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John Winchester, The Dursleys, and Abuse

Posted by: ohgodnotthisperson on 10 July 2014

Or, why do people readily accept that the Dursleys abused Harry, but remain on the fence about whether or not John Winchester abused his sons?

So I was mulling over the topic of abuse in my head the other day – particularly how abuse tends to be portrayed in fiction – and I came to an interesting realization. The Winchester brothers, and Harry Potter, both experience a similar type of abuse in their respective universes.

Primarily, neglect.

Harry Potter spends the first eleven years of his life sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs, only grudging receiving the bare minimum of physical care, and nowhere near enough emotional support or affection to meet the basic requirements of your average human being. The Dursleys do enough to keep him alive and out of their hair, and otherwise, try to pretend he doesn’t exist.

Dean and Sam, meanwhile, spent their childhood on the road with their father, living in motel rooms. Though neither of them had to sleep in a cupboard, and they at least had one another for affection and support, both boys also received only the bare minimum of care essential to survival, and were frequently left alone and unsupervised – unlike Harry, often for days or weeks at a time.

In both cases, this treatment more than qualifies as neglect, which is a legal form of abuse. If a social worker discovered the living conditions of either Harry or the Winchester brothers, both the Dursleys and John could expect to be in trouble.

Neglect, in both cases, is compounded by verbal abuse. Harry has to listen to his relatives declare him a ‘freak’ and criticize his actions constantly. Likewise, while John doesn’t refer to his sons as ‘freaks’ (so far as we know), he is heavily critical of their actions, very sparse with praise, and quick to ‘tear (Dean) a new one’ for any perceived failure. (Dean once identifies a demon pretending to be his father because the demon treats him kindly, where the real John would have been unforgiving.)

We don’t have any evidence that either Harry or Sam and Dean suffered physical abuse at the hands of their caregivers, but all three of them did suffer frequent pains and injuries as a result of their environments – Harry was constantly bullied by his cousin, Dudley, whom his relatives encouraged, and then regularly faced mortal peril at school. Sam and Dean were consistently endangered by John’s hunting, both when they were brought along on the hunts themselves, and also by virtue of being taken into areas that monsters were known to frequent as their father tracked them down.

However, while very few people in the Harry Potter fandom (none that I’ve met) will try and argue that Harry’s childhood wasn’t abusive, plenty of people in Supernatural fandom will insist that John Winchester was just doing the best he could in a bad situation.

Strictly speaking, the Dursleys were in a bad situation, too, given that they were forced to take in and raise a child they despised against their own will – but again, even though there are people who acknowledge this aspect of their perspective, no one assumes that it justifies their treatment of Harry, either. Though arguably, the Dursleys had less choice about how to react to their situation that John did, given that John chose to pursue his vengeance first and foremost.

I think the key to the different perceptions of their abuse lies in how these characters are presented to the audience – and in how the perspective characters view their actions.

Dean and Harry are the main perspective characters of their respective stories, and they see their abusers in wholly different ways.

Harry despises his relatives. By the time we meet him at age eleven, he’s already more or less given up on winning their approval. Neither Harry nor the narrative want to paint the Dursleys in a flattering light – Vernon and Dudley are aggressive and stupid, Petunia is shrill and mean, all of them are unattractive, bigoted, and petty. It’s only at the end of the series that any attempt is made to give them better traits, and even then, most of that is focused on Dudley, who is the least culpable in Harry’s abuse, having been a child himself for the duration of it. Harry doesn’t like the Dursleys or think he deserves their treatment, he recognizes that it’s wrong, and he wants to escape it. It is very straight-forward and simple for the audience to agree with him.

Dean, on the other hand, loves his father. He makes it to adulthood without ever confronting the idea that he’d been mistreated. Because Dean is more of a perspective character than Sam (who actually objects to John’s parenting), the story tends to do what he himself does, and gloss over John’s abuses. John is presented as a mystery, a skilled hunter, and a man on a quest for vengeance. Dean perceives John as a hero, so it is easy to look at the surface narrative and assume that he is correct – most of the time, when the main character tells the audience something, the audience will trust that the information is reliable. Unlike Harry, who tells the audience that the Dursleys are terrible, Dean tells the audience that his father is a good man, rough around the edges, who did the best he could to make sure that his boys would be able to survive living in a world with demons and monsters.

People who aren’t familiar with abuse or abuse victims might think that Harry’s behaviour makes more sense. But actually, Dean is a lot closer to how real-life abuse victims tend to view their abusers (for at least some period of time, anyway).

On top of this, we have the Dursleys’ and John’s differing views of the victims of their abuse. The Dursleys do not profess to love Harry. They barely tolerate him. John, on the other hand, claims to love his sons, and to want what’s best for them. Neither Vernon nor Petunia would ever sacrifice their life for Harry, but John sacrificed himself for Dean. From a logical perspective, it makes more sense that the Dursleys would mistreat Harry than that John would mistreat his sons. If John loved them, why would he abuse them?

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where abuse is something that people only direct towards someone they hate. That’s one of the most awful things about it. A person can abuse someone else while justifying it as ‘for their own good’, or something they do because they were provoked, or lost control. With things like child neglect, it gets even more likely, as the abuser doesn’t even have to make an effort – it is, in fact, the lack of effort that is the cause of the abusive environment. On top of that, neglect is less easy to telegraph to an audience than a lot of other forms of abuse. If there was a scene where John backhanded a nine-year-old Dean across the room for sassing him, his status as an abusive parent would probably be more readily recognized. But if John is simply absent, the abuse is less obvious.

When a character is not presented as a villain, it can also be easier to view their negative or detrimental actions as one-time mistakes, rather than the symptoms of chronic bad behaviour. Because John Winchester is more sympathetic than Vernon Dursley, people don’t want to think of him as a child abuser, and will therefore be more inclined to accept excuses or justifications for his actions.

Another point of interest in fandom perceptions comes from fanfiction. Often, in both Harry Potter and Supernatural fics, when a writer wants to portray the Dursleys or John as abusive, they will write scenes of overt physical abuse. Some of this can be a form of catharsis – by transforming abuse that was previously only presented in emotional/psychological terms into a physical blow, the writers can express the undercurrents of mistreatment that they have observed in a more straight-forward, irrefutable manner. But this can also create the misconception that all abuse must be physical in nature in order to be valid, and that any character being accused of abuse is, by necessity, being accused of physical abuse. Therefore, in instances where no physical abuse has been depicted – such as with John Winchester – fans can become confused about what is or is not canonical abuse.

I can’t help but wonder what this says about real-world perceptions of abuse, too. Emotional abuse and neglect are much more likely to be dismissed as legitimate forms of abuse than physical abuse. Which, in all honesty, is probably at least part of the reason why people get so worked up about whether or not a character could be considered abusive – the question is not only about the character’s depiction and reception, but also about what people in the real world will and will not perceive as abusive behaviour.