WWhen I first started working in the mid-90s, there was an uproar when the evangelical church in the United States produced a parenting leaflet with details about the appropriate size of cane to use to punish a six-month-old baby . The article was a scandal enough to travel across the Atlantic (in the old-fashioned way, from American newspapers to British newspapers), but I ultimately decided it wasn’t worth commenting on. A story about a bad person. Child abuse exists and is sometimes hidden under religion. There is a broader debate about whether religions can do more at an institutional level to eradicate this, but such efforts, if they are sincere, should be You shouldn’t even start. Atheists, such institutions will not accept them. There was also a feeling at the time that just because someone said something and it was posted on a leaflet, you didn’t necessarily have to react as if you were starting a movement.
Thirty years later, child abuse still exists, sometimes disguised as religion. Ruby Franke, a Utah mother of six, was found guilty yesterday of aggravated child abuse, a charge so serious that her prison term could reach up to 60 years. There is. prison. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she was a prolific parenting YouTuber until her “8 Passengers” channel was removed by the platform last year. She proselytized harsh discipline, including withholding food as her punishment. But in a video blog, she said she created what prosecutors called “concentration camp-like conditions” for her children, in extreme heat without shoes, socks or water. He omitted any mention of the fact that he was forced to do physical labor and stand on top of hot water. Concrete is poured continuously for hours or even days at a time. Her 12-year-old son, malnourished and bound with duct tape, ran away and called for help from a neighbor. Police later found his sister similarly malnourished.
It’s a weary story filled with a familiar dry sadness. Hearing that children are coming to harm us causes feelings of disgust and hopelessness. That’s how we survive, to protect the young and the little people.
But if that alone is timeless, the potential for online influencers to build a movement is not. The glamorous Franke has over 2 million subscribers on her channel and her videos have been viewed one billion times. It was so obvious that she was spreading her brutality around the world, and it’s horrifying to think about the extent to which she normalized it.
Meanwhile, on X, people were reacting to a WordPress blogger promoting a Biblical justification for marital rape. Considering it was published in 2018, did it matter anymore? Should the platform have done more about it? Was it justified in wanting to silence him? The blog’s 13 million combined views mark a dangerous new constituency where once-outliers have found their tribe and now ferociously justify non-consensual sex with each other. Did it count? Or is it just the internet, and the price of that convenience is that someone, perhaps more than one person, ends up publishing something anti-social and probably not misogynistic every millisecond of the day? ?
All norms about what can and cannot be said have collapsed, so as a general verb, we should all do the same, as long as we can agree on what that way is. The concept of child-rearing was established. Part of it is driven by the wilds of social media. If adults don’t know what to make of this rising tide of fundamentalism or understand the threat it poses to social harmony and justice, how should children grow up in it? Shall we? That’s why we have such heated debates about whether our kids should have cell phones and how much screen time they should have, and the irony is that that’s what super-authoritarian parenting is all about. creating space for experts in If the liberal order is so great, why can’t it make decisions? ?And why are we so anxious??
As it turns out, if YouTube had shut down Franke’s channel sooner, it wouldn’t have made any difference. It doesn’t limit an individual’s reach, as evidenced by the example of Andrew Tate, who was permanently banned from the channel in 2022. Tate’s content is only shared by his followers. Besides, Franke didn’t need a video blogger to follow to abuse her children, and it would be impossible to resolve the question of whether that intensified her behavior.
There is no objective measure of proportionality when it comes to the crazy, extreme, and inhuman things people say online. Should Mr. Franke’s loud behavior have raised red flags for authorities sooner? Obviously you should. Her 12-year-old son shouldn’t have needed to run to her neighbor for this to come to light. But what if she’s actually a sane parent who dramatizes herself to exaggerate the effect, as YouTubers often do? And does the impossibility of remotely distinguishing between drama queens and abusers actually create that plain sight in which abusers hide?
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