Real child abuse/ Snape again

[lagattalucianese]

No: HPFGUIDX 145627

> 
...
> 
> Miles:
> > Another necessity for abuse is that they cause or could cause 
> serious
> > behavioural, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorders. We never 
> saw any
> > student of Snape's classes that suffers from any of this.
> 
> Alla:
> 
> You may have not seen it, but I definitely did - to me Neville's 
> boggart is a metaphor for all that. IMO of course.
> 
...
> 
La Gatta Lucianese:

Alla, take my mother--please! You need a little practical experience 
in emotional child (and adult) abuse (she's very good at both) before 
you hold forth on it before all the world. I'm sure you could work 
out a deal with her. She probably wouldn't even charge you, she'd be 
having so much fun.

A few posts back, I made the distinction of CONTEXT and EFFECT as a 
factor in extablishing whether an adult's treatment of a child 
qualifies as emotional abuse. IMCE, the abuser has to be not only 
cruel to the child, but also a principal caregiver with genuine 
ability to affect the child's emotional growth. I've had the 
occasional snarky teacher in the course of my educational life, but 
not one of them had the effect on me that my mother had. To be a true 
abuser, an adult has to (1) have *absolute* power over the child, as 
my mother did over me when my father was at work (most of my waking 
hours while I wasn't in school), and (2) be someone on whom the child 
has a strong *emotional* dependency--i.e., the child really *cares* 
what this person thinks and feels about them, to the extent of self-
hating if the adult expresses anger and hatred toward the child ("I 
must be a really bad person if my mother feels this way about me").

None of my teachers had this sort of effect on me. As I said before, 
never was I throwing-up afraid of one of my teachers. I often was of 
my mother.

I really don't think that Snape, nasty as he is, satisfies either of 
the two conditions above. Harry doesn't like Snape, but he doesn't 
fear him, and he knows that he isn't absolutely under Snape's control 
(after the Flying Ford Anglia episode, he and Ron know that Snape 
isn't even in a position to get them expelled), and he certainly has 
no emotional dependency on him; I think he and Ron both refer to him 
as a "git" at one time or another. (For the same reason, I don't 
think the Dursleys qualify as genuine abusers *after* Harry gets to 
Hogwarts--*before* is another matter--, because Harry knows they 
don't really control him and he doesn't care what they think of him.) 
Neville is a rather more difficult case, because he is so impared by 
the time he gets to Snape that he doesn't have the confidence to see 
that Snape really can't do anything to him; Neville is simply 
terrified of any adult, and any adult criticism simply reduces him to 
jelly.

As I said, to be a real abuser, the adult has to be someone with real 
control over the child (and the child knows it), to whom the child 
has strong emotional ties. In Harry's case, that adult is Albus 
Dumbledore, with perhaps Molly and Arthur Weasley as backup in the 
emotional department. None of these are remotely abusive; Harry knows 
he can depend on them absolutely for strong, positive support. 
Neville's case is quite different; I think he is abused, by his awful 
old grandmother, who in the few glimpses we get of her bears a strong 
resemblance to my mother. Her treatment of Neville so undermines his 
self-confidence that he is incapable of sticking up for himself with 
any adult. I think the real ruling terror in his life is that an 
adult expressing anger at him will report him to his grandmother. In 
fact, I think the real genius of Lupin's ridikkulus spell for Neville 
is that it teaches him to laugh not only at Snape, but at his 
grandmother as well.

So, Alla, yes, Snape is an upleasant teacher, and, I think, a deeply 
disturbed and unhappy person (the victim of abuse himself, which 
rarely sets one up for a well-balanced approach to life), but I don't 
think he's an abuser, because he simply isn't in the *position* to be 
an abuser, whatever his personal feelings in the matter may be. Do 
please acquire a little practical experience on this subject, before 
you irritate those of us who've been in the trenches by holding forth 
on something that we know about only too well.