How Someone Stops Seeing a Child

A gray head tilted off center, one strip of orange cloth wound across the eyes…. not a disguise so much as what happens after enough people decide not to look closely at what’s underneath it.

Most people don’t wake up one morning and decide a child is no longer a child. That transformation, when it happens, is slower than that. It tends to happen mostly through language, small and repeated, until the language has done the work that a single decision never could.

Start with the word “behaviors.” It’s a clinical word, useful, precise, and it entered the field for good reasons, to describe patterns without pathologizing the whole person attached to them. But said often enough, in the wrong tone, at the end of a long shift, it starts to take a different shape. A child stops being a frightened boy who is throwing a backpack and starts being a behavior that needs managing. The person is still there. The word just makes him easier to stop noticing.

This is what moral disengagement looks like in a workplace: a slow substitution of categories for people. Euphemism does part of the work. “Redirecting” a child can mean something gentle, or it can mean something closer to force. This is precisely what makes it useful for someone who no longer wants to look closely at which one he’s doing.

Being at a distance does the rest. Physical distance is rare in this kind of work, most of it happens close, hands-on, in small rooms. But there is another kind of distance that doesn’t require leaving the room at all…. a caregiver can be standing directly over a child and still be relating to a diagnosis instead of a person, seen as a set of target behaviors instead of a boy who is scared and doesn’t have the words for it. Proximity and recognition are separate things and losing the recognition while keeping the proximity is exactly what makes this dynamic difficult to catch from the outside.

Fatigue tends to accelerate all of it, though fatigue alone doesn’t explain it. Burnout is common in this field and most burned-out staff never raise a hand against anyone; they disengage, request coverage, complain in the break room, or quit. What separates the ones who don’t from the ones who do is whether the child, underneath the diagnosis and the target behaviors, was still real to them in the moment that mattered.

A small, checkable choice that can be made is to ask a staff member to describe a child without a single clinical term. What does he laugh at, what is he afraid of, and who does he trust in the building and why. If the answer takes real effort to produce, if the person has to reach for it, that’s worth knowing before anything goes wrong, not after.

The boy on the floor, crying, and throwing his backpack, was reacting to something. He always was, and somewhere in the sequence that ended with a foot near his face, someone stopped being able to see the vulnerable boy.

This is the third essay in a series on power, predation, and the conditions that make abuse of trust possible. Read the series from the start: The Myth of the Monster and The Ones Who Can't Report It.

Nando Schlecht is a Licensed Associate Counselor and trauma therapist specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation. More writing at nandotherapy.com.