Invisible
It was five o'clock in the morning and I.M.'s father was returning home to Las Condes, a high-class commune in Santiago, after a long business trip to China. “What did you learn yesterday at school?” he asked the six-year-old, waking him up. Confused, half asleep, he replied: “To add.” “Tell me how much is two and three,” then asked the man. I.M. felt he had butterflies in his stomach. He knew something bad was about to happen. “Seven?” he said hesitant.
His father grabbed him by the arm and took him to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and put him in pajamas in the icy water. Then he sat him on his desk. “Go study now!!,” he ordered, and put a blank workbook in front of him. “I had to fill two columns per page of: 2+3=5, 2+3=5 and so on, in all sheets, on both sides, until I filled the workbook,” the 28-year-old recalls today.
For as long as he can remember, he underwent the most diverse abuse at the hands of his father. The shouting and the insults were just the beginning: "You're stupid, you're moron," he kept repeating to him. Then came the hitting: the hits to the tables, to the walls and, of course, the beating both to him and his three sisters. “Punches, slaps, smacks on the back of the neck, shoves. He beat the hell out of me,” he summarizes. The first time he kicked him out of the house? Seven years. Finally, he endured the sexual abuse, the touching, which he tolerated way into his adolescence. He wasn't the only victim though. “My dad waited for everyone to fall asleep and went into my twin sister's room,” he says.
That time marked I.M. forever. “In my house, there was no possibility of having an opinion. Since I come from a Jewish family, I know the analogy may sound tough, but it was like living with Hitler. My house was almost Auschwitz.”
Among healthcare providers, educators, lawyers, and other experts who work in family environments like I.M.'s, and who research childhood issues, this young man's story does not come as much of a surprise. “I've had to see cases and I've heard about others, where I've been asked for advice from psychologists or school principals,” says the lawyer and former director of Sename Francisco Estrada.
“It's an invisible phenomenon in the sense that parents with the resources will prevent the case from going into the court system or only allow it when there's some kind of interest for them.”
Francisco Estrada , lawyer
According to Felipe Lecannelier, a child development psychologist and physician, there is, undoubtedly a hidden figure concerning violations of rights in children and adolescents (NNA) of the upper socioeconomic stratum, or ABC1. “We would love to have more data, but, unlike the lower strata, where you go to community health centers and you can check the records, interview the patients, nobody will provide us with that information at private clinic and those families will refuse to be assessed,” explains the researcher from Universidad de Santiago.
However, there is one report that reveals the subtle differences of mistreatment among social classes. Dated back to 2012, this report was made by UNICEF and is the last of its kind that considered the variable of social stratum. While psychological violence reaches 17.3% in the lower level, it rises to 23.2% in the high stratum. In contrast, severe physical violence occurs at 27.2% at the low level and 24.2% at the high level. The phenomenon is clearly present across all levels.
“There is the image that the poor is stupid, alcoholic, drug addict, abuser, a beater, but when you start to see these data by socioeconomic level, you don't find so many differences,” says Lecannelier, who found that the children at the highest and lowest strata had the same prevalence of mental issues in one of his latest studies.
“Indeed, there is a perception that this doesn't happen, or it rarely occurs, but there are a lot more cases than one would believe,” says Andrea von Hoveling, a Pediatric and Adolescent gynecologist at Santa María Clinic and El Carmen Hospital, of Maipú. “When I say that I encounter cases of sexual abuse, people immediately assume that they are from my work at the hospital and I have to clarify that they are not, that they are patients of the clinic or people close to me.”
Estimates from Fundación para la Confianza, that works with sexual abuse victims, points out that for every sexual abuse report, 25 are silenced. For this reason, José Andrés Murillo, executive director of the institution, believes that the figures should be similar with other types of abuse, “or perhaps more,” because they are not always understood as a violation of rights and are overlooked.
While this phenomenon has been mostly associated with the lowest social strata in our society, different circumstances have contributed into slowly making this phenomenon more visible.
“Undoubtedly, we get more cases from the ABC1 group,” says family judge Verónica Ortiz. Her perception is that the phenomenon is related to the amendment of the shared tuition Act. Since that year, there has been a clear rise in the number of Child Custody and Visitation cases.
In addition, since mid-2017, family judges have progressively opted to appoint guardians ad litem to these types of cases, after the court dismissed a Child Custody trial arguing that a guardian should have been appointed.
“When the guardians entered these cases two years ago, they realized that these proceedings often involved a minor who is being mistreated by one or both parties,” says Francisco Estrada.
Ester Valenzuela, executive director of the Centro Iberoamericano de Derechos del Niño, CIDENI (Iberoamerican Center of Child’s Rights) and guardian ad litem, has been part of this process. Initially, most of its cases were for child protection and with minors of very low resources, but she has begun to increasingly encounter this other type of cases.
In these contentious cases, which are for matters such as alimony, personal care and visitation, Valenzuela says that many times you see “an enormous animosity between parents and that, in the midst of that conflict, children are totally invisible and violated.”
Attorney-at-Law, Paula Correa, also guardian ad litem, adds that these parents have lawyers "some of them very prestigious, which are very active and with a more confrontational profile.” This usually extends the proceedings and makes the guardian's task of visibilizing and safeguarding the rights of the child much more complex.
In addition to this scenario, the minors themselves are more aware of their rights. "This is a generation that now understands what is happening to them, unlike adults who only now understand what happened to them years ago," says child and adolescent psychiatrist Pilar del Río, who, in addition to attending to children and adolescents in her private practice, advises schools on issues of mistreatment and abuse. But this recognition, she adds, also comes with a huge frustration of being defenseless against these abuses.
“You see this family, all blond, blue-eyed, with surnames that are hard to pronounce, big house, multiple cars, good schools, trips across the globe… How are these children going to be unhappy? For me, it was all a disguise, living in that house was always martyrdom.”
I.M.
It was only at the age of 16 that I.M. began to understand that the life he led, the mistreatment he suffered, was not normal. One day, he defended himself.
“I came back from social work at school and I had to bring home a classmate's notebook to study, to review his notes, I don't remember it well.”
- Where's your classmate's notebook? - asked his father.
- My classmate didn't take it, he forgot it.
- And what did I tell you?
- To bring my classmate's notebook.
His dad started shouting. First, he hit the table and then him. “I recall being sit, covering my head. Then the chair staggered, and when he came back, I pushed him, and I got him off. He lost his balance and hit the wall.”
I.M. grabbed his wallet and ran out of the house. He ran non-stop from the avenue Presidente Riesco, in Las Condes, to Puente Nuevo, in La Dehesa (about 6.5 miles). “It was too much adrenaline. I ran until my legs were gone and I fell to the floor. I called a friend who lived in San Carlos de Apoquindo (5 miles away) and asked him if I could go to his house, without saying anything. I don't even remember which path I took; only that I ran again. I ran and ran.”