Speculative Titles: Pat Benatar "Hell is for children" (Part One)

I'm going to read this song somewhat against the grain, or at least to extrapolate beyond the usual interpretations of it. The most obvious reading of this song is that it is about the horrors of child abuse (not, as some trolls--or genuine fools--claim, that Pat Benatar hates children and wants them to go to hell). The main idea expressed in the line "hell is for children" is that the combination of innocence and dependence/vulnerability that children embody makes it particularly apt to use hell as the analogue for the special kind of torment that they experience in such situations. This is a powerful idea and I endorse Benatar's handling of it in this way, and part one of this post will be devoted to cashing out this idea. But, in part two I want to read the expression "hell is for children" in another way, and say that precisely because the concept of hell and all that it represents is so beastly and awful, that the idea is "for children" in the sense of being childish.

Now before I go any further, because child abuse is an emotionally charged subject that has had devastating effects upon those whom it has touched, I should note that I do not speak from experience here and I do not claim any particular authority on the matter or claim to speak for anyone. What follows are basically theoretical reflections: I speak in a general way of experiences that I have only heard reports of, and the best I can do is to think and use my imagination to understand the phenomenon.

That being said, one particularly ghastly element of child abuse is surely the fact that it doesn't simply do immediate damage to the child (though of course it does that in spades), but it actually damages the child's very process of emotional and psychological maturation and everything that comes from that. Because children are still learning what it means to love and be loved while they are being abused, and often are abused by the very people who are supposed to teach it/model it to them, their torment has the "special" internal component (I say "special" to differentiate it from the fact that all torment has a crucial internal component) of actually twisting the concept of love in its very formation. Benatar is sensitive to this fact, writing that:

Forgive and forget
All the while
Love and pain become one and the same
In the eyes of a wounded child

The idea that "Love and pain become one and the same / In the eyes of a wounded child" is crucial, and she will later sing that "It's all so confusing, this brutal abusing, / They blacken your eyes and then apologise." It is confusing for children, and that confusion goes deep to become a kind of confusion of concepts--love and pain. At such a level, the potential for damage is tremendous, as these twisted lesson have the potential to infect a person's entire capacity to enter into loving relationships with others. (I say "have the potential" because not everyone will be affected by abuse in the same way; I am telling one story, the one that Benatar also tells. If you have been abused but this is not your story, I hope that is because your story went a better way.)

Related to this is Benatar's inclusion of the nostrum "Forgive and forget," a form of advice wholly unsuited to children who lack the emotional capability to properly forgive. I am not disputing the importance of the capability to overcome (or leave behind or comes to grips with or however you wish to understand it) injury or hurt captured by that phrase, nor do I think Benatar is. No, the problem is that child abuse seems to stand in the way of developing the very capability to "forgive and forget" in the first place, at least to do so in a healthy way. After all, what I think of as genuine forgiveness involves coming to terms with one's injury, and I don't think most children have the emotional resources to do so. This is because of the general emotional immaturity of children, and is likely made worse by the damage that abuse does to their capability to eventually develop the kinds of emotional resources necessary to ever "come to terms" with it. After all, I think Benatar is trying to say, without a healthy understanding of what love and trust are supposed to be, how could one forgive?

In addition, there is the fact that children who have been abused may not have the external resources--like existential safety and independence--to give them the luxury of coming to a genuine place of forgiveness. Likely many children will "forgive" their abusers, but not because they have have attained a higher perspective from which to overcome the wrong that was done to them, but rather because they desire love and approval from the very person who is abusing them, and because they depend on them. Perhaps even more likely is that in the course of "forgiving" their abuser most children will really just do their best to forget what happened, while nonetheless carrying it with them their whole lives in some form or another. (This last statement is not meant as an endorsement or denial of repressed memories, a matter that I have not formed any definite judgment about, nor is it meant to consign all victims of abuse to a condition of permanent and defining victimhood. Rather, I just want to express the idea that one does lightly overcome abuse in the blithe way suggested by the expression "forgive and forget" in this context.)

The point of Benatar's inclusion of a phrase like "forgive and forget" then, may very well be a demonstration of its very inadequacy. If hell is for children, part of the reason for this hellishness may be because neither forgiveness nor forgetting are possible. But as I indicated at the beginning of this post, that is only one side of what there is to say about the idea that "hell is for children," next, I will look at an idea that lurks in the song in parallel, as it were.