have with authority- this very valid discomfort they have with authority. I mean, when I did time, everyone I knew was a mother, you know, it’s 80% of women serving time in the US are mothers. And if cops took your mom away, if cops are keeping your mom away, if the state is keeping your mom away, like, is this, is this the place you’re gonna go to for resources and for help, you know? Like, we need to find a way to untangle authority from pain, you know, and I think that’s learned so early on, that the people that you’re supposed to trust actually cause more harm to you than good. Like, that’s, I think, I think that’s what we meant when we said that we’re all in proximity to the harms against children. You know, we all bear witness to this, we all participate in the system. And I don’t know, I feel like I just took us down kind of a heartbreaking route. Sorry.

Crystal  14:30  

And to add on to the heartbreak, one of the, when I was on my health care path, and one of the things that a lot of my professors in different classes always emphasized when we talk about health, whether that’s maternal health, children health, whatever it might be, they always emphasize the importance of the relationship between a mother and a child. They always said, if you want to make a general- generational difference and have an impact on children, and an impact in the future health and quality of health of, of lives, you also have to take care of the mother. You can’t just focus on the child and what you’re doing for the child. If you take care of mom’s health, if you give mom an education, if you’ve get mom a job and financial stability, the child will be okay. It doesn’t matter how many programs you set up for just a child- if a mom, it’s not okay, the child will not be okay. And when you say Ra, that most of the women are, 80% of the women who are incarcerated are mothers, those are a lot of children without growing up without mommy, you know that you mommy taking care of them to having that close relationship and close bond. So a lot of the times that is that is lost when we talk about women who are incarcerated and incarceration and that’s what about what about the children?

Ra  16:13  

Yes, yes to all of that, but let’s get like super specific. What are some specific examples of violence that we have seen that we’ve maybe participated in or that we think people we know, more than likely bore witness to? Or like, like, take away just the idea of the big harm like okay, hunger, yes, we get it, kids are experiencing hunger but and like Crystal said, specifically, that makes it hard to go to school, which is like a federal requirements, you know, they will bring cops to your house if you do not attend school. So that’s a big deal. And like Adam mentioned, you know, getting in trouble for like clowning around. And that’s kind of oftentimes associated with hunger and not basic needs being met at home. And I know I casually said, like, most of the women I was inside with are mothers, but those have like really tangible effects on children, because you don’t have someone to celebrate your successes with you, to teach you how to like, reset the joys because we we don’t, we can’t just pick up a phone anytime we want. You know, we talk about our kids all the time. You know, we carry pictures with our kids everywhere we can we make them into frames inside, but you can’t just send them gifts. It’s a complicated process. The kids can’t just buzz you when they had a really bad day, or an adult in their life hurt them. Gifts for Christmas, things like that, you go to school, and everybody’s talking about stuff that they got, and your mom is locked up and your dad probably too, cuz yeah, the odds are incarcerated people almost always parents.

Adam  17:40  

Right and I couldn’t agree with you like, even more. I mean, just, and even you said some things like that made me go back to my childhood. And some of the things that happened, right, I didn’t, I remember getting whipped. You know with a branch, you know, from the tree. I remember getting whooped with extension cords, I remember getting a bat thrown at me. I mean, it was just different kinds of things that was happening because the reality of the right our parents don’t have no parental guide guy like, hey, this is how you raise children. So as we know, like, I spoke in episode one, like it was things that was passed on to my family that was passed on. So like, a way of discipline, this is the way we should discipline our children, you know, or this is the way we should punish our children. And that same mindset is the same with the punitive system. And so when we talk about physical safety and children, that was that was some of the things that that I have witnessed, and even having friends that didn’t come to school, right, because they were so brutally beaten from for not doing their homework on time, or, you know, not taking out the trash on time, like these things that’s happening on an everyday basis that don’t get talked about because we have made it the norm on this is how we discipline our children. This is how we treat our children because once again, they are children. And so for me, that’s, that’s why I like to change and say they are little humans, you know, they are little grown people, right? Because they’re gonna grow up. And so if if I can be able to relay a message to a child, and still give them the respect of being adult, although they a child makes a big difference on how we how we parenting and how our kids were raised, if I tell my child, Hey, stop doing that. Stop doing that. Right now. 9 times out of 10 they’re gunna respond a certain type of way, the same way that a grown person will respond. If I told, you know, if I just say, hey, Ra, stop doing that. You’re gonna look at me like, What am I doing wrong? But if I speak to you, like, hey, can you stop doing that because X, Y and Z Now once again, we are opening up that door to give children access to communicate, and to share, you know, what is some of the wants and needs that that can be overlooked.

Ra  19:42  

Yeah, exactly and validating those things when they finally tell us you know, because you have to kind of create the culture of communication. They use the words they have, you know, that they’re sad today, and you have to give them more words. You know, that’s kind of our job as adults, which means our job as adults is to learn more words, right? And use them more visibly. Because yeah, I think it’s human nature to not like I know me with my niblings is the it’s the gender neutral term for nieces and nephews so it’s what I call mine. But when I’m talking to the niblings, it’s kind of instinctive to want to protect them from things I’m experiencing. And so I don’t tell them that I’m also scared of seeing police, you know, like, that’s not something I would bring up like, oh, I’m sorry, the sirens threw me off, you know, and I need a minute to collect myself and like, yeah, language we need, we need to get better at it. 

Crystal  20:35  

You know, as you were talking about one of the things that came to mind was my baby niece, you know, as I’ve shared in the podcast before, my brother who is incarcerated has a daughter now and she was one, I think, yeah, just turned one when when he was incarcerated, and she’s, she’s going to be five this year. And you know, she hasn’t seen dad in about three years and as you were describing that with the little ones in your life, that is one of the things right now that we protect her from, you know, we taught her that that papi is working. But she’s a smart little girl, she’s starting to ask questions. And I remember when you would visit him, you know, drive two hours to visit him at the county jail, and having to having to walk through the metal detectors and I remember, there’s this big steel, big steel door that slides open. And after a few times of visiting, she would like tap on the door and be like, oh, this is papi’s house, like we’re visiting papi and papi’s house. And it was just so heartbreaking. 

Ra  21:50  

Heartbreaking.

Crystal  21:51  

Yes, and I, she’s growing up now. And she’s asking questions. And she doesn’t really believe anymore, that papi’s working and you know, all of all of the little ones in my life, or even my teenage nephew, who’s who grew up with us, and I saw everything he experienced, and how and how it affected him. And, again, heavy on my heart is the thousands of letters I’ve read, you know, from everyone who was incarcerated, and all of the needs, that they had- basic needs that they had. And I often think about going back and providing those for them, providing the needs that little human Adam needed little human that you know, my brother needed and how that could have turned out differently. And how come now as a society, we’re not making those changes, we’re not protecting and taking care of the most valuable people that we claim to be, which is our little humans.

Adam  23:04  

Wow, that was a lot that we that we spoke on that we covered. So I have to pose this question. What do we miss? What do we miss?

Crystal  23:14  

For me, it’s not something that we necessarily missed, something that Ra mentioned earlier and it’s I really want to emphasize, to pay attention to other times children are not in the room all the time if talking about resources or making big decisions, and the children are not in the room. As Ra mentioned, there’s no child in the room today. And I know that I just shared some pretty scary stats and we got lost in a few sad things and a few sad stories, but I do want us to end with a little bit of hope because I know that there are organizations doing the work out there. So Ra, and Adam, what is that little bit of hope that you would like to share with our listeners today?

Ra  24:09  

Well since, Crystal, since you just mentioned the organizations doing the work, I do want to uplift a couple that are doing some pretty impressive stuff, TransformHarm.org and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, but since I haven’t figured out my bit of hope yet, I’m gonna pass it to Adam, Adam, you got something for us?

Adam  24:29  

I will say that every day our actions create the ripples, that create this culture, or at least enable this culture of harm. As we mentioned in the beginning, you are likely a part of these harms, but that also means we can change the culture with our everyday actions creating new ripples [outro music begins] a new culture, to be the new ripple.

Ra  24:50  

I’m gonna echo that. I’m gonna echo everything we’ve already said. Yeah, be the ripple

Ra  25:01  

[outro] This isn’t the full story of the full humans involved in these experiences or every complete community or person who has gone through experiences that parallel. We have walked this gently so as not to diminish the story, but to highlight and amplify the hearts involved. For a safe discussion that goes further in a larger but more community-based space, please join us at Abolition Corner. For more information visit initiatejustice.org/abolitioncorner

Ra  25:27  

[outro music continues]