So I want to be clear about something here. Homeschooling saved my life. My trip through public school was hell on earth and left me with serious emotional and physical scars. After years and years of battling with the public school system, including changing schools several times, we finally got to the point where my health would not allow me to continue in the public school system, and also I was being stalked by a fellow student, so I was homeschooled for a year and a half, on and off, before dropping out and getting my GED in going to college early.
I was very badly abused within the school system by teachers and administrators who both bullied me themselves and also instigated bullying by my peers, and then refused to do anything about it no matter how severe that bullying became. I am terrified of sending any child that I have to school, because my own experience was so horrific.
But I have met so many adults who were once children who were homeschooled whose experiences were the opposite of mine, whose parents abused them, sometimes dramatically and sometimes simply by neglecting to give them the tools they needed to be independent adults. And because I have seen the difference between these experiences, I think I've got an idea of why homeschooling so often goes so badly wrong and why it's so often the tool of abusers.
Simply put, it's about controling information: what information a child has access to, and what information anyone else has about that child. The second part of this is easy enough to explain. Teachers are mandatory reporters and the school system is full of people who have eyes on children and who might see something's suspicious and report it. As pointed out already in previous reblogs, children often disappear into homeschooling after an adult in the school system gets suspicious. Children in homeschooling households often do not go to doctors for the same reason.
But the former type of information control is just as significant. The most common stated reason parents want to homeschool their children is to control the information that they have access to. When your stated reason for homeschooling is to deny the children access to information, to prevent their education in certain directions, educational neglect (itself a form of abuse) is a natural next step. If you are afraid of your children gaining the wrong information, actually giving them information is beside the point. You protected them from the bad thing, right? You did your job.
In the US where home schooling is virtually unregulated (though this varies greatly from state to state) homeschooling is overwhelmingly dominated by right wing Christians, with terrifying beliefs about government interference, and about what should and shouldn't be taught to their children, and about the amount of control parents should be allowed to have over their children. These movements are deeply patriarchal in the most traditional sense of being about a father's control over the family, over the children. They are deeply hierarchical, and deeply deeply authoritarian. And they tend to be very, very big on corporal punishment for children and sometimes even for wives. Not only do these environments attract abusers and provide cover for them, but they also give them a blueprint for abuse and a rhetoric to justify it to their victims, to bystanders, and to themselves.
As far as I'm concerned, it is impossible to homeschool in these groups without it being abusive, because a big part of the point of home schooling for these groups is to deny children the ability to become independent adults who make their own choices, including but not exclusively religious choices. But if the baseline is abusive, then many families go far beyond the baseline and many children in these circumstances are horrifically abused, emotionally, intellectually, physically, and sexually, because these communities not only attract abusers but support them.
And even leaving aside this religious context, homeschooling is both practically extremely useful for abusers, because again it allows them to hide their victims away, but also deeply attractive on an emotional level to abusers, who after all are almost always abusing out of that deep desire to control their victims. Homeschooling makes it so much easier to keep child victims under your control and isolated. It makes it really easy to be their whole world when you don't let them access to the world outside.
My parents had no desire to isolate or control me. They homeschooled me to protect me from very real and immediate dangers that they didn't see any other way to protect me from. But most parents who homeschool their children do it because they want to. And the reason they want to is almost always overtly so that they can isolate and control their children. This is in itself already abusive, and it makes any further abuse so much easier.
