Is safety a social construct? That seems to be the implication of a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics defending a disturbing medical procedure.
The authors discuss the “harms” of worldwide campaigns against female genital mutilation, which is imposed on young girls by certain African and Middle Eastern cultures, but it is classified by the World Health Organization as a human-rights violation. The procedure is prohibited in the United States, but the article says that policing the practice means “racial profiling and disproportionate legal surveillance of migrant families.”
If you find that certain groups of people are cutting off their children’s body parts in violation of the law, does it matter that those groups are disproportionately affected by our attempts to find out whether they are doing so?
The authors suggest that there is a racial double standard going on here, with other groups getting to perform unnecessary surgeries on their children. Indeed, they may have a point here. I would argue that cutting off body parts because a child believes they were born into the wrong body is equally barbaric. Both practices call into question what constitutes “safety.”
The idea of “safety” has been distorted in recent years, with some even using the word to describe the desire to be insulated from viewpoints they don’t like. But it was still supposed to mean something when it came to protecting children.
A new report out from Casey Family Programs casts doubt on whether that is the case. Now, apparently, there is something called “lived safety,” which is based on “lived experience.” As one parent involved in the child welfare system explains, “My idea of safety could be very different from someone else’s, based on culture.”
Yes, but what about the law?
The authors advise that child welfare agencies should consider other questions of safety like “Is connection to my culture and religion respected and protected?” and “Do I feel supported in engaging in my cultural practices and traditions?” It is not that these issues are not important, but the role of child welfare agencies is actually to protect children from bodily injury and death. It is a big job, and by some measures, we are not doing it very well. So maybe focus on that first?
But the very idea of child protection is undermined by some of the statements in this report. One person interviewed says: “There’s this idea that one culture or the way one set of people might live is the best way, and those children will have the best outcomes, when in reality they might just face fewer barriers — socially, economically and financially.”
There is indeed an important idea that people who don’t abuse or neglect their children might live the best way. And the idea that those children will have the best outcomes is ingrained in our child welfare system. In fact, it is ingrained in our legal system. We don’t judge whether someone is a victim of a crime based on the cultural context. We don’t decide whether a woman was raped based on whether she comes from a culture where women are considered the property of their husbands. We don’t decide whether an assault on a gay man is OK because his culture believes that homosexuality is immoral. But these are the logical implications of seeing safety as simply a cultural construct.
Unfortunately, our country’s move in this dangerous direction seems to be continuing apace. Last year, Minnesota passed the African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, which sets a different standard for how we assess the abuse of Black children and creates different standards for their placement in foster care. The law defines the “best interests” of a Black child differently from the “best interests” of other children.
The law was challenged last month on equal protection grounds. Indeed, one might wonder why Black children would be treated differently than any other children according to the Constitution. Astonishingly, though, the plaintiff was a Black woman who wanted to continue to have her children living with her and their father despite the fact that he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 7-year-old. (The child welfare agency reasonably determined that young children were not safe living with such an offender.) The law is only in a pilot phase and so the lower standards for treatment of children hadn’t applied to her family yet. She wanted to make sure her family qualified for this lower standard of treatment sooner rather than later.
In another world, one might assume that a parent would be ashamed of asking that her children be subject to worse treatment than those of her neighbors. But when we pretend that safety just all depends on your culture, we give abusive parents a pass and make a mockery of the rule of law.