Who Decided to Remove the Children?

[The Romulan Republic]

I'd also like to add that they aren't just separating the children from the parents - they're also separating siblings. The boys and girls are being kept at different facilities. Also, we're ONLY see where the boys are being kept. Where are the girls?

I truly hope I'm wrong, but considering the history of abuse in institutions where children from marginalized groups were kept without proper oversight (residential schools, for example), and the ugly undercurrent of pedophile apologism running through the Alt. Reich in particular (see Milo, Roy Moore, and Trump himself), I would not be remotely surprised to find that their are child sex rings being run out of these places.

In addition, there are reports that care for toddlers and infants is being provided by the girl child prisoners instead of the guards/keepers.

Because a woman's place is raising children, don't you know. Even if they're an underage girl.

There is SO much fucked up wrong here.

There are no words for it.

[Exonerate]

Children as young as 14 said the guards there stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.”

In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told The Associated Press this week that she saw kids there with serious injuries. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases.

The boy had been in custody for over a month. One of his guardians told me that he had been ‘acting out’ and threatening to harm himself, by jumping from his bed. This man told me, ‘I’m his clinician,’ but he was definitely not a doctor. I don’t know if he’s a social worker, a medical assistant, a housekeeper. I have no clue. But he obviously had been granted some sort of authority in regard to assessing children and determining what their needs are. He wouldn’t provide basic background. I couldn’t find out any information because he would say, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that’ and ‘You don’t need to know that,’ even though a lot of my questions were relevant to taking care of the child. I was asking things like ‘Where are his parents?’

...

This boy seemed devastated—quiet and withdrawn. He barely spoke. I asked if he needed a hug. I kneeled down in front of the recliner, and this kid just threw himself into my arms and didn’t let go. He cried and I cried. And to think he’s been in a facility for a month without a hug, away from his parents, and scared, and not knowing when he’ll see them again or if he’ll see them again. While I held him, I heard the men standing behind me muttering that I was ‘rewarding his bad behavior.’ Thankfully, it was in English, so I don’t think the boy understood what they were saying, but it just revealed their attitudes toward these kids.

Jesus, this shit is fucking bloodcurdling. You know what the treatment of these kids reminds me of? Enemy combatants. Dollars to donuts when they went around hiring people, they went looking for people with experience handling kids and picked up people who were basically prison guards trained to make their prisoners comply, not childcare or social workers. Another dimension to chickens from "The War on Terror" coming home to roost.

[LaCroix]

They must have gone around to shop for unmarried people who were single children and fit a certain emotionally distanced profile. Because nobody could just be that bad with children to bechave like that. I just refuse to believe that a parent (or anybody with contact to children) could treat a child that bad.

[Broomstick]

Speaking as someone who has never been a parent.... I couldn't treat a child like that. It's not about being married or unmarried, a parent or not (look up the Turpin family, for example), it requires someone who is simply not normal in a bad sense to be party to this.

[Tribble]

Its a child concentration camp meant to deter brown people from entering the US. It takes a certain type of personality to run these kinds of things and "empathetic" isnt one of them. I'm sure they screened out people who would be squeamish beforehand.

[Zwinmar]

This is a case where I wouldn't trust myself to not shoot the asshole guards, administrators, and everyone else involved

[Zixinus]

The most likely explenation is that they've took border guards trained up to handle desperate border-crossing adults (you know, "those fence-hopping mexicans desperate to take your jobs!") who taught how to handle hardened convicts in prisons. Instead, they got this because they were the only staff on-hand and nobody cared to hire people qualified to handle children (or there was no time because they did not anticipate that they would need to). Now they're stuck with this job that they're both unprepared, untrained, underfunded and worst of all, obviously without the interest of their superiors about what is going on in-depth. In other words, in an impossible situation where you either quit (which is not a simple option for everyone) or just keep doing the job. It is not surprising that the most unemphatic stayed because they were the only ones willing.

I would not be surprised that those that spoke out against the conditions and overall situation were either silenced somehow (I'm primarily thinking along the lines "shut up or we'll fire you" or "we don't care, just do your job somehow", not something as melodramatic killed or harmed), quietly going along the dictated program despite their wishes (and guilty for that), fired or already quit (those who can and I imagine that "caring for the rights of the convicts" is not a plus point for most prison guards).

I mean, this is how they handle adults in prisons and that's normal for the USA (and most of the world, sadly). It's obvious that they simply took the existing tools and used it to solve an existing problem without concern for the result.

[NecronLord]

They must have gone around to shop for unmarried people who were single children and fit a certain emotionally distanced profile. Because nobody could just be that bad with children to bechave like that. I just refuse to believe that a parent (or anybody with contact to children) could treat a child that bad.

As someone who fits that profile, thanks for the stereotype, shit for brains.

In fact actual academic research on concentration camp guards has shown that there is no profile, and the likes of Eichmann had relatively content family lives behind the scenes. They put on their hats, went out the door, clocked on and started murdering.

The directors of Nazi children's work camps and slave farms (because that was a thing) were often recruited from people with extensive childcare experience.

People who do evil are very good at psychologically distancing themselves from the evil, and compartmentalising it.

[LaCroix]

They must have gone around to shop for unmarried people who were single children and fit a certain emotionally distanced profile. Because nobody could just be that bad with children to bechave like that. I just refuse to believe that a parent (or anybody with contact to children) could treat a child that bad.

As someone who fits that profile, thanks for the stereotype, shit for brains.

In fact actual academic research on concentration camp guards has shown that there is no profile, and the likes of Eichmann had relatively content family lives behind the scenes. They put on their hats, went out the door, clocked on and started murdering.

The directors of Nazi children's work camps and slave farms (because that was a thing) were often recruited from people with extensive childcare experience.

People who do evil are very good at psychologically distancing themselves from the evil, and compartmentalising it.

Well, since you are protesting against being in "that" group, you obviously are not one with "that" kind of emotional profile... Don't call me out for trying to slip on that shoe, yourself.

Concentration camps were a quite different kind of thing - the children rarely did not go directly into the showers - this selection was a job for the worst of the guards, who took joy in killing en masse. Children were of no value in hard labour, so they were sorted out right ahead. (Knowing what the life inside of the camps was like, it might even be easier to rationalize for the somewhat more humane guards to outright (mercy-)kill the kids, to spare them the slow suffering death.)

Inside (most of - I don't know about all of them, but the earlier ones certainly had some, when they had not yet been turned into killing and torture camps, yet, but were pretty much gulags, still) the camps, there were only adults - and it's somewhat easier to rationalize that it's fine to treat them badly, for they are criminals, traitors, dangerous people, etc.

But that's REALLY hard with children. Anyone with children will have at least the basic knowledge that tells him that this particular child in the article is just traumatized and needs consoling. Anyone who had a smaller silbling will know and realize it. You need someone with no knowledge, at all, to have people think it's just bad behavior, or to tell silblings they aren't allowed to hug. And even of that group, a lot will have the right instinct to tellthem how to behave - empathy.

So you need some people who are very specific to be this bad at the job - someone with absolutely no exposure to young children to draw on the experience (or very bad template from their own childhood) and complete lack of empathy. Perfect would be strongly indoctrinated people (Immigrants are evil), and sociopaths are high up on the list. And even after pre-filtering like this, you will need to hand-pick the ones who will follow your policy without remorse, because even of these preselected best candidates, a good part will not be willing to follow these rules to the letter. Because our behavior towards children is hard-wired by instinct, for as long as mammals exist. It's so hard-wired that people even get useless animals as pets because they trigger our "cute, must care for" instinct.

I'm pretty sure they had to go through shitloads of staff to find some people willing to work like this.

[NecronLord]

The fact that you're talking about showers - as in gas extermination - in the context of children in the Holocaust demonstrates you don't know about what I'm talking about in detail. In fact the Nazis had a whole policy of rounding up children from occupied territories to test them for aryan-ness. The Nazis were such that no matter how many evils you think you know about there's always another one.

So, I'm not going to thread-jack but there were actual children-only facilities separate from extermination camps like Auschwitz where yes they took in former childcare professionals as guards and administrators. We are talking about an entirely separate project.

In short, lack of childcare experience is not a criteria used by the nazis to determine who would manage children for forced labour and other abuse. We have no evidence beyond your visceral gut reaction that this is the case here.

The idea that you, or people like you, cannot do evil, is foolish. Humans have spent thousands of years working out ways to dehumanize each other.

---

To come back to this after a few moments thought in the shower, I'd like to point back at the Milgram experiment and other such research into the topic of evil, there is no factor that generally underlies willingness to do evil. As one psychologist has said recently while reconstructing this:

“Upon learning about Milgram’s experiments, a vast majority of people claim that ‘I would never behave in such a manner,’ says Tomasz Grzyb, a social psychologist involved in the research. “Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant.”

You're again saying 'I could never do this' and imagining that the people who do this have to be specially selected. They don't. Most people are willing to administer harm to others in the right circumstances. You are implying a level of trawling through the gutters to find the right guards for these places that isn't really required.

Do you think all the teachers who birched children while they screamed through the 19th and 20th centuries started out as single children without exposure to children they cared for? Of course you don't, you're just (ironically) looking for a reason to dehumanize the guards here and assure yourself this is outside the norms of human behaviour, that these people are long term deviants who could never have been like the rest of us.

If anything the research suggests that the old adage 'power corrupts' is utterly true - that's why we have inspections in schools and many other places, looking for abuse. It's not as easy as running a background check and excluding the wierdos.