Should We Pity the Enforcers of Family Separation?

Separating children from their families causes lasting harm to children. My question is how can someone do this to a child? How do people justify taking crying and terrified children from their parents? Should we pity the people ordered to perform this horrific violation of basic human rights?

First, let me be clear about the harm: This traumatic family separation harms children in terms of emotional, social, and cognitive development. Actually, don’t take my word for it. Many developmental psychologists and psychological organizations have spoken out about the harm (Association for Psychological Science; American Psychological Association). Many developmental psychologists signed a letter pointing out the harm and asking Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, to both stop the practice and work to reunite families.

But let me pose a question: Could you do that work? Could you be the person taking children from their parents? Could you drag apart a crying mother and a screaming child? Would you lie to parents about when they would see their children? I firmly believe that I could not do that work. I hope you share a sense of horror at the thought of separating families. And yet, US government employees are doing this work.

Who could do it? That’s the question many people ask. The assumption is that there’s something about those people doing the separating – something that allows them to take children from their parents. Maybe a personality trait. Maybe a history of violence and aggression. Maybe a lack of empathy. Maybe training. Maybe racism. Maybe a belief that laws must be followed, no matter the consequences for little children.

We tend to believe there must be something that allows people to not simply take children, but that perhaps makes them proud to do this work. But that basic belief is probably wrong.

Obedience to authority is powerful. Anyone could find themselves in a situation of great conflict; a time when obedience to authority conflicts with their basic values. Stanley Milgram demonstrated this in experimental research following World War II. He was trying to understand the Holocaust – how people could obey orders that placed people in concentration camps and resulted in genocide. In his experiments, people were tasked with applying gradually increasing electrical shocks to another person. The shocks were administered as part of a study on the effects of punishment on learning. If the person made a mistake in learning a set of information, then the person in the experiment was asked to apply the electrical shock. Everyone obeyed the experimenter. Everyone applied shocks that appeared extremely painful. Two-thirds applied shocks to the point that it appeared they killed the other person. Of course the experiment involved a confederate and no one was shocked or harmed.

Milgram’s work demonstrated the power of obedience to authority. And his experiments weren’t as powerful as the real world. The people were only in an experiment. Nothing could directly hurt them if they failed to obey. They wouldn’t lose their jobs. Their families were not dependent on their performance. They weren’t threatened for not administering the shocks. Yet everyone shocked the experimental confederate. (See another post in which I describe Milgram’s work in more detail.)

Taking children from their parents is a complex instance of obedience to authority. This involves not only obedience, but also the dehumanization of an entire class of people. People crossing the border are presented as different based on race, ethnicity, and religion. Dehumanization may make it easier for people to obey authority. Milgram’s experimental participants often said that the person deserved the shocks for failing to learn. You can hear echoes of dehumanization when people announce that families deserve what is happening because they choose to come to this country.

The government employees are now living in an obedience to authority ethical conflict. They have orders to follow. Their jobs, income, and families depend on performing this work – on taking children from families. This is a much more powerful obedience situation than anything an experimental psychologist could ever create in a lab. A recent article in the New York Times described the conflicts many of these employees are experiencing. What do they see when they look in the eyes of these children taken from their mothers? Do they see the eyes of their own children?

So should we pity the enforcers of family separation?

Perhaps we should all work to create a country in which people are not placed in such ethical conflicts.