Mothers Protect Us, Why Don't We Protect Them?

Kanye's treatment of Kim Kardashian is a reminder of the tremendous and unjust burdens of motherhood

I have come to loathe celebrity couples and the way they vapidly weaponize relationships for exposure and relevancy, but sometimes a story comes along that is about so much more. The TL;DR is that Kanye West (or I guess Ye… I can’t be bothered ) has been publicly terrorizing the mother of his children, Kim Kardashian for basically, existing. He’s dragged her in public about their children’s social media accounts and accused her of kidnapping them, and has incessantly threatened her boyfriend Pete Davidson, even posting her private texts begging him to stop. He’s since “apologized” according to several media outlets who are using an Instagram post he made that doesn’t include the words “sorry,” “apology” or "apologize" in it. The disgruntled divorcé does admit that sharing private conversations with millions of people without consent in an effort to intimidate the mother of his children “came off as harassing” which I think is very brave. Slow clap. “I’m still learning,” said the fully formed 44-year-old grown man.

While very little of Kardashian’s life is relatable, for many mothers watching this unfold, it feels all too familiar. The emotional abuse of mothers is so widely accepted and socially sanctioned that the men who perpetuate it seldom face consequences for it.

Mothers routinely face physical or emotional abuse from their ex-partners with very little legal recourse because family court and child protective service systems are notoriously bad at protecting survivors of physical or emotional violence. Abusive partners can weaponize the courts to drain financial and emotional resources away from victims and our justice system can act as an extension of the abusers’ axis of power by helping abusive fathers keep custody. A 2019 study found that even when a mother reports child sexual abuse at the hands of the father, courts only side with her 15% of the time. The same paper found that when it comes to domestic violence against the mother, the woman was only believed in less than half of the cases. Abusers so often use the justice system to force their victims into having contact that there are several terms for it for it from “paper” or “separation” abuse to “stalking by way of the courts.” As Jessica Klein writes at The Atlantic, Tennesse is the one and only state that has a law on the books to prevent abusers from doing this:

“After a breakup, the courts are often the only tool left for abusers seeking to maintain a hold over their victims’ lives. The process costs money and time, and can further traumatize victims of intimate-partner violence, even after they have managed to leave the relationship.”

If one of the most famous and wealthiest women in the world is helpless to harassment by her co-parent, what does it tell about us about the way we treat mothers, and the self-protection they must exhibit? Kardashian is being expected to mother both her children and her ex-husband, while protecting her boyfriend from harm, while withstanding emotional abuse is the kind of superhuman strength that women have to develop in a world that leaves mothers in the dust.

And even when mothers pull off the impossible, they often get criticized for trying to protect themselves or their children. For instance, even after his “apology” West continued to refer to the woman divorcing him as “his wife” and shared photos of her in addition to another post with a caption that read “STOP TELLING FATHERS THEY SHOULD HAVE FOUGHT HARDER TO SEE THEIR CHILDREN & START ASKING MOTHERS WHY HE HAD TO FIGHT AT ALL.” Harassing and publicly stalking the mother of your children seems like a great way to prove you’re a great dad worthy of custody!

West’s actions don’t exist in a vacuum. His abrasive and immature attacks echo the language and language of men’s rights activists who claim victimhood by family courts despite them tending to favor men. Similar to West, these activists like the ones from the group Fathers For Justice have been known for outlandish attention-seeking grand gestures like climbing bridges dressed up as Spiderman to prove a point about fatherhood.

Through his words and actions West has given Kardashian every reason to fear for her safety and yet she is the one being blamed for the ramifications of his own behavior. Like so many other mothers throughout modern history, she is accused of being the cause of a problem she didn’t create and then burdened with the responsibility of fixing it. Being a mother in our contemporary culture, is like being stabbed in the stomach repeatedly while being simultaneously criticized for making the floor all bloody. Jacqueline Rose puts it best in Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty when she writes that mothers become “the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task – unrealizable of course – of mothers to repair.”

Making women responsible for the fixing of men is a recipe for them to be remain committed to being broken. Since the beginning of time, mothers have protected us. Why aren’t we protecting them back?