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

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 158588

wynnleaf wrote:
> 
> 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.
>
Carol responds:
I'm not going to criticize anyone else's reading of these scense, but
I take them much less literally, just as I don't take the statement
that Dudley was as broad as he is tall literally. (Other examples of
exaggeration include Madame Maxime's shoes being the size of a child's
sled and Hagrid's handkerchiefs being the size of tablecloths.) If
Harry had been kept day and night in his cupboard, he could not have
attended school and the authorities would have come after the
Dursleys. I think that he was probably sent there immediately after
school or as soon as he came home. And he was certainly given
something to eat and allowed to use the bathroom just as he was when
he was confined to his room (an actual bedroom at that point).
Possibly the references to spending time in a cupboard are exaggerated
for the Cinderella effect of the first book. We don't actually see
Harry being treated much worse than the rest of the family; as BetsyHP
pointed out, everybody, not just Harry, has to eat a bag of crisps and
a banana, and Vernon is trying to keep Harry from being sent to a
wizarding school run by what he considers to be an old crackpot.
They're trying to keep Harry from becoming magical for what they
(wrongly) consider to be his own good. I think that their methods are
old-fashioned (a more lenient version of spare-the-rod,
spoil-the-child) but not as outright abusive as other fictional
parents and stepparents--Pap in "Huckleberry Finn" or Mr. Murdstone in
"David Copperfield," for example.

As for the incident in which Vernon attempts to choke Harry, I think
that's the first and only time he does so. Both he and Harry are
surprised by an electric shock that causes Vernon to drop Harry--the
blood protection in action?

And the reference to Harry knowing what it felt like to go without
food all summer, mentioned by Alla, refers to the grapefruit and
"rabbit food" diet on which Petunia places the whole family because
Dudley can no longer fit in his school uniform, not to any punishment
inflicted on Harry.

It's interesting that Harry says somewhere that the Dursleys haven't
given him pocket money since he was five, which indicates that at one
time, probably before the outbursts of accidental magic, they treated
him somewhat normally.

At any rate, with the exception of putting bars on Harry's window and
feeding him only cold soup through a cat flap, I'm not sure that we
see many examples of actual physical abuse. Neglect, certainly.
Absence of love, certainly. But, as Dumbledore says, their
overindulgence of Dudley is actually a far worse form of abuse even
though they do it unintentionally.

Silly question for those of you who live in the UK--do English houses
still have bedrooms that lock with a key from the outside? In the
U.S., bedrooms lock from the inside, and teenagers have been known to
lock their parents out of their rooms for "privacy."

Carol, who grew up at a time when most parents spanked their children
and sending kids to bed without supper was a common punishment but
understands that the parents were doing what they thought was best