It’s up to all of us!
A few days ago, my best friend LB asked me to look at a Netflix movie called Brother with him. He explained that the teenager he is presently mentoring references this movie quite a bit, and this boy seems to really identify with the characters in the movie. He has seen the movie so many times, he actually knows much of the dialogue by heart.
This intrigued me, so I agreed. I love movies and documentaries. It wouldn’t be a hardship to see this one.
Wrong!
From the first few minutes of the movie, I realized that LB’s casual request was going to strain the limits of a friendship request.
Without giving away the plot in case anyone is courageous enough to tackle this movie, it is about the horrendous life of a young Black boy — African?Haitian? — living in France. He is in juvenile detention because of his age. His crime: killing his father. His environment: abusive, hopeless, confusing both before and after his sentencing.
In the juvenile detention home, we meet tough defiant adolescents who are familiar with abuse at every level, from parents to authority figures. They handle their conflicts with one another and the world with extreme violence and the most unbelievable expressions of anger, frustration, and inner anguish. Defecating on another inmate’s bed is relatively normal behaviour for these boys.
I found myself shrinking down in my seat and several times during the movie, I covered my ears or my eyes to distance myself from the horrors being portrayed on screen. LB, on the other hand, found my reaction a little amusing and somewhat naive.
It isn’t that he couldn’t empathize with the adolescents on the screen, but he was actually studying and analyzing the movie. To LB, the movie was a clue or perhaps the key to understanding his mentee. Perhaps this would, in turn, help him to be a better mentor.
I couldn’t see the movie that way. First of all, the acting is fantastic! I could feel the characters’ confusion and anger and helplessness and their raging at the feeling of impotence that being in the center engendered in them. Their emotions were palatable! And truly disturbing! But, worse of all, they were infectious.
At one point, I found myself shouting: “Kick him! That’s it! Give it to him!” when (to me) the most distasteful, cruel adolescent was being kicked and punched in the stomach and head by one of his victims. [To be clear, at one time or other, each adolescent is alternatively bullied or being bullied, and the attacker was also an equally vindictive adolescent who had done something similar to a new arriver, so I don’t know what I was saying.] But I felt the thirst for vengeance since Mo, the adolescent being beaten up, had minutes earlier tried to rape his attacker … with a broomhandle while the other inmates held him down.
It’s unforgivable, I know, but I felt great satisfaction anticipating Mo getting his comeuppance!
Well, perhaps I should mention that Mo boasted that he had been beaten so often, and without mercy, as a child that he became a tough moth****ker! He decided that no one would ever lay a hand on him. If anyone was going to get hurt, it wouldn’t be him!
LB paused the movie, now about 30 minutes from the end, and told me: “Moira, calme-toi! You’re getting too involved. It’s just a movie.”
“No! No, it’s horrible! How can you just sit there and not feel … feel … angry! These kids are so awful to one another. They’re all in the same situation, they’ve all come from horrible, abusive backgrounds, and instead of sticking together and helping each other, they’re tearing each other apart!”
LB looked at me a moment before asking gently, as if trying to get a child to understand a difficult concept: “How would they know to do that? Has anybody taught them how to be compassionate, how to be fair? Where they come from, strength, violence, never backing down has kept them alive. You want them to give up their survival tools? Never!They don’t know how to behave any other way.”
This is why LB is a social interventionist, an educator, at a tough high school in Montreal North, and I am a teacher at a relatively sedate, safe, semi-private college in Ahuntsic.
I could not deal with those types of situations, and LB deals with them every single day. He has told me about students bringing knives and guns to the playground, of students attacking their teachers, of parents slapping their kids in front of the staff, of Grade 11 students intimidating Grade 7 students for their lunch or possessions, etc. and reducing these Grade 7 students to quivering balls of fear.
In Brother (or Mon Frère), there was a boxing program at the Juvenile Detention center for the adolescents to box and spar and (hopefully) work out their feelings and frustrations in a positive manner. Great! That seems like a good start. But the majority of the boys didn’t trust the staff, or the boxing program, and they didn’t want to let their guard down. There was a constant tug of war with one another, to establish dominance, to become the leader of the pack, and as I said before, it was a brutal environment and process.
A few weeks ago, I came across news feed on YouTube.com about Jeffrey Epstein (JE)and his international ring of human trafickkers and child sex slaves. Famous names, like the Clintons, Trump, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, etc. were mentioned in association with JE and the million dollar question was: were these people just innocent friends of JE or were they a part of this ring?
Who knows? That seems to be a question way above my pay grade.
But I became quite obsessed with this topic. I have read countless articles and looked at numerous news stories over the last month or so. And during one of my searches, I came across an interview with Shaun Attwood and Anna Brees (True Crime 61). They were talking about a book written by a sex abuse victim several decades after his first exposure to that world.
The thing that both shook my quite complacent ideas of juvenile delinquent behaviour is when Anna Brees (an established journalist) and Shaun Attwood (the interviewer) were discussing how, in court cases where the plaintiff is a “troubled” youth or adult with a checkered, criminal past, and the defendant is a respected member of society, usually a rich, powerful, entitled person, the deck is stacked against the plaintiff.
In the court’s view, the unknown, rather unsavory person who is bringing a case again the upstanding citizen is not a good witness, and therefore, he or she cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Game over, before it has even had a chance to begin.
Shaun Attwood explained that many of the youths in our detention centers and prisons have undergone ghastly, unspeakable abuse. And as a result of this, they turn to mind-numbing substances and self-destructive behaviour to escape their reality. In an almost predictable fashion, they begin to commit small crimes, such as shoplifting, while quite young to pay for their drugs and other forms of escape.
This is the beginning of their downward spiral. They invariably get sent to juvenile detention centers where once again they are abused and disempowered. The idea of “it’s me or it’s them”/”by any means necessary” is reinforced, and the majority of the delinquents leave the center and move on to bigger and bigger crimes, as well as more and more substance abuse and self-destructive behaviour.
Oh, I feel so demoralized right now! I cannot bear to think about what their lives must be/must have been like. And to be honest, my mind shrinks from fully understanding what is actually being experienced by so many (hundreds and thousands) of our weakest members of society!
We are supposed to protect our children, to be responsible for these, our most vulnerable member of society, to stop the big bad wolves of this world from grabbing and swallowing them up!
But as LB pointed out, many of us, most of us are not even aware of what is really going on, and if we are, we shut our eyes and leave it to others, the professionals, to deal with it. Alternatively, if we do acknowledge what’s happening, we feel as powerless or as impotent as the victims of abuse must feel.
My life is one of middle-class privilege. I have never had to worry about food, lodging, self-protection, abuse, etc. I have just skipped blighty along life’s path, having the best of what life has to offer, including travelling with my family to countless destinations around the world. In a typically entitled fashion, I sometimes feel very put out or sorry for myself when something hasn’t gone my way, but that has really been the extent of my angst!
Let me end with a question for all of us: How can we help these children and adolescents? What needs to change — in us, in society, in our assumptions — to make it safe for children in our world?
This answer does not lie with one of us. We need to figure it out together.
Who am I writing for?
No one in particular. Anyone. Everyone. Just someone who, like me, realizes that it’s up to us to make a difference.
