Time's Up for Parents who Abuse

We’re living in an important time in terms of family scapegoating abuse - a real inflection point. 

The Age of Silence is fading - indeed the Silent Generation - those now age 80 - 97 are mostly retired and have passed on the cultural baton.  What’s evolving in its place is an Era of Transparency.  

This is brilliant news for the family scapegoat. 

We’ve never been as well versed in mental health, boundaries and nervous system regulation.  It’s all over the internet , even TikTok.  Thirty year olds are very comfortable talking about their feelings - publicly,  something that would be utterly cringeworthy for the Silent Generation. 

We’ve changed so much in the last 100 years.  

The oppression, dominance and power plays were more extreme.  (I’m speaking from my personal lived experience as a white female who grew up in Ireland in the 1970’s).  

Imagine growing up in Ireland in the 1960’s and being the family scapegoat.  It would have been hell.  Your name sullied.  Your family had the ability to turn the whole village against you.  And you suffered because of that. 

Everyone believed your parents' narrative about you.  They were the upstanding members of society.  And that meant you were doomed. 

How do you get a job, how do you have any credibility when everyone is whispering behind your back that you belong in the local mental asylum?  

The family benefitted from the lack of education available, the taboo nature of family abuse, and a wider society who obeyed authority without question.  

‘Honour thy father and mother’ was drilled into everyone and there was little to no safeguarding for minors.  

In this era, the family scapegoat was wearing a metaphorical straightjacket.  There was nothing they could do to reverse their family’s narrative about them.  Even though most people would have known and/or suspected that extreme forms of abuse were taking place, they said nothing.  The abuser's reputation was protected.  

With every decade that passes human consciousness evolves.  Never more so than the last twenty years with the arrival of the Internet.  Information is widely available. 

Younger generations don’t feel the same loyalty to protect their abusers reputation.  They value being real.  

Keeping with the Ireland example - in the 1980’s there were shocking abuse scandals and every week another news story broke about abuse in religious orders and other institutions.  Whistle blowers were listened to and given a public stage.  Investigations were held.  People wanted answers.  

It didn’t change or heal things over night but it was a start. 

A decade or two later it was becoming slightly less shameful to show emotions, be sensitive or vulnerable.  

The Zeitgeist was suddenly ready for dysfunctional families to be exposed - for victims to start talking about it. 

A google search for the term “No Contact Family of Origin” now returns 1.3 billion results, compared to none just 25 years ago.

“Scapegoat child abuse” shows over 2.3 million results which is up from zero in 2000.

For the family scapegoat deep in the trenches of being on the receiving end of the prolonged abuse and not seeing a way out yet, the dysfunctional family looms all powerful.  What they may not have the ability to see is how small a silo this family operates in.  

For example , if the parents posted the things they claim about their scapegoat on Facebook they would never be met with the loyal mob they were previously so used to - the ones who bow down to their every word and take it as gospel, grateful that they’re not the target.  There’d be a wider demographic who would question them and their fabricated story lines.   Their vitriol would never stand up.  

People who know the scapegoat would vouch for their good character and include solid receipts.  This would completely discredit the dysfunctional family’s narrative who would be left with egg on their face.  

Their pathologisation of their scapegoat no longer washes in an emotionally literate, therapeutically informed, more morally conscious society of today. 

We’re no longer in the village gathering outside mass under umbrellas for the news of the day. 

The village got the Internet.  

Dysfunctional families are desperately clinging to the archaic silo that they’ve operated in and benefitted from for hundreds of generations.  

And time’s up on that.