As a parent, you do NOT have the right to spy on your child NO MATTER WHAT. I don't care if they are suicidal or doing drugs, that doesn't give you the right to spy on them. You don't have the right to read their email or diary or texts.

Not only do you not have the right, literally no good will come from you violating their trust like this. All they will learn is hyper-vigilance against anyone who wants to get to know them, and they will learn to see you as the enemy and they will learn to hide things much better.

Instead of treating your child as a wild monster that you're trying to control, treat your child in ways that make them feel loved and trusted and able to trust you. Things like using drugs and having suicidal thoughts are a sign that they need more care, better care, more experienced care, not control. CONTROL ALWAYS MAKES IT WORSE.

edited to add:

sometimes I honestly feel grateful that my parents were so neglectful and disinterested in my life. Because they did not value consent at ALL and if they thought they could control me better by invading my intimate thoughts or alone time they absolutely would have.

Content note: contains specific examples of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse between my parents.

My dad was in town this week and reminded me that the last time he was in town, I asked him if he had "an exit strategy" with regards to my mom. I said "yeah, I think you shouldn't be together." Later he mentioned it two more times and I realized that this had made an impact. I feel oddly vindicated that during this conversation my dad said he hadn't been happy for 25 years. I did the math and realized 25 years ago was the first time I started telling my parents to get a divorce.

He told me several stories I'd heard before: how she flew into a rage, beat him with her fist, and left him with over a dozen bruises. How she punched him in the face and gave him a black eye. How she broke down his bedroom door when he locked it to keep her out (in a house she didn't even live in).

But I was raised in a house of hitting, yelling, and breaking things, so that doesn't horrify me as much as the emotional abuse. She makes him account for every waking minute: what time did you leave work, where did you go after, etc. She will not let him leave an argument: she will chase him down and yell at him continuously. He doesn't keep a journal anymore because she broke into it and weaponized it against him. He has elaborate rules for being around women (or people he thinks are women) because she will torment him if she thinks he is interested in someone, and she is not rational about it: she made him change the way he hugs his sister because they used to hug chest to chest and my mom found that too erotic.

I said these things are abuse, and he said he knows. I asked why he has not left and he said "because it would ruin us" (meaning financially). But he keeps talking about wanting to own his own business, and he casually talks about retiring and going back to school and putting my brother through school. Those are not things a broke person discusses without even mentioning money.

I said "I think instead of daydreaming about owning a business, you should daydream about getting a divorce." And I asked how he thinks he's going to be able to get any satisfaction in life when he is enduring this daily abuse. He said that he hopes to outlive her. He thinks it is impossible to leave.

I told him that even when he was happy with their relationship, it wasn't good because they have never understood each other. He's autistic, and she's not, nor does she accept that his mind works differently from hers. She has always wanted him to give her all his attention whenever she's around, which to me sounds like torture since they live together.

I tried to illustrate how much better it could be by explaining that my partner and I understand each other and are independent, and we make no demands on each other's attention. Instead, we send requests through texts when we are both home, so that we don't interrupt each other or prevent each other from having the down time we need. We respect each other's needs. As usual when I say something about how much better it could be, he was silent.

People talk about abuse like it is easy to separate the abuser and the abused, but my parents abuse each other. When I was a child, my dad would sexually assault my mom as a "joke" (pinch her nipples when she didn't want it and said no, then laugh at her being upset) and I'm pretty sure he did worse behind closed doors. He would break her favorite dishes as a symbolic physical attack. He controlled all her relationships and got mad every time she wanted to spend time with someone other than him. He says cutting, demeaning things to her. When she got drugged and raped during a time when they were separated he blamed her and refused to believe it was rape for years.

They have both damaged each other so much that I am sure it is impossible for them to ever be anything but abusers to each other. As soon as you deliberately try to hurt your partner, trust is broken. When that happens over and over, it builds an ever-increasing chasm that at some point, you don't have enough years of life left to cross.

They're both in their 60s at this point and have been hurting each other on purpose for at least 15 years (before which, they hurt each other plenty but mostly on accident). They might have enough life left but I doubt it, because they'd both have to stop their attacks on each other immediately and completely. At this point they are both too scared of being alone to take the time apart they would need to break their habits of attacking each other.

So I keep pushing for them to break up, like I have for the past 25 years.

Content note: general discussion of abuse, social fall-out from talking about abuse, and rape (no specifics)

Most of the caring people I have known rely on the same tool to manage any conflict: compassionate conversation. This is a fantastic tool for many interpersonal conflicts, and it can be life-alteringly good if you had previously only experienced antagonistic or competitive conflict.

However that tool is not a simple one and it simply will not run without all parties contributing respect, a willingness to be wrong, ability and willingness to put in effort, and a desire to create an outcome that is positive for everyone.

I recently got to listen to someone speak about restorative justice, as a concept opposed to punitive justice. I absolutely believe that punishment does nothing good, and that most harm can be best addressed with a focus on healing and providing solutions to the problems that created problematic behavior in the first place. I think there are too many times when we rush to discard a person rather than coming together as a community and explaining the harm they caused and guiding the person to safer behavior.

However, when we discussed it, all the solutions that were mentioned relied on the person who caused harm being willing to acknowledge that harm and work on a solution that would reduce future harm to the victim.

Unfortunately there are many cases where the person who caused harm does not care about the victim, or doesn't care enough to admit to fault or change their behavior. In these cases, a restorative justice approach will often result in further harm to the victim, because rather than doing the work, the abuser will lash out at the victim. They will call this person a liar, and often make up offenses to try and paint themselves as the victim. This happens so often that it has a name: D A R V O: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.

Which brings me to another practice in social justice which can be skewed to cause harm: believing all victims without checking for truth. I am NOT suggesting that we EVER dismiss a claim out of hand. However, we need to do more than zero checking because if we don't, abusers get to control every situation. All they have to do is make up some shit about actually, they hit that person because the other one hit them first, etc.

When I say check, I don't mean for forensic evidence. I mean, talk to all parties who witnessed it and ask them to tell their version of the story. Then make your own decision about who is dangerous and who is not.

I once was told that a friend of mine, Cliff*, had raped someone. I was not at the place where this happened and I didn't know the victim, but a mutual friend, Mac*, told me (with permission) that this had happened because I had invited Cliff to a cuddle party, where consent is extra important. I was horrified that my friend Cliff might have done this but I also know that consent mistakes exist, and I hoped that there was some kind of explanation or at least remorse and reform.

So I reached out to Cliff and said hey, I have heard about a consent violation you did, can you explain please? Cliff then explained sort of vaguely and made it sound as if something relatively innocuous was all that had happened, and asked what exactly I had heard. I got permission from the victim via Mac and quoted the thing that the victim said that Cliff did (unambiguous rape), and Cliff did not deny it, but asked to move our talk to in person or via phone. I can't hear on the phone and I didn't have the gas money and time to drive to them so I said no.

I asked them to explain themselves further and they didn't -- they just stopped responding. (it didn't occur to me until later that they probably reacted this way to protect themselves legally) From this interaction I decided that Cliff was not a safe person and that it was likely that they did commit rape and then try to pass it off as something else when I confronted them. I waited several months, still hoping they would follow-up and have something worthwhile to say but they did not, so I unfriended them. Later I learned that they were not informing their sex partners about an STD they had, which I believed partly because they now have a history of consent violations.

Which brings me to my suggested community solution, which is listening to all stories and checking to get as much information as possible, then taking protective action if necessary. Whenever there is abuse, it almost always has happened to more than one person. In my opinion, patterns are the best evidence of someone being an abuser, but you can't notice these patterns without checking. And of course, in the meantime ask what you can do to support the person who has told you that they suffered abuse, and do what you can.

Then, when someone has been confirmed as an unrepentant, unchanged abuser, they should be removed from the social circle of the victim if that is what the victim wants. People don't have to stop interacting with the abuser entirely, but any gathering of the victim's social circle should not include them. This is not a punishment, but a protective measure to prevent the victim from being harmed further, and to protect others in the community.

What happens more often is ostracization of the victims, where people other than the abuser are continuously cut out of the social circle because it has become traumatic for them. Abusers should not get safety at the expense of their victims. We have to make a choice to remove the abusers so that we don't remove the victims by default.

*(these names are fake)