29th, May 2025

Black Lawyer
2 days ago
2 min read

Entry Title: The Case Was Closed. The Child Wasn’t.

Filed under: Bureaucratic Blindness & Other Rituals of Neglect

Dearest Diary,

Imagine, if you will, a small child watching a man batter a woman like it’s a contact sport — and then imagine a government body shrugging and calling it “resolved.”

No broken bones? No hospital trip? Well then, carry on.

The footage showed it all: raised fists, flared nostrils, a scream you could feel in your molars. Date and time of the incident - full color HD.

And just beyond the edge of his rage, two children, silent and still — the kind of stillness that isn’t peace, but preparation.

One flinched and jumped on the perpetrator's back in attempts to stop it. The other froze. Apparently, that didn’t meet the threshold.

You see, we have perfected the art of plausible protection. It’s not about whether the child is safe — it’s whether we can technically say they are.

Never mind the well-documented trauma caused by witnessing violence.

Never mind the MRI studies that show how a child’s brain reacts to proximity rage the same way it would to a direct slap.

Never mind the decades of research that say children raised in households like this are more likely to develop PTSD, anxiety, difficulty learning, attachment issues — and a disturbing tendency to love people who terrify them.

The science is clear.

The law, however, prefers bruises it can photograph.

Because the problem isn’t a lack of evidence. It’s a lack of spectacle.

Apparently, a child must be bleeding, sobbing, or publicly dead before anyone calls it a crisis.

Anything less is chalked up to “a family matter,” that ancient euphemism for generational rot.

And so, another report is marked unfounded, another child is told — without words — that their safety is negotiable, and a woman is left to perform her own rescue, again.

The state may have closed the file, Diary, but the child hasn’t.

They are wide awake. And watching.

I am still, somehow, Poised. Petty. Permanently Outraged.