American politician Vivek Ramaswamy released an advertisement attacking an opponent last week that was so heinous that it was roundly condemned across party divides. It featured the estranged mother of Dr Amy Acton, his rival from the Democratic Party. In it, Amy’s mother Donna Arthur accuses her daughter of being mentally ill and lying. Donna had supported her husband Cledith Arthur, Amy’s stepfather, following his indictment for raping her daughter when she was a minor. Amy and her brother were formally removed from Donna’s custody at the age of 12 by authorities, following the trial, and the politician has remained estranged from her mother since. Amy and Vivek are both gubernatorial candidates for the state of Ohio, with elections to be held in early November.
The advertisement is in shockingly poor taste, dredging up the trauma of a childhood abuse survivor — who already underwent a trial before a grand jury even before reaching her teens — and using the testimony of a parent who had been found by the state to be criminally negligent against her. Vivek has refused to withdraw it despite censure, even from his fellow conservatives.
When Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (more popularly known as Meghan Markle) and her spouse Prince Harry chose to distance themselves from the British monarchy, her father Thomas Markle Sr also took the opportunity to malign her publicly, participating in paid interviews to do so, and leaking private correspondence between them; wherein she begged him to stop. Meghan has been estranged from him since 2018 and he is currently being investigated for the possession of child pornography, and the notorious British paparazzi has deployed this as its latest cannon fodder against Meghan. How she can be blamed for her father’s iniquity, especially given her separation from him, is a twist of logic that only a spiteful mind can come up with.
While each of these attacks has its own motivations, they are linked as examples of parental cruelty being weaponised in service of larger agendas. Somewhere, the idea that an adult survivor would choose to separate themselves from a parent is abhorrent to many. But adults who are estranged from their parents are almost without exception people who had to make an agonising choice because to not do so would really have been slow self-destruction. When it comes to living parents, this is a choice that has to be made not just once, but one that requires reinforcement.
Because this is the thing: just as “no one puts their child in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”, to quote the poet Warsan Shire, no one distances themselves from a parent unless that parent has poisoned their life to the point where shouldering the emotional, social, and practical costs of such estrangement is better than continuing to bear the abuse. To quote Warsan Shire again from the same poem: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”.
On a profound level, that is as true for people fleeing conflicted homelands as it is for people escaping abuse.
