Justice & Law Quote by Andrew Vachss

The line lands like a legal brief disguised as a gut punch: if you want to understand how little protection abused children actually have, compare them to prisoners of war. Vachss, a novelist and longtime advocate for exploited kids, isn’t being cute with the Geneva Convention reference; he’s weaponizing the one international framework most readers recognize as a baseline for humane treatment. POWs get rules, oversight, inspections, enumerated rights. An abused child gets a locked bedroom door and the presumption that the family is a private realm the state should hesitate to enter.

The intent is provocation with a purpose. By dragging domestic abuse into the language of war crimes, Vachss reframes “family problems” as a human-rights emergency. The subtext is an indictment of both sentimentality and procedure: society loves children in the abstract, but our systems treat them as extensions of their guardians, not as rights-bearing individuals. “Far fewer rights” is doing double duty here: it’s about formal protections (due process, representation, enforceable standards) and about practical power (the ability to be heard, believed, removed, shielded).

Context matters because Vachss wrote in an America that often celebrates parental rights as near-sacred while underfunding child protection, crowding courts, and treating trauma as a private misfortune rather than a public obligation. The grim irony is that international law can imagine guardrails for enemies, yet domestic law still struggles to impose them on adults in charge of children. The quote’s force comes from that moral inversion: we reserve our strongest protections for people we can name as “combatants,” while kids are left to negotiate survival without a treaty.