If it’s for my daughter, I’ll even hold abusers responsible

(Warning: Dealing briefly here with sensitive topics. If abuse and suicide are not things you want to read about, stop now.)

It’s episode four of “If it’s for daughter, I’d even defeat a demon lord”, and boy are we going into dark territory fast. Latina starts school, and the joy of the new experience with friends derails when a young teacher verbally and emotionally abuses Latina.

The teacher, a priestess who recently joined the school, sees Latina’s horn and explodes into a xenophobic tirade. Needless to say, she traumatizes Latina, who upon her return home breaks her remaining horn off and tries to kill herself with offensive magic.

Fortunately she is found and taken to the hospital. By the end of the episode, she appears to be on the mend, though still without her horns.

Dale, naturally, is furious. He confronts the head of the school, pointing out that the abusive teacher was transferred to this school from another one precisely because she’d caused similar problems at her previous school.

As a Catholic, I couldn’t help being reminded of the abuse many people have suffered at the hands of our own priests in the US, Ireland, and Australia. Not because my church has a monopoly on abusers–the #MeToo movement and other events in recent years have uncovered rampant abuse among politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and alas even in the anime community–but because all too often the abusers were shuffled between parishes and schools instead of being charged and convicted. Exactly as happened to Latina’s teacher.

(As an intriguing aside: Under pressure from Dale, the school principal fires the teacher and has her “defrocked” in the sub, i.e. removed from the priesthood. In the real world, there is frequently the misunderstanding that Catholic priests guilty of great crimes like abuse should be “defrocked” as punishment. In fact, the Catholic Church believes it is impossible for someone to cease being a priest; they can however be removed from active duty, which means they cannot practice as a priest publicly, or even “laicized”, meaning they cannot practice even privately. The latter, however, is I believe more often the case for priests who don’t want to live as priests anymore, rather than as a form of punishment.)

Personally, I don’t think the teacher’s dismissal went far enough. But I give props to Dale for confronting the school in the first place, as well as for calling out the head of the school:

Somehow, Dale is all the more frightening because he never loses his temper, and he never raises his voice. But he goes straight for the throat, metaphorically. If everyone in a position to do so did so, abuse might well follow the path of polio as a disease all but unknown.