The “Child-Mothers” of America’s Concentration Camps
There is no rhetoric powerful enough to convey the horrors experienced by young mothers in detention
There are sorrows in this world that put speech beyond us. We’ve spent the past week flooded with them: Concentration camps are very real in our country, and they’re being used to house children. Children are being left in dirty diapers, with matted hair and lice, “wearing clothes caked with snot and tears” untreated influenza and other diseases ravage the camps, and five children have already died. In one incident, a roomful of children was told to share a lice comb, and when they lost the comb, their beds were taken away.
And all that may seem like the limit, like the most barbarity you could stand to hear about, but it isn’t. Because after you’ve absorbed all of that, then you hear the term “child-mothers.”
“Child-mothers” doesn’t mean mothers of children. It means mothers who are children. And they’re locked up in the child detention camps, too. Many of them are survivors of sexual abuse, many have already undergone some kind of horror on their journey, and the conditions in the camp now put them and their babies at risk.
The phrase crops up, for example, in descriptions of the facilities’ “isolation rooms”…
