Applications Of Feminist Legal Theory

Child Abuse: A Problem for Feminist Theory

A·S· Child Abuse: A Problem for Feminist Theory MARIE ASHE AND NAOMI R. CAHN A BROAD PROFESSIONAL and popular awareness of the disturbing and not uncommon reality of child abuse has developed during the past two decades. Responses in legislation and the legal process reflect this awareness. Prosecution of child abuse has greatly accelerated; children's accounts ofsexual abuse and other forms of abuse are now recognized as deserving credence; and procedural accommodations have been instituted in manyjurisdictions to aid child victims in telling their stories. Increased awareness of child abuse has been accompanied by popular reactions of outrage and horror and by Widespread condemnation of its perpetrators. The accounts of child abuse delivered through popular media and various types of professional literature have tended to tell the story of child abuse with a focus on the experience of child victims and have devoted only very limited attention to the realities and experiences of perpetrators of such abuse. While parents, particularly mothers , are regularly brought under the jurisdiction of trial courts in child dependency proceedings, pursuant to which children are removed temporarily or permanently from their custody, there is a surprising dearth of literature about the complexities of such parents. The developing contemporary understanding of child abuse within and without the legal system, to the degree that it focuses on perpetrators of abuse, tends to reduce to a story of "bad mothers." This Article attempts to expand the scope ofdiscussion regarding the "bad mother" and suggests ways in which a fuller dialogue may take place.... Prevailing Cultural Interpretations of the "Bad Mother" The "Bad Mother" in Literature If we define the "bad mother" as the woman whose neglectful, abusive, reckless, or murderous behavior threatens or destroys her children, we can locate her powerful figure throughout the literature ofWestern culture. She is apparent in ancient Greek litOriginally published in full in TexasJournal of Women and the Law, Volume 2 (993). 916 Copyrighted Material Child Abuse: A Problem for Feminist Theory I 917 erature in the familiar figures of Medea murdering her children to the horror of the chorus; of Agave, murdering her son Pentheus, tearing apart his limbs, and bearing his head into her city; and ofJocasta, the fatefully destructive mother ofOedipus. Each of these literary figures manifests a powerfully destructive woman whose excessive and transgressive violations of law bring destruction upon herself, her household, and her community. The "bad mother" is also prominent inJudeo-Christian mythology. She appears in the disturbing figure of the infanticidal Lilith, defined inJewish apocrypha as the first wife of Adam. The "bad mother" also operates centrally in the biblical account of the judgment of Solomon.! That account, which is often cited as a paradigm of wisdom and good judgment, marks the foundation of the definition of a bad mother in Western culture in general and Western law in particular.2••• The "bad mother" has been a common character in Western fiction. In the most familiar of Western fairy tales, she often figures as a "step"-mother.3 In European and American fiction, the "bad mother" is typically depicted as horrifying, excessive in some essential way, and worthy ofgreat fear. She is often depicted as so split offfrom the normal reality of "good motherhood" that she is characterized as the bizarre and crazy persona -the "madwoman" consigned to "the attic" of deviance or marginality. The "bad mother" is depicted as the figure always threatening to exceed, to violate the norms that prescribe the boundaries and the scope ofher duty. Her boundary-violations have tragic consequences for her community by inviting destruction upon all its members. It can be argued that the "bad mother," in her literary appearances, operates as a character within a child's story. In her standard manifestations, she appears not in her own complexity and moral agency, but as an "other" defined from the perspective of a fearful and deprived child. From perhaps unknowable origins, the "bad mother" figure operates archetypally and paradigmatically to construct her own "other"-the "good mother"-who becomes, by extension, the "good woman," a figure highly constrained and highly constraining. This "other" to the "bad mother" model is defined in our oldest literature.... She has continued to operate into the contemporary period. Alicia Ostriker observes that "good motherhood is selfless, cheerful, and deodorized. It does not include resentment, anger, violence, alienation, disappointment, grief, fear, exhaustion--or erotic pleasure. It is ahistorical and apolitical. It excludes the possibility of abortion."4 Clearly, it does not include the reality...