When Men Harm Children, We Ask All The Wrong Questions
The first story of child abuse I read last month arrived in the way so many do now, with video.
Grainy footage from a Ring doorbell camera showed a man beating a three-year-old boy who had been left in his care. The man was a U.S. Army sergeant stationed at Fort Hood, someone we, as a society, are taught to trust, someone trained in discipline and duty, someone we expect to protect the vulnerable rather than harm them. The child was not his son. He was simply a toddler entrusted to him, an everyday decision families make without thinking twice.
In the video, the boy’s body folds inward as the blows land. His cries echo in the narrow space of the doorway where the camera hangs. Neighbors shared the footage because they could not look away. Police later arrested the sergeant, but by then, the violence that will haunt this child for the rest of his life had already happened.
Not long after reading that story, another tragic narrative surfaced.
In Maine, a baby died after being left alone with her father for the first time. Early reporting described the death as devastating and confusing, the kind of loss people struggle to make sense of, especially when it happens inside a home with a parent present. But as more information emerged, the story’s shape shifted. The father had a documented history of domestic violence and stalking, charges that were known to the courts and part of the public record. That history was still treated as separate from his ability to be alone with a child, as if violence could be neatly compartmentalized– dangerous in one relationship but irrelevant in another. What should have raised urgent questions about safety instead became background noise, something noted but not acted on, until a baby’s life was gone. This story unfolded under different circumstances and in a different home, yet it carried a similar, unbearable outcome.
The public response followed a script many women know by heart. Be careful. Don’t leave your babies with just anybody. Choose better men. This advice moved quickly, piling up in comment sections across the internet, delivered and masked as concern and protection. The warnings sound practical on the surface, but underneath them sits an impossible expectation. They ask women to anticipate harm perfectly, to believe that abusers announce themselves clearly and early, while ignoring how often violence hides behind respectability, behind uniforms, titles, and promises of change.
This cultural script also erases how frequently women are encouraged not to leave relationships. We’re told to be patient, to believe in growth, to offer grace, and to hold men close through their anger and instability while calling it love. And when a second chance ends in violence, the blame circles back to women, as if the grace we are almost mandated to offer is a personal failing, something we should’ve known better than to give.
As a Black woman, I recognize this script immediately. Many of us do. We’re raised inside it, being taught early that safety is our responsibility and that prevention is our duty. When harm happens at the hands of the men in our lives, the first question is rarely, “Why did he do this?” More often, it’s, “Why did she trust him?” What makes this even harder to swallow is who often delivers that judgment. Usually, it is men telling women to choose better. Men who are quick to critique women’s decisions but slow to confront their friends, brothers, coworkers, and other men in their communities. For many of them, it’s easier to point out women’s supposed failures than it is to look another man in the eye and tell him to do better.
This quiet hypocrisy lives everywhere. Men dissect women’s choices in comment sections and on podcasts while remaining silent about the rage, volatility, and violence they recognize in other men. They offer warnings instead of accountability. Their silence with one another is treated as neutrality, even as it protects the very conditions that allow harm to continue.
Women, meanwhile, are expected to be vigilant enough for everyone. We are asked to anticipate danger, while men are excused from addressing it in themselves or in their peers. What we consistently avoid asking is the harder question: why are we not demanding that men be better caregivers? Not better partners or better providers, but better caregivers. Why is emotional regulation not treated as a basic requirement for men who are left alone with children, or for men at all? Why is patience not considered a skill men are expected to learn? And why does the burden remain on women to predict harm instead of on men to prevent it?
Black feminist thinkers have been naming this imbalance for generations, in the margins of books we have passed hand to hand. We have shared this knowing in classrooms that felt like refuge and in living rooms where women spoke in lowered voices about what love had cost them.
bell hooks wrote plainly about how patriarchy trains men into emotional disconnection and domination in both The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love and All About Love: New Visions. In The Will to Change, hooks argues that patriarchy trains men to deny their emotional pain while rewarding emotional shutdown, domination, and rage rather than care, teaching them early that vulnerability is weakness.
In All About Love, hooks reminds us that the first act of violence patriarchy demands of men is the killing off of their emotional selves, a harm that doesn’t stay contained but spills outward into their relationships. When that emotional severing goes unnamed and unchallenged, it doesn’t remain internal. It shows up in men’s domestic life and, sometimes devastatingly, in moments where children are most vulnerable.
To be clear, naming this isn’t an argument that men are inherently dangerous. It’s an argument for honesty about what we excuse. Too often, men’s anger is reframed as stress. Their impatience is softened into exhaustion, and their inability to caregive is dismissed as inexperience.
In the Maine case, the question should never have been why a woman trusted a man with a known history of violence. The question should have been why that history did not automatically disqualify him from unsupervised caregiving, or why male violence is so easily compartmentalized in our communities.
Why is emotional instability framed as a private flaw instead of being recognized as a public risk?
If we’re serious about protecting children, we have to be willing to change the questions we ask entirely. What would it look like for men to hold one another accountable before harm happens, to interrupt each other’s excuses, to challenge rage instead of rationalizing it, and to insist that caregiving requires emotional competence? That shift would require us to stop treating caregiving as something men help with and start naming it as a responsibility that demands preparation. Instead, what we keep doing is circulating warnings to women like talismans, telling mothers to be hypervigilant in a world that refuses to demand growth from men, and reducing a cultural failure to a series of individual choices. The personal is political. What happens inside our homes is shaped by what we excuse in public and what we refuse to challenge in private.
Children deserve caregivers who are regulated, accountable, and capable. Women deserve to belong to communities that don’t place the full weight of harm prevention on our backs. And men deserve to be challenged into becoming safer, more emotionally present human beings. The next time a story like this breaks, and it will, we can respond differently. We can stop telling women to choose better and start demanding that men be better. Until we do, no amount of warning women will ever be enough.
Josie Pickens is an educator, writer, cultural critic, and abolitionist strategist and organizer. She is the director of upEND Movement, a national movement dedicated to abolishing the family policing system.
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When Men Harm Children, We Ask All The Wrong Questions was originally published on newsone.com
