u/Gu2530

English Translation

Is this a page about healthy families, or is it an echo chamber too?

I'm asking sincerely, because when I visit pages for stepparents, all I find are people saying they hate their stepchildren, that they can't stand them anymore—often children who are seven or eight years old, teenagers, and so on. People saying they hate these kids and their mothers, many times simply because they exist. These children already come from dysfunctional families, and then they're hated even more. And that's somehow considered acceptable in those groups.

But when someone comes along and says, "Hey, if you're a stepparent and you want to have a healthy partnership with your spouse or partner, maybe it's worth considering whether it's really a good idea to stay completely detached from their children," they're punished for it. That's what I said, and I was banned.

I said, "When you're a real partner, you help your partner with their mother if they need it, with their pet, and with their children." And when I said help, I meant exactly that: help.

I was talking about situations like an emergency. For example, your husband or wife is stuck in traffic after work and calls you saying, "The school is about to close. Could you please pick up my child? I can't make it in time."

I said that the right response would be, "Yes, I can go get them."

That isn't taking on the role of a mother or a father. It's simply doing someone a favor—the same kind of favor you might do for a friend, a sister, or an aunt.

My grandmother once traveled with a lifelong friend so that her friend could have surgery in the capital city. She could have said no, but she cared about her friend and wanted to help. That's altruism.

Then a stepmother commented that what I was describing was sexism. She claimed that the kind of altruism I was talking about somehow meant that a stepmother should become the child's actual mother.

My goodness, where do people come up with these interpretations?

Certainly from frustrated minds that feed on even more frustration in groups that function as nothing more than echo chambers.

And I'm not even going to talk about the groups exclusively for stepmothers, because those are somehow even worse.

Far from any stereotype, stepparents are unsuitable people to live with children and adolescents. Although most sources place biological parents ahead of stepparents when it comes to child abuse, we must consider the proportion of violence committed by these two groups. In Brazil, it is well known that 40% of child sexual abuse cases are committed by either stepfathers or biological fathers. In 2019, for example, there were 86,600 reports of child abuse, of which 17,029 (11%) involved sexual violence. Stepfathers were responsible for 21% of these cases, followed by biological fathers (19%), mothers (14%), uncles (9%), and neighbors (7%). In 2007, the Higher Education Centers of Maceió (CESMAC) conducted a study using child abuse data. The research analyzed cases of sexual violence against children and adolescents between 2002 and 2007 and found that stepfathers were the primary perpetrators, followed by uncles and grandfathers. In the year covered by the report alone, there were more than 4,700 recorded cases: 31% involved sexual violence, 35% involved neglect, and 34% involved physical and psychological violence. Surveys conducted in other Brazilian states also identified stepfathers as the leading perpetrators of child abuse. In Brasília, for example, more than 34% of violence against children and adolescents was committed by stepfathers, compared with 22% by biological fathers. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, a survey conducted by the Public Security Institute (ISP) analyzed 5,191 cases of child sexual abuse that occurred between 2015 and 2021. It found that stepfathers were responsible for 1,570 cases, whereas biological fathers accounted for 1,403 cases. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, the pattern remained the same, with over one thousand cases of sexual violence committed by stepfathers. It should be remembered that only about 10% of child abuse cases are ever reported to the authorities. Therefore, the actual number of incidents in every category of violence is likely to be substantially higher. Studies such as Prevalence of Child Sexual Violence in Brazil in the Period 2010–2018: An Ecological Study indicate that although the total number of abusive biological fathers is higher, the prevalence of sexual violence is greatest among children aged 10 to 14 years. Interestingly, children in this age group were also the most frequent victims when the perpetrator was a stepfather (50.3%). In Peru, stepfathers once again ranked ahead of biological fathers as perpetrators of child sexual abuse: stepfathers accounted for 23.5% of cases, compared with 19.9% for biological fathers. Two percent of Peruvian victims reported becoming pregnant as a result of sexual violence. Among these pregnancies, 34% resulted from rape committed by a stepfather, while 20% involved another family member, such as a biological father, uncle, or brother. In Ecuador, UNICEF data show that 65% of sexual abuse cases were committed by relatives or individuals close to the victims. According to sources within the country, stepfathers were the single largest contributor to this category of abuse. In 2013, data from Hospital Castro Rendón in Argentina revealed that 49% of the 174 victims of sexual crimes treated by the institution had been assaulted either by a stepfather (27%) or by a biological father (22%). In Mexico, a 2018 study conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), based on 460 death certificates of children and adolescents between the ages of 0 and 15, found that at least 34% of child deaths were associated with abuse within the home. Based on these findings, the Mexican magazine EMEEQUIS reported that in 2018 stepfathers were the primary perpetrators in 23% of these cases, while biological fathers accounted for 20%. Similar figures were reported in 2019. Also in Mexico, a 2019 survey by the National Observatory on Violence Against Women and Members of the Family Group found that of the 9,815 reported cases of sexual violence, 4,981 occurred within the household. The leading perpetrators were stepfathers, responsible for 1,170 cases (23.5%), followed by biological fathers with 991 cases (19.9%). The original text was very long, so I had to stop here, but I think you get the idea.

I am deeply sorry for every one of you who feels like you don't belong in your own family, who isn't treated with kindness, and who doesn't receive the love you deserve from your parents. I am truly sorry.

I dedicated half a decade of my life to writing articles, creating content, and studying psychology and law. I produced content on nearly every platform, and some of it even went viral. But for every stepmother I confronted, for every stepchild I tried to help, there were a thousand more I couldn't reach.

I opened Reddit and found countless stepmothers, just as on every other social media platform, posting hateful things. I was banned from most of those communities. I tried to make a difference until the stress made me sick. I fell into depression and began suffering from anxiety attacks.

At just 25 years old, I no longer have the strength to keep going.

I tried to fight for you. I tried to be a voice for stepchildren. But for every post I published, I discovered another page where people defended abusive stepparents or normalized harmful behavior. I cannot save your reality. Please forgive me.

Believe me—I tried.

From the bottom of my heart, I hope you grow up to be happy. I hope you become different from the stepparents who hurt you. You have never known me, and I have never known you, but I would give my life if it meant that every child and teenager could grow up in a family that truly loves, protects, and accepts them.

But that is not how the world works.

Please, stay strong. Keep studying. Keep believing in your future.

I believe in you.

This group is hypocritical. You're not here to find productive solutions. You're here to validate your own frustrations through the comments of other frustrated stepmothers. In fact, your own rules state that the purpose of this group is validation.

You talk about how society treats stepmothers unfairly, but have you ever stopped to think about how stepchildren are treated in the homes of the people who participate in this group?

You're normalizing the idea that it's okay not to like your stepchildren, that it's perfectly fine not to accept them in your home, and that there's nothing wrong with deciding not to do anything for them because "they have parents." You act as if those attitudes don't have a negative impact on them.

If someone says, "Maybe you should be more supportive of your husband. It's not healthy to be in a relationship while thinking you're just the father's wife," as if the father's wife weren't also the stepmother, that person gets banned from the group. After all, no one can have a different perspective in an echo chamber, because every differing opinion is treated as criticism. And every criticism, even when it's constructive, is seen by you as judgment.

Yet you're here judging your stepchildren's mother and your own stepchildren—who, in most cases, are children whose greatest "crime" was simply not being born from your womb.