conuly | Even before I saw this SMBC, I was thinking of this

Clicky.

There's a book from childhood that recently popped back into my mind, Pick-Up Sticks. A middle school girl is tired of living with her artist mother and their own personal housing crisis, paying for her orthodontia with custom-made stained glass, and so she goes to live with her well-off uncle.

Her uncle is awful - ableist, classist, the "nice" kind of racist who won't actually use a slur but definitely thinks it, and he's also a bad father. Probably doesn't think he is, since he's technically present when he's not at work, but he is.

And eventually our protagonist realizes this and goes back to her mom and the fight to keep their building from going condo, but I gotta say - her uncle didn't make any complaints about taking her in, didn't give her some huge chore list or set of restrictions, I think he even gave her an allowance, and he doesn't pat himself on the back for it either. He's a bad father, but he's not physically neglectful or actually abusive in any way, he's just absent. None of this absolves him from being generally terrible, but it's not nothing.

I had that same uncomfortable realization when nostalgia-watching The Color of Friendship, which is very very loosely based on a real story. Sure, the apartheid South African government is evil, and has been heavy-handed and intrusive for the entire movie - but at the end, when they come to fetch her and send her home? That's actually perfectly reasonable, for all the script plays it up like OMG EVEN MORE EVIL. There's demonstrations against South Africa all over the world (quite rightly) and it makes sense to recall your unaccompanied minors and send them home to their parents, especially if those parents are in any way connected to your (evil) government.

(I wouldn't go quite so far as to say "At least the Dursleys don't own any house elves", though.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

bitterlawngnome

Writing villains in general. Does it help to get inside their head a bit? or does that just get in the way?

From:

lauradi7dw

Before we stopped wanting to pay any attention to JKR, I wished for the book about Petunia. The cartoon is correct - they took in the child of estranged family members and treated him badly in some ways, but he was healthy, had glasses that were the right prescription, went to school enough that he had no trouble at Hogwarts, etc. He and Dudley were two months apart, so she (and we know she did all the work) suddenly had two toddlers to potty train. We know nothing of her inner life, really, except that as far as the owls were concerned, she lived in the kitchen.

From:

conuly

We know nothing of her inner life, really, except that as far as the owls were concerned, she lived in the kitchen.

We know she felt that her parents favored Lily, and while I think that JKR's intent is to have us buy into Harry's little retcon that this is just the jealousy talking, I think she's right. Her particular brand of bad parenting didn't spring up out of nowhere, and she was already doing it before Harry arrived.

From:

mme_n_b

"I wouldn't go quite so far as to say "At least the Dursleys don't own any house elves", though"
Why not? They didn't. They also did not murder sentient mandragora teenagers or evict any garden gnomes from their homes.

From:

conuly

The were happy enough to treat Harry like their own personal house elf, and honestly, by rights the abuse he endured ought to have killed him several times over by the time the books start.

From:

mme_n_b

I... don't remember them ordering Harry to beat himself up. I do remember him eating at the table with the family and going to school. Not saying his childhood was happy, but Dursleys were neither slave-keepers nor murderers.

From:

conuly

They routinely locked him up with no food for lengthy periods of time. At least once, Aunt Petunia tried to hit him with a skillet, which could really have done some damage. They tried to prevent him from doing his summer homework.

From:

mme_n_b

That's bad, but nowhere as bad as actual murder and slave-keeping. Standards are pretty low in HP.
Also, real life shows that when an adult actually wants to beat up a child they don't "try". Imagine Nujood Ali's husband or (if you prefer literature) Simon Legree "trying" to hit a kid and failing.

From:

conuly

And in real life, a kid who falls 20 feet or more will have more to worry about than a broken arm.

I think it's entirely plausible that Harry's magic is protecting him, same as it protected him from ugly sweaters and bad haircuts.

From:

mme_n_b

This is a good point, although I must note repeated attempts at sweaters and haircuts, but not beatings :)

From:

conuly

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yjpdubg7nPY-Lz8h0qKfuzoq47L3d0kG8P4a6KpoYcY/edit

You can click straight to "physical abuse". You're right that most direct quotes have to do with Dudley hitting or otherwise harming Harry, but I'd argue that tolerating abuse of one child by another - or even encouraging it, as in one instance - is in and of itself physical abuse by a caregiver.

From:

mme_n_b

I think we may be trying to argue different arguments. Yours is that Dursleys were abusive, which they were. You don't actually need to support this point, because I accept it as a given. Mine is that this abuse was as nothing in comparison to slave-keeping (Narrative of Sojourner Truth for scale) or (nevermind and) mass murder.
Hell has circles.

From:

conuly

Hell may have circles, but I don't. You don't get brownie points for "only" being a child abuser instead of an enslaver, especially when house elves aren't an option for the Dursleys anyway.

From:

mme_n_b

Approx. 5K slaves were found in UK in 2019, so Dursleys totally had the option (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/modernslaveryintheuk/march2020). It probably just didn't occur to them. However, if you really don't make distinctions between crimes this does not matter. You are right, given this assumption Dursley are just as bad as Voldemort. Of course, so is Harry, but that's another argument altogether :)

From:

adrian_turtle

Physical abuse seems kind of routine in the Dursley household, and it's clearly meant to define the Dursleys as Evil. Somehow we aren't meant to see Hogwarts as Evil, though physical abuse is awfully common there as well. (Not just abuse of enslaved house elves, but abuse of children at levels one might expect to kill several per year. Even with only 280 kids in the whole school.) Our hero Dumbledore quite deliberately keeps Snape and Filch on the staff, along with a bunch of ghosts eager to push kids down the stairs. And it seems like sheer luck that those lovable scamps Fred and George Weasley haven't killed anyone.

The Dursleys do a lot of awful things, but the books seem to think the worst thing they do is to trying to keep Harry away from Hogwarts and the world of magic. That's what I think is most excusable. If my sister had joined a cult when she was 11, and she had become a child soldier and died at 19...I would go to some trouble to keep her kid away from that cult, and its weird creepy messages about how he's special and they'll train him in their ways.

From:

mme_n_b

You're right.

From:

mindstalk

They didn't the chance to own house-elves, so it seems weird to claim that as a virtue. Besides, the whose house-elf situation is weird.

From:

mme_n_b

There are slaves in UK, therefore they had a chance to own a slave. Of course, it's likely that they were simply ignorant of this chance, but the ignorance itself indicates that they did not actively want one.

From:

conuly

There's also banks in the UK, but that doesn't mean that they have the realistic chance to own a bank.

Getting involved in this criminal enterprise of owning slaves... it's not something you just stumble into.

From:

mme_n_b

I believe the prices are not entirely comparable, but will, of course, defer to your knowledge of UK.

From:

readerjane

I never understood why the Dursleys (particularly Vernon) weren't delighted to get rid of Harry. "What, this kid we resent and dislike and are terrified will humiliate us by being abnormal in front of the Joneses is summoned to all-expenses-paid boarding school? Hooray, no need to come home for the summer" would have seemed more in character.

From:

ironymaiden

there is something deeply weird about the way the Dursleys are written. maybe there's some British cultural stuff that i don't understand?
like, are they getting some kind of stipend from the government for Harry's care? it seems like they didn't adopt Harry but they would be his legal guardians in the Muggle UK. is there some bureaucracy that ought to get upset when Harry disappears off to Hogwarts?

From:

shewhostaples

I assume they get child benefit for him, but I can't say that I've ever thought that JKR has thought it through. (Which doesn't bother me particularly: it's not that sort of book.)

From:

hilarita

But they'd still get child benefit even if he was at boarding school. It's not a means tested thing, and the Dursleys would still be considered as his guardians, so they'd not lose out from that.

I mean, Petunia loses out on free household help, and they all lose out on someone to bully and enforce their status in the household hierarchy, but they don't lose cash.

From:

conuly

Right, but let's imagine they hated Harry for being gay or having a non-Christian parent or something, and now the boarding school is a super pro-LGBT boarding school for kids of that other religion.

From:

brokenallbroken

And yet they complain about what a financial burden the extra mouth is. I once read a great fic about someone looking at Harry's wardrobe and how small he is for his age and wondering "what is his benefit getting spent on? Because it's clearly not his care". There was an investigation, with Consequences. It may have been the same fic that said his parents didn't make any provision for funding his care in their wills because they assumed he was going to Sirius, who wouldn't need the assistance. Wish I could remember the title.

From:

adrian_turtle

Most of the story is written to make emotional sense, without even trying to make logical sense. From the perspective of an abused child, they want to hurt him and they want to keep hurting him and it doesn't have to make sense.

But if you were trying to make sense of it according to our earth logic...it would make sense to me if Petunia resented Harry because she saw him as a painful reminder of her beloved dead sister, and thus neglected him physically and emotionally. And it would make sense if both Vernon and Petunia were angry people who had trouble controlling their tempers around the little boys. And it would ALSO make sense that they would hate and fear the wizarding world (that did, after all, kill Lilly), and feel responsible for protecting Harry from it. If he'd been invited to spend 7 years at a boarding school they'd never heard of, in New Zealand or something, they might have taken him to the airport with a great sigh of relief. (Only Dumbledore is not nearly bright enough to write that kind of letter.)

From:

silveradept

I'm reminded of the cartoon about the differences between Us and Them, and also the not really a joke that young people were supposed to age into conservativism and see it as the rational choice compared to their impetuous youth that led with the heart instead of the brain.

The most common statement I usually hear about these kinds of situations is that the Chancellor of the Third Reich was able to make the trains run on time. Which does not absolve him of all the atrocities he and his committed, but for someone whose biggest concern was governmental stability and order, he would have seemed competent and possibly even praiseworthy.

From:

conuly

also the not really a joke that young people were supposed to age into conservativism and see it as the rational choice compared to their impetuous youth that led with the heart instead of the brain.

The reality is that people who are more likely to want a strong social safety net and civil rights to protect minorities are people who are more likely to die young due to structural inequalities. Funny how that works.

From:

silveradept

Indeed. Having a personal stake in such things certainly increases your desire for a good outcome. And makes people who think of themselves as rational, detached, and cerebral dismiss you as too emotional to possibly understand why giving people who already have too much more is the best course of action for everyone.

From:

oursin

It's not perhaps entirely pedantic to say that that was said of Mussolini rather than Hitler - it was already assumed that the Germans could run a railroad efficient to the max - but stereotypes of the Italians meant that it was a major achievement to do so in Italy.

As I am sure you know, the perception of ruthless Fascist efficiency and orderliness is an entire myth. Early on in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon set in the then Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, she and her husband are on a train in a compartment with a group of Germans, moaning and whingeing about the petty problems that the bureaucracy puts in the way of their jobs and generally living their lives.

From:

silveradept

Ah, it must have been mangled in the telling, then, as I had always heard it to describe Hitler rather than Mussolini.

And yes, as the States hopefully learned through the last Administrator, the promise of efficiency, order, and law under an authoritarian is almost never real. Unless you are someone who already is exempted from having to deal with the law and its agents.