Dear People,
FEMALE ENERGY IN CHILD PROTECTION
Introducing Faye Yager
Faye Yager asked that we not announce her visit in advance. She is under
constant FBI surveillance, and that of local law enforcement, and has been
acquitted in three hours by a jury of criminal charges totaling a possible sixty
years. Her husband Howard and one of their children, Joshua, flew in for
Monday's class at their own expense.
Children of the Underground is Faye Yager's personal creation. She actually
sought publicity for children she helped go underground, to air their own
statements and filmed testimony on network talk shows and in popular magazines.
She became a teenaged bride to move from poverty and obscurity in rural West
Virginia. She caught her husband laying his penis on their two-year-old
daughter's food tray for her to fondle. He had her committed as making insane
charges, where she received a series of ten shock treatments. She later had her
daughter diagnosed as having gonorrhea with dark green vaginal discharge. She
tried to flee, was jailed, and ultimately saw her daughter taken back to the
father. For more than a decade her daughter would not repeat her story, until
in 1986 she ran away from the father, called her mother, and at the moment that
the father was charged with molesting other children in his home neighborhood,
told her mother all. The daughter's life is still a mess; her ambivalence towar
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her own mother as acute as ever. While Faye and Howard look for signs of healin
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in her oldest daughter, Faye's interest in protecting children has taken on a
life of its own.
She began trying to do something by spontaneously contacting friends and lawyers
and the jailed mother they were trying to help in Mississippi. The mother was
refusing to tell the court where to find her child, in hiding from an abusive
father. Thereafter, supported by her family in part by Howard's income as a
pediatrician in Atlanta, she did her best to learn from early mistakes and desig
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an international underground network for children.
The structure of her network reminds me of that described for the national
resistance in the film "The Battle of Algiers." Each cell in the network
consisted of three persons. One of the three had independent contact with each
of the other two. The one at the apex of the triangle was one of two having
independent contact with someone higher up the chain, and so forth. Even if
strands of the network were cut off by catching and "vetting" a member, no membe
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can identify more than three members of the network. And like a cancer, the
guerrilla force gains power by engaging the oppressor on two different fronts.
Faye's number is listed. She will go virtually any distance even for a half hou
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alone with a child to decide for herself what the child is saying and asking for
.
She will offer the child sanctuary from a parent who has brought the child to he
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if her decision is that the "protective" parent is in fact an abuser. She will
tell the child that she will do her best to help fulfill any fantasy the child
has of a safe place to live, while being what some commentators consider all-too
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brutally frank about getting a child to talk or about options lying before the
child. She has an array of contacts to make for children she believes to be
genuinely running from abuse. She assumes the international network now include
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thousands of persons offering shelter, but makes it a point not to know.
Faye, do I remember this wrong, or didn't you analogize the process of deciding
what children fear and want to be like a mother cat's instinct for the truth?
I think I understand your point. I have been taken to task myself for making
snap judgments about what version of events to act upon, as in my decision to
trust Debbie and Mary. In earlier letters to this class, I have spoken of this
use of instinct you describe as the art or science of developing one's sense of
personal judgment. It is a matter of learning from one's mistakes as best one
can and seeing what happens when one relies on this or that bit of evidence of
what others truly fear and want.
Faye has a federal lawsuit asking--was it?--$4 million damages for the FBI's
nationally orchestrated violations of her civil rights. Published commentary
reflects a reality Faye readily acknowledges: She is either devil or angel for
children depending on how you look at it. She hasn't given herself much ground
for middle-of-the-road appeal. Mary told us in class how in an Atlanta
restaurant the local police chief had come up and told Faye to keep giving hell
to the bastards, while a county away the police were threatening her life and
liberty with a vengeance.
THE POWER
Susie Hall from the Alliance for the Rights of Children was back visiting at her
own expense. As Susie sat listening to Faye I couldn't help thinking how alike
their involvement was: each had been abused--one as a child, the other as a
child bride--each had acted to try to rescue their child from an abusive parent,
and had reached out to another mother-in-jail in the news to do something to hel
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other children from suffering as their own daughters had. Each had gotten
carried away in internationally organized activity on behalf of children other
than their own. Each had found a partner earning money and giving them time and
support for what many would call their obsessions. Each was in turn
embarrassingly grateful to me for having this class and inviting them to tell
their stories before it. Susie had never before described to an audience of
strangers how her father had raped her, and Faye had never before invited to
speak before a college or university audience. To me, the two of them together,
and for that matter Sandy, Keith, Debbie and Mary in our class, represent what
feminists would call female energy at work.
Female energy is NOT something associated with a biology peculiar to women.
Rather it is a way of responding to danger and protecting community which "good
mothers" are expected to master (and keep within private discourse, within areas
defined as appropriate in reasonable/real man terms). In part, mothers are held
accountable for the plight and sins of their children regardless of what the
courts and police do in the name of the public. Judges feel free to get mad at
mothers (and fathers like Keith who have the audacity to act like mothers) for
getting hysterical seeing their children carried back screaming and heaving to
their abusers. That's a hard political reality readily appreciated by women
whose children or who themselves are trapped in abuse. So if you're strong
enough and survive, let alone strong enough to protect your children, you learn
to do what it takes in spite of "the system" rather than because of it. You're
expected to do what it takes quietly of course, without making a public scene.
The kids have to eat, you have to save them from being raped tonight, the
responsibility is in reality all yours, and if there's a right decision to make
you had damned well better make it yourself because there's no one else there
doing it for you. Female energy grows out of social necessity. It is an
expression of a will to survive nightmare reality.
Faye believes, and now hears from children she has helped later in adulthood,
that whatever moments of sanctuary and safety she can offer a child can make
mountains of difference in the child's later life. I'm reminded of the finding
by Maya Pines and others I have cited so often: that what appears to be the
minutest contact with an adult who acknowledges the horror of a child's reality
and offers the promise that somehow, somewhere, safe adults are to be found, can
turn out to be the crucial confidence-giver later in life. It can give a child
the confidence and discrimination as an adult to find nonabusive, supportive
partners and friends, and to engage children as peers in human rights without
carrying one's abuse a generation forward.
Susie and Mary believe that if a Senate rider to the current catch-all crime bil
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passes, calling upon the Justice Department to investigate state, local and
federal abuse and neglect of abused children, more children will gain more
notice, more sanctuary, more of a voice, more respect, more respite from abuse.
"Small wins" is what social psychologist Karl Weick has called it--taking comfor
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for bits of justice and safety, not giving up the struggle for survival even
without hope of ending the recurring weight of the oppression, without hoping of
taking over or reforming the legality state of mind. On the one hand, it appear
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to be so little to be accomplishing, of such little effect. On the other hand,
I find incredible effect in the aggregate force of such seemingly isolated,
personal maternal energy and moral commitment.
I have experienced many magic moments over decades of teaching some twenty
subjects in a variety of places and settings. Never have I experienced the
feeling of being at the center of such power as I felt in class Monday. Susie
Hall had never until then personally met Faye Yager. They in turn drew friends
and visitors, including a Norwegian, a parole officer, and variety of people to
class for the first time. Dwight Noble was back to listen. Gene Bell, Sandy's
husband, a professional photographer, taped the event. "Regular" students and
Susie spoke with Faye as peers struggling to get a grip on how to offer children
safety. A large group of us celebrated the occasion at a restaurant later.
This class essentially happened TO me at just the time in my large class where
people were telling me I offered them no concrete ways to make peace in place of
violence. Here I draw a lesson in my own involvement in change: The only risk
I took in offering this class was in being questioned (a) for letting students
and visitors take the lead in designing and running the class, and (b) for makin
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the personal political by involving people with real problems into the heart of
class discussion. The former I got away with as just another wild act of a
renegade abuser of academic freedom, and the latter by taking pains to open
discussion to rival interpretation of children's wants, needs and fears. I have
in fact taken relatively little heat for offering this class, relative to heat
I have gotten from any number of quarters in the past. To me, doing the class
is a small thing, requiring little courage, risking little. Small as that
example is, I offer both Faye and Susie their first opportunity to air their
concerns and information as a topic of college discussion in its own right. To
them that turns out to be a big thing. Defining the situation as they do, they
help create the reality, now quite real and personal to me, that a class I'm
teaching is as close to the heart of international action that matters as I coul
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have imagined. The class has in reality become a vehicle for them to express
themselves, meet ("network"), and gain strength through validation. Students
like Michele and Julianne are in the process of letting Susie help them become
involved in their own children's rights activity after graduation. I can hardly
foresee what various people sitting in class last night might do with the
experience, but I do expect to hear back from graduates of this class more than
usual.
All these feelings and events to me represent the power of what Martha Ruddick
has called "maternal thinking" and action. It is anarchist by necessity, in the
case of Faye's remarkable initiative a manifest case of what Bill Breeden calls
"guerrilla peacefare." The power I find myself part of is evidence to me that
personal witness is the crux of replacing organized violence with justice. It
is the way. For readers who spend time wallowing in organized criminology, what
is happening in and around this seminar is evidence that Richard Quinney is righ
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on by asking that we put cultivation of our own personal selves and souls before
the salvation of others'. Far from being digressing from scholarhip and
commitment to social change, I think Quinney was right on about where the soul
of peacemaking, including safety and respect for children's rights, lies--first
in choosing one's own rights and wrongs, primarily in setting one's own personal
course. We characterize this power as female, as yin to the yang of change, but
like the romantic poet whose name I've forgotten who coined the term, I find tha
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the real "movers and shakers" in this world are those whose outlandishness lies
in acting on purely personal authority.
Faye, Howard, Joshua and Susie, thank you and all our friends who joined class
Monday to bringing such power alive.
Mary says it's time to get serious about the design of our text or texts.
There's another fruit of our efforts to look forward to.
SATANIC CULTS
Faye told me she has seen evidence of cults from children telling essentially th
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same stories who come to her from all over the country. She finds the practices
of ritual dismemberment and such to be traditions passed on, so far as she has
heard, through at least the last five generations. By now I want to know more.
As with the issue of whether children lie, I by now believe that there has to be
some serious truth to the allegations I keep hearing about. I want to find out
more, and try to sort out a better idea of what I believe might be going on.
Unfortunately, Michael Nelson has just written advising me that he will not be
able to come to class to talk about satanic cults on November 22 or on any Monda
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in the near future. I am about to pick up a book Sandy and Mary had recalled fo
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me at the library, John DeCamp's THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP. I want to spend more
time looking into the matter next semester. I will try not to shed my critical
faculties; I no longer feel I can presume the whole notion, and police/court
involvement in it, is purely a figment of people's imagination.
Next Monday, we have no guest speakers or videos. We can just talk. Barb tells
me people in class have issues they want to raise. Let's get to it.
Love and peace, Hal