Christian Nationalists Exporting Child Abuse Through Homeschooling
Because nothing says freedom like beating your kid
Because nothing says freedom like beating your kid
Originally published at Prism & Pen
An openDemocracy report has found that American homeschooling groups are promoting child abuse practices across international borders into nations like Brazil.
The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), founded in 1983, is a well-known promoter of physically punishing students, including with paddles. It has also opposed contraception, abortion and same-sex marriage and, in 2004, went so far as to propose a constitutional amendment to ban equal marriage rights.
The HSLDA is opposed to human rights for children
The United States is the only country in the world that has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force in 1990. The U.S. is also a haven for homeschooling, which was legalised across the 50 states in 1993, but remains largely unregulated.
The HSLDA takes credit for both.
The UN Convention says parents should help children realize their own rights, and sets four core principles: non-discrimination, best interest of the child, the right to survival and development, and the respect of the views of the child.
But according to HSLDA former lead attorney Chris Klicka, children should not enjoy human rights independent of their parents’ rights: “If children have rights, they could refuse to be home-schooled, plus it takes away parents’ rights to physically discipline their children.”
The HSLDA is run by Michael Farris, the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The ADF is one of the most notorious Christian-nationalist groups in the United States, calling for sterilization of trans people, the elimination of same-sex marriage, and the reinstitution of sodomy laws criminalizing same-gender sex and other forms of non-procreative sex.
See my Twitter megathread for details about ADF, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.
Farris explained in detail why and how he believed children should be spanked in his book, ‘How a Man Prepares His Daughter for Life.’
He wrote, “I am a firm believer in — dare I say it? — spanking.”
Farris suggested parents use hands or a “small wooden object such as a spoon”, in moderation, and “only to the bottom… You will find yourself facing child-abuse charges if you ever strike a child on the face or head.”
His group sees child protection services as a “threat” to homeschooling families.
The Home School Legal Defense Association also provides secret “tips” in order to avoid getting caught with regards to harming children.
In the HSLDA document ‘The Social Worker At Your Door: 10 Helpful Hints’, Klicka advised parents how to “avoid potential situations that could lead to a child welfare investigation.” They include:
Do not spank children in public…
Do not spank someone else’s child unless they are close Christian friends.
You can read the document here.
Ryan Stollar, a former homeschooled student and advocate for children and abuse survivors in the U.S., told openDemocracy, “HSLDA believes very strongly in the idea that parents have universal rights to parent their children how they see fit. And corporal punishment is probably one of the top parental rights that HSLDA focuses on the most.”
Stollar said corporal punishment was “widespread” among Evangelical homeschooling communities in the U.S. But as most U.S. states have deregulated home education, it is nearly impossible to get accurate figures.
A database set up in 2013, Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, “aims to catalogue all known cases of crimes against children that have occurred in a homeschool context.”
Warning, the stories are complete nightmares to read.
“In the United States, homeschooling often shields abusive parents from scrutiny and children suffer as a result. It also allows parents to teach their children extreme ideology without challenge,” U.S. former homeschooled student and survivor Jerusha Lofland told openDemocracy.
Lofland is not against homeschooling, as she homeschooled her children herself. There are situations “where homeschooling can be in the best interests of the child.” But, she added, “homeschooled kids are at greatest risk when they are isolated…”
In a blog where she posts critical recounts of her upbringing in a strictly religious homeschooling family, Lofland wrote, “The youngest children were spanked on an almost daily basis for infractions as minor as not praying before meals on command…”
The Alliance Defending Freedom and Focus on the Family are interlinked together with a group known as the World Congress of Families — a platform for international groups, primarily U.S. and Russian evangelical groups opposed to equal rights for LGBTQ+ people.
I wrote about the World Congress of Families in an article for LGBTQ Nation detailing how the World Congress of Families backed a bill in Ghana that was called one of the worst anti-LGBTQ+ bills ever created.
The World Congress of Families and ADF work in tandem, and Focus on the Family work alongside both.
The Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council (Focus on the Family’s legislative lobby group) have for years worked against LGBTQ+ equality and against homeschooling regulations.
An openDemocracy investigation last year exposed Focus on the Family’s involvement in anti-LGBTQIA+ ‘conversion therapy’ activities in the U.S. and Costa Rica.
I wrote about that for LGBTQ Nation as well.
Focus on the Family was founded in 1977 by conservative psychologist James Dobson. Dobson, who Mike Pence considers his role model, is known for his extreme views, including his push for corporal punishment that has now been found to have traumatizing effects for children.
Dobson also once said that the shooting at Sandy Hook happened because of gay marriage, and in the same vein published a newsletter with a letter that said fathers should take their sons into bathrooms to show them that they have the same private parts — to try to discourage them from being gay, which you can read in his own words here.
More crazy from James Dobson:
“Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.”
Cringe!
Here’s the connection to exporting child abuse
ADF, HSLDA, Focus on the Family, and the World Congress of Families are partners with a group known as Classical Conversations, a U.S. Christian homeschooling programme also introduced in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa and the U.K.
The HSLDA established the Global Home Education Exchange (GHEX) in 2012 as a platform for its international activities.
The GHEX leadership has a web of ultra-conservative connections. Board member Alexey Komov is also the World Congress of Families representative in Russia and sits on the board of the Madrid-based online platform CitizenGo, known for its attacks against LGBTIQ people.
Komov helped to fundraise for CitizenGo, asking for money for the group from Konstantin Malofeyev and other Russian oligarchs.
Komov and his wife Irina Shamolina run Classical Conversations in Russia, selling guides to the homeschooling teaching method that dates back to the Middle Ages.
Stollar (the homeschooling abuse survivor) said: “HSLDA and GHEX are proactively and extensively exporting everything they do in the U.S. … to create a world in which there is hierarchy and power designs only in the hands of those who look and think and believe like them.”
Mike Donnelly, HSLDA’s director of global relations and GHEX secretary, travelled last year to Brazil, invited by the National Association for Home Education (ANED), “to work closely with the Brazilian association, providing advice, encouragement, and financial support.”
Two months later, he spoke at a public hearing in Congress arguing in favour of a relaxed attitude to regulating home education, urging them to legalise homeschooling (some 0.03% of Brazilian school-age children are currently thought to be educated, illegally, in this way).
Brazilian homeschooling lobbyists and advocates are promoting corporal punishment as a means of educating children, as reported by openDemocracy.
Connelly and Alexandre Magno Moreira (a Brazilian homeschooler who wrote a course explaining to parents how to spank children without breaking the law) co-authored a GHEX document to declare parental rights and homeschooling as “fundamental rights”.
Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro is signaling he openly supports homeschooling, despite the fact the groups all attached to this push are all designated hate groups who advocate child abuse.
If you are in Brazil, this is a matter of grave concern.
This story is once again a case of Christian nationalism operating without supervision or oversight leading to great harms. Here we have once again a case of Christian nationalism leading traumatizing lives. Christian nationalism is a pernicious evil everyone should reject.
Countless children who have been harmed by homeschooling, but somehow we have not only been unable to sign pledges declaring children have rights to be free from threats of violence but we have allowed groups to perpetuate violence towards kids in the name of religion.
This has to stop.
We always talk about “parents’ rights”, but what about children’s rights? Do children not matter? Apparently not if we can’t sign a UN declaration of human rights for children! What does that say about us?
I’ll end with this quote taken from an article written in The Hill by Dr. Rebecca London of UC Santa Cruz and Dr. Catherine Ramstetter, the founder of Successful Healthy Children and founding member of the Global Recess Alliance.
“It is an epic failure on the part of our country and one that could be rectified, if only we truly believed that children have rights: rights which deserve to be made explicit so as to be considered paramount in our institutions and policies.”
Nuff said.
— Songbird 💜🂡♠️🏹
As an ace trans woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling family, thank you for speaking out for us. I can vouch first hand how much abuse me, my sister's, and other kids we grew up around who were homeschooled received as well. I was abused physically, mentally, emotionlly, financially, and sent to conversion therapy. I wasn't allowed to have a social life at many points growing up (and therefore have zero social skills as an adult, which is why I love as a hermit). I can only think of one or maybe two homeschooling families I knew that I couldn't see any evidence of abuse growing up out of the hundreds we met (all of whom were Christian conservative, never met any liberal or secular homeschooled families). Thanks for speaking out about these issues that really don't receive enough attention. Just tired of seeing this issue get overlooked and knowing kids are getting abused right now because no one is willing to even mention what's going on in the homeschool lobby world.