Re: I don't think that's necessarily the answer

"Not to mention a child being able to choose who takes care of them isn't necessarily the best way to stop abuse. In this the kids wanted out but there are many cases of children who are taken away from their parents by children services that would go back in a minute if they were allowed, since children (especially young ones) may love their parents even while being abused by them. "

Precisely. And in that case taking the children away from the parents is itself abuse.

Um, in all cases? I emphatically disagree. It depends on the nature and degree of the abuse, which needs to be assessed in each case. If it is merely verbal abuse, if it's not every second the kid is getting screamed at or insulted, I'd let it go. But if the kid has broken bones or bruises, damn straight the government should step in. People who are being abused--even if they are adults--are often brainwashed and believe whatever the abusive person tells them. That's even truer of kids, who may not know any other situation but the one they grew up in.

Sorry, but sometimes the state has to intervene. This shit can get complicated real quick. I always find simplistic solutions suspect, which is why I don't buy sweeping ideologies that seek to completely change everything, whether it be anarchy and minarchy at one end or socialism and totalitarianism at the other. I understand people are driven to fix things, and often they settle for simplistic, all-encompassing (though almost completely unattainable) solutions to quell their cognitive dissonance, telling themselves, "Well, if I was in charge we could fix this easy by just ____________." But big social problems like child abuse are never that easy to fix.

But there are some things we can do. As a long-time observer of human nature, what I've noticed is that many social problems tend to self-correct through immersion/exposure to opposing perspectives. What I mean is, when people are less isolated from the complex world around them, they tend to become less rigid and resistant to the alternatives. It happens in college all the time--a small town boy or girl who is convinced abortion is a horribly evil thing (or some such) arrive a university and come away much more liberal than when they went in. In fact, it's one of the big gripes of conservatives, and for good reason. It's true. College tends to liberalize students, but this is only because most colleges and universities are in urban areas where people are already likely to be pretty liberal. If universities were primarily conservative, then the same thing would happen to liberal students, only in reverse.

In fact, this did happen to me a bit when I went to UNA. I was pretty much a solid liberal on every issue when I arrived there, but it is a very conservative university as far as they go, and I was exposed to intelligent people representing opposing ideas, so I came away more moderate than I had been.

Now let's take racism. There's still a lot of it where I live (rural Tennessee, but what you notice here is that there is still a lot of segregation. It's not legally enforced anymore but it is culturally enforced, and culture is more powerful than the law as a deterrent anyway. In cities there is much less racism because cities are more of a melting pot. There is still some segregation in cities, but due more to logistics than culture.

And as for abuse, have you noticed that the most effective abusers are those who isolate their victims? From spousal abusers to cult leaders it is the same: they isolate the victims from society, sometimes physically but also psychologically, by telling the victims something like "Everyone else is against us. It's you and me against the world, baby. Hey, maybe I'm not perfect, but I'm the best you're gonna get." This is why social workers need to check up on kids who are in the most vulnerable position. We need to live in a pretty much completely open culture. Privacy and silence are double-edged swords that can be used to trap people as well as keep undesirables away from us.

This is also why I am for a completely sexually open culture. What happened to 13-year-old cousin when she was raped by her stepfather? He used her shame (programmed by culture) and her natural sexual instincts against her. When he discovered nude pics of her on her phone (intended for her bf) he threatened to tell her real father if she refused to have sex with him. Ergo, he blackmailed her into sex. This couldn't have happened in a completely sexually open culture. Ultimately, MAPs will not benefit from standing against all government intrusion into our lives. The only way we can ever have a hope of getting what we want is to make the gov't and culture work on our behalf. Thus, we must not be afraid to let the state peer into our lives, and if we are causing no harm, then we have no cause to fear anyway. But fearing the gov't makes us look suspicious, precisely for the reasons I outlined above.