Science isn't the problem, morality is

[ljwrites]

What separation from parents does to children

“The effect [of forcibly separating children from their families] is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”

(via redrikki)

This is an informative article but I think Dr. Nelson is dead wrong that people would never tear children away from their parents if they knew the level of harm it does to the children. Many don't care, and for still others that's the whole damned point.

Nelson himself as a pediatrician, and one in a cushy position at that focused solely on research and facts, would never recommend such separation. But what if he were a doctor consulting with an embattled and overworked, and also heavily racist and classist, child protective services and family court system? If he were a doctor cooperating with the immigration authorities? If he were an immigration official? A high-ranking government official formulating policy?

Did all these other professionals really act out of ignorance of the harm they were doing to children? Or did they simply not care, or did they lead themselves to believe the harm was not so great? Or was the lifelong wounding of children a feature, not a bug, in not just last year's but decades and centuries of systematic family separation policies?

Pleading ignorance of the science instead of apathy and cruelty (which come down to the same thing as far as the recipient is concerned) is a misstatement of the problem, and is one of the ways scientists can give moral cover to atrocities. Nelson has, as it were, misdiagnosed the problem: It's not that people don't know the science. In the U.S. context, it's that a lot of professionals and policymakers don't think brown, Black, and poor children hurt like their own children do. Or, too often, they want to hurt children in order to terrorize and traumatize them and their communities. The true evil here are the empathy gap and the desire to dominate by hurting those most vulnerable, not simple ignorance.