Protection-Abuse / Patron-Client (was:re:Blood protection/ Dumbledore and Ha

[wynnleaf]

No: HPFGUIDX 158571


> 
> Betsy Hp:
> But since the Dursleys neither beat nor starved Harry, they don't 
> manage to rank, IMO.  There needs to be bruising, fainting, etc., to 
> make it into the pantheon for me.  Harry doesn't even manage an 
> emotional breakdown because the Dursleys don't love him.  If the 
> Dursleys are to rank, Harry needs to bleed.  And he doesn't.

wynnleaf

In PS/SS we are told that Harry often is confined to the cupboard for
many days at a time.  For instance, after the zoo insident, Harry is
thrown into the cupboard and doesn't get out until summer holidays
have already started.  Now we don't know how long that was, but the
implication is much longer than any other instance except possibly the
time Harry ended up on top of the roof at school.

Confining a person to a small cupboard for days, or even weeks at a
time, *is* physical abuse, even though there are no physical scars.

But OOTP has the biggest evidence of physical abuse.  In the first
chapters there we see Vernon literally choking Harry for an incredibly
trivial thing.  Both of Vernons hands were tightly around Harry's
throat.  Now -- do we truly believe that a person goes from no
physical abuse, to suddenly choking a kid with two hands for something
trivial?  That's just not the kind of progression abuse takes.  

Later in OOTP, Harry considers that a necessary skill around Vernon is
how to duck well.  Why would Harry need to duck around Vernon?  What's
the necessity of ducking, if Vernon didn't hit him?

I don't think JKR wanted to get too into the physical abuse problem,
because then she'd be forced to address it more directly.  But I do
think she wanted to imply it.  The strangling episode is, in my
opinion, a clear indication that Vernon must have hit Harry.  It's far
to aggressive and harmful a physical action for it to be the first
physically harmful thing that Vernon had ever done to Harry -- or even
one of a few.  For Vernon to so quickly choke Harry over a triviality,
he had to have regularly been willing to use physical force on Harry.

wynnleaf, who if she ever heard of an adult choking a child with two
hands, would immediately assume that the adult had a history of
physically abusing the child.