A century of violence, silence, and power behind the most idealized figure in the Western world
June once again fills shop windows, social media feeds, and advertising campaigns with one of the most enduring images in Western culture: that of the protective father. Ties, tools, surprise breakfasts, family photographs, and messages of gratitude come together to create a seemingly innocent celebration. Within it, the father figure is associated with sacrifice, moral guidance, security, and unconditional love.
Yet every society is defined as much by the narratives it constructs as by the silences it protects.
And behind the idealized image of the father lies a far less comfortable history. A history that does not fit inside a greeting card. A history marked by physical violence, psychological abuse, patriarchal domination, intrafamilial sexual abuse, and the cultural legitimization of a male authority that, for generations, was considered virtually untouchable.
The question is not whether loving fathers existed. They obviously did and still do. The real question is this: why did the West construct such an idealized image of fatherhood that, for decades, it proved incapable of recognizing the many forms of violence that could also emerge from it?
The answer requires looking beyond individuals and examining the cultural structures that sustained that idealization.
Because the history of modern fatherhood is also the history of power.
For centuries, the Western family was organized according to a hierarchical logic. The father occupied the summit. The mother and children occupied subordinate positions. Authority flowed downward, while obedience flowed upward.
Although legal arrangements varied from country to country, the general idea was remarkably similar. The father was regarded as the head of the household, the family’s representative before society, and the primary decision-maker in matters of importance. His authority was reinforced by religion, schools, medicine, law, and social customs.
The family structure functioned as a small domestic monarchy.
What we now call patriarchy is not simply the existence of men in positions of authority. It is a social system that distributes power unequally and grants cultural legitimacy to that distribution. Throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paternal authority was one of its fundamental pillars.
The problem was not merely who held power.
The problem was that this power was considered natural.
When a form of power presents itself as natural, it ceases to be questioned. And when it ceases to be questioned, its abuses tend to become invisible.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, throughout much of Europe and the Americas, children were viewed more as objects of guardianship than as holders of rights. Obedience was considered a central virtue in child-rearing. Corporal punishment was regarded as a legitimate educational tool. Hitting a child was not necessarily seen as an act of violence. It was viewed as a form of correction.
The boundary between discipline and aggression barely existed.
The educational literature of the time offers abundant examples of this mentality. Parenting manuals, religious texts, and school discourse insisted on the need to build character through obedience. Authority had to be imposed. Children had to learn submission.
Physical violence was therefore wrapped in a moral language that justified it.
One did not strike in order to harm.
One struck in order to educate.
One did not punish in order to dominate.
One punished in order to shape character.
That language helped normalize practices that today would be considered abuse.
The situation of women was not substantially different. For decades, domestic violence was treated as a private matter. Many legal systems showed extraordinary reluctance to intervene in family conflicts. The home was conceived as a territory protected from public scrutiny.
Privacy functioned as a refuge for violence.
And silence functioned as its principal ally.
What happened inside the family belonged to the family.
That seemingly innocent idea produced some of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century.
Because when the home is declared inviolable, so too are those who exercise violence within it.
The first major crack in this system of silence appeared in 1962, when pediatrician Henry Kempe and his colleagues published the historic article The Battered Child Syndrome in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study described hundreds of cases of children severely beaten by their own caregivers. Many showed multiple fractures, repeated injuries, and wounds incompatible with the explanations offered by the responsible adults. Some had died.
The significance of the work extended far beyond the medical field.
Kempe did something that seems obvious today but was revolutionary at the time: he named the violence.
To name a phenomenon is to make it visible.
And to make a phenomenon visible is to render it politically impossible to ignore.
For the first time, a scientific institution was systematically asserting that the danger to a child could be found inside the child’s own home.
Childhood ceased to be viewed exclusively as a space of protection.
It also began to be recognized as a potential space of violence.
Over the following decades, research progressively broadened the concept of abuse. It was no longer only about physical blows. Categories such as emotional abuse, neglect, psychological abandonment, and verbal violence emerged.
Society began to understand something fundamental: violence does not always leave visible marks.
Repeated humiliation can be as devastating as physical assault.
Permanent threats can alter a child’s emotional development.
Systematic indifference can destroy the basic trust necessary for building healthy relationships.
Violence is not only what breaks bones.
It is also what breaks subjectivities.
Contemporary research in neuroscience and trauma has reinforced this understanding. The work of specialists such as Bessel van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, Judith Herman, and many later researchers has shown how prolonged exposure to traumatic experiences during childhood can affect emotional, cognitive, and relational development.
Childhood trauma does not disappear when childhood ends.
It often accompanies a person throughout life.
Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, difficulties establishing trusting relationships, physical health problems, and even a higher risk of cardiovascular disease have been linked in numerous studies to adverse childhood experiences.
Violence has memory.
And so does the body.
Yet even as physical violence began to be recognized, another form of violence remained protected by silence for much longer.
Intrafamilial sexual abuse.
Few institutions have been as effective as the family itself in concealing this reality.
For decades, the dominant image of child sexual abuse was associated with the dangerous stranger, the unknown predator lurking outside the home. The narrative was reassuring because it displaced danger to the outside world.
Scientific evidence ultimately revealed something far more disturbing.
In a significant proportion of cases, the perpetrator was someone known to the victim.
Frequently, someone loved by the victim.
And all too often, someone invested with authority over the victim.
Fathers, stepfathers, close relatives, and trusted male figures appear repeatedly in the specialized literature on child sexual abuse.
These are neither exceptional nor anecdotal cases.
They constitute a widely documented social phenomenon.
Research conducted since the 1970s by scholars such as Diana Russell, and later by numerous specialists in victimology, criminology, and clinical psychology, helped dismantle one of modernity’s great cultural fictions: the belief that the family is necessarily the safest place for a child.
The family can be a space of love.
But it can also become a space of domination.
And precisely because the father figure was cloaked in moral prestige, allegations faced enormous obstacles before being heard.
A child’s word rarely carried the same weight as that of a respected father.
Credibility was distributed unequally.
Male authority was considered more trustworthy than a child’s lived experience.
That inequality explains why so many victims waited decades before speaking.
And it also explains why they were so often not believed.
At this point, it is impossible to ignore the contribution of the feminist movement.
Much of the progress in understanding domestic violence did not initially come from the state or traditional institutions. It came from women who began speaking about what society preferred not to hear.
The second wave of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s placed domestic violence at the center of public debate. What had previously been considered a private problem began to be understood as a political issue.
The slogan was simple and revolutionary.
The personal is political.
Behind that phrase lay a profound insight: individual experiences of violence were not isolated accidents. They were part of broader structures of power.
Violence against women ceased to be interpreted as a series of isolated cases and began to be analyzed as a social phenomenon.
That shift in perspective had enormous consequences.
It made possible the creation of shelters for women experiencing violence.
It drove legislative reforms.
It generated new academic research.
And it opened spaces for a deeper understanding of the relationship between power, gender, and violence.
Paternal authority began to be viewed in a different light.
No longer as a natural reality.
But as a historical construction.
Decades later, the #MeToo movement produced another cultural rupture.
Although it is often associated with the entertainment industry, its impact was much broader.
#MeToo challenged a deeply rooted mechanism in contemporary societies: the tendency to grant automatic credibility to powerful men.
The logic that protected film producers, business leaders, politicians, or celebrities was strikingly similar to the logic that for years protected many abusers within the family sphere.
Respected men.
Admired men.
Men whose reputations seemed incompatible with the accusations made against them.
#MeToo did not merely expose abuse.
It exposed the social mechanisms that made abuse possible to conceal.
The central question ceased to be whether victims were telling the truth.
The question became why society had taken so long to listen to them.
The same question can be asked regarding millions of children.
Why was it so difficult to believe them?
Why did it take decades to recognize the magnitude of intrafamilial violence?
Why was the father figure so difficult to challenge?
The answer once again points to power.
Because violence does not flourish solely thanks to those who commit it.
It also flourishes thanks to those who justify it, minimize it, or prefer not to see it.
One of the most troubling findings of contemporary research is the intergenerational transmission of violence. Numerous studies show that traumatic experiences suffered during childhood increase the risk of reproducing violent patterns later in life.
This is not an inevitable determinism.
Most people who experience violence do not become perpetrators.
But the risk exists.
Learned violence can become enacted violence.
The blow received can become the blow repeated.
Inherited fear can become transmitted fear.
That is why family violence is not merely an individual problem.
It is also a historical phenomenon.
Each generation passes on to the next more than property, education, or culture.
It also passes on ways of relating to power.
The good news is that the changes that have taken place over recent decades demonstrate that history is not written in advance.
The contemporary understanding of fatherhood is radically different from the one that prevailed a century ago.
Today, there is growing appreciation for caregiving, shared responsibility, emotional expression, and respectful parenting. Millions of men practice forms of fatherhood that would have been unimaginable to their grandfathers.
That change deserves recognition.
But precisely because there is now a new way of understanding fatherhood, it is essential to examine the past critically.
Celebrating Father’s Day should not mean forgetting history.
It should mean understanding it.
Mature societies are not those that idealize their institutions.
They are those capable of examining them critically.
Fatherhood deserves celebration when it protects.
When it cares.
When it accompanies.
When it recognizes the autonomy and dignity of children.
But no celebration can be built upon forgetting.
For far too long, the West confused authority with ownership, obedience with virtue, and discipline with violence.
For far too long, the family was presented as a sanctuary even when some of its members lived within it as prisoners.
For far too long, the word of children carried less weight than the prestige of adults.
June will once again fill with congratulations.
And many of them will be fully deserved.
But alongside the celebration lies an ethical responsibility.
To remember that behind the most idealized figure in the Western world there is also a long history of violence, silence, and power.
Because the true tribute to fatherhood does not consist in protecting a myth.
It consists in protecting children.
