Abuse doesn’t require a pandemic. Stop using it as an excuse to spread COVID-19

Derrick Peavy
16 min readOct 28, 2020

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I really do hate country music

On the afternoon of June 8, 1978, my 10 year old brother and soon to be 7 year old self slid into the back seat of a four door, 1978 Chevrolet Caprice Classic. It was brown. 1970’s automobile brown.

The only thing I remember being said on that car ride to our new “family” was that the car had cruise control and an 8 track cassette player and it cost a whopping $10,000. Mr. and Mrs. Harvel and Maple Luallen were quite proud of that fact. For curious minds, that’s roughly $40,000 in 2020 dollars.

Harvel always played the same cassets of music in his 8 track music player — a mix of bluegrass, gospel and country, which we must have had to listen to 5,000 times, whether on a trip to Gatlinburg, TN, or on the country radio stations, driving to the pallet mill in his Chevette, where we served as child laborers pulling boards from the gang saw and assembling pallets. Contrary to the example in that link, there was no automated conveyor to take the cut boards at the end of the saw. No eye protection, no ear protection, no gloves, no steel toed shoes, just my brother and my scrawny 60 pound self on the receiving end of the gang saw. If the blades were too hot, or the wood was wet or chewy, Harvel ran the saw with the steel side covering open and the blades exposed. In which case the blower was probably not working and I would watch the those blades tear through cants (partially finished logs) while I shoveled saw dust from the bottom of the gang saw, eye level with those blades. Spinning, screaming, toothy steel and young flesh, side by side, naked and exposed.

On that first June night in our fourth foster home, my brother and I did the same thing we always did in the evening. We took a bath, slipped on clean underwear and went into the new family’s den to say good night.

Hysteria ensued.

Maple grabbed me and my brother and fled to the basement where she proceeded to show us a large tree stump and an axe. One peep of our penis to their daughter’s eyes she explained, and “I will chop it off.”

Welcome home.

Pandemic not required.

The foster system is a lived experience so far outside the world of the average human that it defies written or visual description. I don’t give a damn if you’ve seen “The Fosters,” or HBO’s “Foster” or any other foster theme production. You simply cannot know it, nor understand it, if you haven’t lived it or been deeply involved in delivering what it serves up - the good and the bad.

By my calculation about 6% or more of the current US population has lived in foster homes at some point in their lives. And that is likely an undercount. To put that in perspective, a 2017 Gallop poll places the number of LGBT+ citizens in the United States at 4.5%. The 2010 U.S. Census places the number of Americans of Asian decent at 5.6%. We walk among you in numbers as significant as any group you casually discuss and toss around in woke conversations.

Foster survivors are just as diverse as the population at large. Some conservative, some liberal. All different colors and sexual identities. Old, young, broken, healed, you name it.

But the one thing that every single foster survivor would agree with is this - it doesn’t take a pandemic to abuse a child.

Most Americans, whose lives have become so calm and routine in recent decades, simply cannot place into perspective, this time of “shelter in place” and “virtual learning,” experiences so unusual that we have now resorted to calling it “trauma” and the resultant frustration of parents, “abuse.”

Abuse isn’t loosing your cool with a child in a moment of exhaustion. And staying at home during a pandemic, playing teacher alongside an underpowered laptop on a slow connection is neither abuse nor trauma. Virtually stone me for saying so if you must.

Sustained abuse, the kind that foster survivors often see before entering the foster system, and quite often in the foster system, the kind that demands intervention, is an order of magnitude beyond what you think you know. And the results of that abuse are both relevant to this discussion and stupefying to read:

  • Foster survivors suffer from PTSD at twice the rate of returning veterans.
  • Foster survivors comprise a staggering 80% of death row inmates in American prisons.
  • 60% of Americans who are trafficked come from the foster system. And this last point is worth dissecting the specific words — those trafficked individuals come FROM the foster system, not BEFORE entering it. (https://thefosterproject.org/foster-facts)

Of course, abuse also doesn’t have to be rough or brutal, nor leveled against the young, the poor, or the homeless. Abuse can be cold detachment between quarrelling adults, or as simple as a quiet statement whispered in the dark into a fragile ear. Context matters. You have to put it in perspective. Especially now.

I don’t think trauma means what you think it means.

In this shit show that has become 2020, (a year which, if we are lucky, our youngest children will refuse to believe ever actually happened), one refrain is repeated over and over by the extreme extroverts and the take charge personalities who just cannot stand the idea of an actual deadly pandemic interrupting their all too exciting lives: staying home is causing serious “trauma” to our children, children are more likely to be abused by parents, children will be molested (more?) and so many variations on the theme. You hear it in the media, and on Zoom calls with school superintendents and anxious parents yearning for a chance to resume in person sports after school — pandemic be damned.

Speaking for myself and perhaps for some of the foster survivors who have experienced sustained abuse and trauma, I find myself reflexively cringing every time I hear the word “trauma” used in this context. It has become a throw away word, devoid of the impact it carried before COVID. I literally do not think it means what YOU think it means. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong either. We just come from different places, and I want you to know there is so much more to “trauma.”

Yes, dying is trauma. Dying from or being hospitalized because of COVID is trauma, without a doubt. A parent loosing her job is trauma. Being evicted is trauma. And if that is the trauma being referenced in these conversations then I am 100% fully on board with that word, in that context.

But it is also true, if that is the trauma we’re talking about, then re-opening schools before we have COVID fully under control will only create more trauma. No one should be arguing for fully re-opening entire school systems to all children before getting COVID fully under control if this is the kind of trauma we are talking about. Exceptions, of course, do present — special needs children for example — where systems could reasonably supply in person instruction to specific children, children with IEP or 504 plans, and children of single parents, whose lives are so stressed to the limit that the risk of in person schooling is necessarily acceptable. So too, some children are simply unable to learn outside of the environment provided in a classroom. A needs based assessment to determine who receives in person schooling is what is required in this time.

Consider too, children unable to touch one another, or hug, or sit close in, children masked and sitting behind sneeze guards for six to seven hours per day carries its own trauma. A child learning of their teacher’s death from COVID, delivered by a child into the classroom, is also trauma.

Conversely, curtailing your activities, staying home, wearing a “damned mask,” and helping your child with virtual learning while juggling your job? Difficult, challenging, frustrating, yes, yes, and yes, times 1,000.

But those things are NOT trauma, and to call it trauma is a slap in the face to everyone you never bothered to speak on behalf of before COVID — people experiencing trauma so far outside your experience you cannot acknowledge it for fear of loosing faith in your fellow humans.

In the starkest terms possible understand this: a parent who IS abusive during COVID, WAS abusive before COVID. A parent who IS molesting a child during COVID, WAS most likely molesting the child before COVID.

Abuse, does not require a pandemic.

Yes, there are going to be some parents who are pushed over the edge by this pandemic and join the abusers club. I am aware of that. I do not deny it. I also do not have a good answer for that and quite frankly — and this is why I am writing this — neither do you! Because without a functioning federal response which takes care of at risk families during this time, those families are, quite simply, screwed six ways from Sunday, to put it politely. You can thank Moscow Mitch for that!

And if you think I am making light of the suffering, no. I simply understand it. And I understand that loosing your parents and ending up in the care of strangers is a far, far, far worse outcome than any bout of uncomfortableness during this time.

Consider too, there are countless parents whose lives were so stressful before the pandemic that they may now find renewed patience and renewed purpose during the pandemic, preventing them from ever embarking on an abusive path in the first place. Both possibilities are true, and neither can be proven in significant quantity. Do not argue one while refusing to acknowledge the other.

The scales are not uneven.

Only now, when the care-free and extroverted have been restricted in their activities do we hear their concerns about “abuse” and “trauma,” tears of concern shed on Zoom calls for the abuse of strangers, by strangers, and the need to return to their prior normal. For many of these types of personalities, this is possibly the first time in their adult lives they have truly been restricted by someone else’s needs. I should probably assume their voices cried out for the abused before COVID, and I simply could not hear them. Perhaps Zoom made it possible to finally see and hear those voices.

Prior to COVID, tens of millions of people could have and should have been able to work from home. It would have reduced air pollution, reduced costs for both employee and employer and improved the mental health of millions. It would also have helped maintain healthy families by providing more time to connect with children, without the stresses of two hour commutes, and would have provided for more parental support from parents who could be home after school.

One unintended positive in this pandemic is a significant reduction in the number of premature births in countries around the world - by as much as 90%. The New York Times article on this unexpected outcome reads: “By staying home, some pregnant women may have experienced less stress from work and commuting, gotten more sleep and received more support from their families, the researchers said… If the trends in the data are confirmed, the pandemic and lockdowns could be something like a natural experiment that might help researchers understand why premature birth happens and how to avoid it. Maybe some maternity leave should start before a mother’s due date, for example.

For every person whose mental health has suffered from staying home, countless others have improved their mental health because they haven’t had to be face to face with abusive or intrusive co-workers and difficult bosses, or sit in endless lines of traffic, and so many other daily activities that carry real anxiety for tens of millions of people.

The scales of mental health are not uneven in this situation. If anything, they have begun to equalize between those who need in person contact and those for whom such contact is stressful, and riddled with anxiety.

When the pandemic is over, the policies and routines of the privileged and the extroverted will prevail again, forcing millions back into situations damaging to their mental health and subsequently damaging to their families. There will be no Zoom conference call for those parents’ concerns, nor for the abuse which will continue to happen in homes across the country, just as it did before the pandemic. Abuse, normalized. Again. As always.

By the skin of my teeth.

When my brother revealed to our youth paster in 1984, that Harvel had sexually abused him — in addition to the physical abuse we both endured by Harvel and Maple, and the screaming and taunting and emotional abuse and manipulation, and my brother being called “fodder” on a daily basis, and even “n****” a time or two — the response from the youth pastor, was simple: “Pray harder.”

Telling you that is not so much an indictment of religion as it is to lay open the bare ugliness and shear denial of humans when faced with unpleasant facts. That I escaped my brother’s fate is to face my own unpleasant reality. No one escapes the consequences and guilt of abuse, wether abused or spared.

Even in “normal” times, abuse is often overlooked, downplayed, or disbelieved for fear of upsetting a community, a congregation or an influential family. For the newly initiated, you seem shocked that abuse and trauma are taking place around you, as if COVID suddenly created this thing called abuse. For the rest of us, it’s simply whatever day you happen to be reading this.

If you think I am exaggerating the frequency and level of abuse and those who try to hide it, you can simply read from September’s headlines: “After reported abuse at Christian boarding school, some say Missouri law must change.” In this case, the abusers know they can continue their abuse because state law exempts religious institutions in Missouri from the same licensure requirements as other agencies dealing with youth. It’s as if a state legislature decided to build in gratuitous abuse in a system already rife with abuse and trafficking.

Right on que, state representative Mike Stephens (R) comes to the defense of his personal friends who run the “ranch,” Boyd and Stephanie Householder:

“I am real upset and worried that they are being crushed, their lives are being crushed over allegations that I’m concerned about,” Stephens told The Star. “They’re just desperate. They’ve devoted their lives to the care of these children. And now their reputations are being trashed and ruined. They’re being vilified.

Caring for troubled youth, Stephens said, can be a “very difficult and challenging proposition.” The teens know the system, he said, and know how to work it.

“These kids that end up in these homes, they are practiced and expert master manipulators; they just are,” he said. “You may not want to hear that.”

Based on his experience with the Householders, Stephens said he sees them as a couple who have “conducted themselves in a very upright way.”

“I know their character and I know their heart,” he said. “I just have a hard time embracing the idea that they are serial abusers.”

That’s right Mike, blame the kids.

Their masterful manipulation of a system in control of their every moment and every movement is the real problem. I mean, if they can manipulate the entire system, they must want to be at the “ranch.” So, they either wanted the abuse, or they made the abusers do it. [sends chef’s kiss]. That the complaints about the boarding school go back to 2007, a year after it first opened to three girls is, of course, of no import.

Perhaps you need a more recent example, of withholding food and forcing a child to jump on a trampoline in 100+ degree conditions until she is dehydrated, passed out and dead? https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/us/girl-dies-trampoline-punishment-tx-trnd/index.html

Or, maybe something more specific like placing foster children in the home of a molester — one of more than 70 children this monster had “fostered?” https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/10/15/no-one-checks-on-kids-who-previously-lived-with-abusive-foster-parents/5896724002/

There are numerous such stories, old and new, none of which were the result of COVID-19. Abuse, does NOT require a pandemic. So, please, stop using other people’s trauma — trauma you never seemed to give a damn about — as an excuse to get back to your normal.

Nor, as so many have claimed without evidence, is it the case that reports of abuse are down during COVID only because children are not in school. Schools account for, at most, about 20% of reported abuse cases. The majority of the rest come from community and family. But please, think twice before you pick up that phone and call CPS. You literally have no f***ing idea what you are about to unleash on that child.

I never knew the full and complete scope of the abuse my brother endured until 1989. He had previously filed suit against Harvel Luallen in what would now prove to be a vain attempt at justice. I knew what we had both been through, but I didn’t know his full story in detail and most likely still do not. The only justice for my brother came in the form of a $500 court approved settlement, reached just minutes before the case was to be heard. A tacit acknowledgement at least that something rotten had happened. And in the approval of that settlement I too had to sign away my rights for justice, at a solid 17 years of age, still a ward of the state, with the shittiest of legal representation and no notice to the state by our representing counsel. I suppose Harvel still had his public shame to think about. Then again, we’re talking about a man whose wife caught him in the act of intercourse with his own brother’s wife. Shame may not be best word in this case.

At this late date, there will never be justice for what they did - the pain, the anguish, the abuse, the trauma. It must all be swallowed by the abused, a putrid pound of rotten flesh choked down clump by clump over a lifetime. Meanwhile the abusers smile in family photos, the sin and stank of their deeds never discussed in polite company.

By the skin of your teeth.

In March, just as this COVID train was taking off, my then employer generously paid for a trip to Podfest Expo in Orlando, Florida. Dawn Fraser made a very powerful statement in her keynote on story telling — “we tell stories from our scars, not our wounds” she said. Wounds are still healing, still raw. Scars are the spots where we have healed. Scars start a conversation. Scars tell stories.

For myself and the millions of foster survivors in America, our wounds have long since stopped oozing. We speak from our scars, so large and hardened they seem unbelievable to you. Scars which have taken the place of our skin. So unpleasant are these scars for others to see, that rarely have I shared my story with people without hearing in return how much I “need to heal.” Or, being told that my experiences have impacted my neurological circuitry — as if anyone’s upbringing did not affect their brain both positively and negatively. I sigh quietly on the inside, as if those people even know what healing looked like when it was taking place years later, in an actual caring home which became my family.

I have learned that when people tell you that you need time to heal, they are expressing their expectation that you, the abused, be silent.

Ignore them.

They have neither the right nor the agency to make such demands.

Make no mistake, you are being abused at this very moment, and your scars will form too. Every time we engage in public conversations about re-opening our schools — while positivity rates stagnate in our communities, while testing rates plummet— we are in fact enabling the abuser. We are ignoring the abuse already received, without healing, and inviting fresh, new abuse. Such is the cycle of abuse — it happens so quickly, becomes so pervasive, that the abused do not even recognize it. In the case of COVID, we are agreeing to permit our entire society to randomly abuse each other in the name of some unspoken, undefined goal.

In just eight months, we have become so accustomed to the abuse that we dare not question the idea of sacrificing a few thousand teachers and children to the pandemic. The abuser has shifted the narrative from whether or not such a thing is humane, to how to deliver the blow, and upon whom. The scar will be deep and broad. Only when the scar has formed and the wound has healed will you know the gauge of the skin of your own teeth.

When confronted with audio recordings of his lies to the American public about the true threat of SARS-COV-2, President Trump, with a straight and calm face, blamed reporter Bob Woodward (who made the audio recordings with the President’s permission), for not alerting the public to the President’s own lies sooner. A line delivered so smoothly you could see Ron Burgundy blush. Abuse doesn’t get any classier than that. The president’s defense for the death of more than 220,000 people: “you made me do it.” As I stated at the beginning, the average American simply has no idea what abuse actually looks like.

You serve the abuser now.

Perhaps, you will need time to heal?

The insane push to re-open schools for the benefit of the abuser in chief has been marginally successful in places where the virus was taken seriously from the beginning. But in other places, it has been met with failure, infection and death. Thousands of students at colleges in almost every state were housed in hotels or “COVID dorms” within weeks of returning to campus. Elementary school teachers are getting sick and dying. Nearly 800,000 children have now been diagnosed with COVID-19, and children account for 1 in 10 COVID infections.

Yet the national refrain repeats like a warbling country tune, “what about the trauma,” of not re-opening? It would be naive for me to say there is no abuse or trauma taking place as a result of COVID. I am not naive.

Instead, I see the inevitable and magnitudinal increase in trauma and abuse when little Jackson brings COVID home to mom, and mom dies or lingers in bed for weeks or months on end. And then dad, already on edge, crosses the line. What was merely a rough ride before COVID becomes a full blown crises of abuse or neglect. One call to CPS and little Jackson is now my newest brother among a family of millions, set upon a journey you will never hear about until he is an 18 year old homeless addict, or on death row. You’ll shake your head and ask “what could I do?” The answer was simple.

Stay home. Ride it out.

Wear a “damned mask.”

Keep schools closed for most, and only open for the ones who must.

There are worse things in life.

You simply lack the scars to know the difference.

Derrick Peavy is the founder of the National Registry of Standby Guardians (https://www.nrsbg.org), a non profit organization with the aim of preventing children from entering the foster system through standby custodial agreements. He is seeking guests for the forthcoming “Orphans of the Living” podcast.

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Derrick Peavy
Derrick Peavy

Written by Derrick Peavy

Foster Survivor, Founder, National Registry of Standby Guardians