Parenting & Family Quote by Andrew Vachss

No respectable culture survives the way it treats its children, and Andrew Vachss writes like someone who has seen the receipts.

“Victimizers of children are the enemies of any so-called society” is less a moral flourish than a prosecutorial sentence. The key move is “so-called”: Vachss isn’t merely condemning abusers; he’s indicting the social order that permits them. The phrase yanks “society” out of its warm, civic branding and forces it to earn the name. If children can be harmed with impunity, then whatever we’re calling civilization is a sham arrangement of rituals, institutions, and public relations.

Vachss’s intent is confrontational and strategic. He refuses the comforting frame that child abuse is an individual pathology or a private tragedy. By naming perpetrators “enemies,” he relocates the crime into the realm of collective defense: this is an attack on the community’s future, its moral credibility, its continuity. It’s also a challenge to the reader’s complicity. “Enemies” implies a side to be chosen; neutrality starts to look like collaboration.

Context matters: Vachss built a career writing crime fiction and advocacy-inflected work shaped by deep proximity to the legal and social-service machinery around abuse. That experience shows in the quote’s hard edges. There’s no therapeutic language, no sociological cushion. It’s a demand for consequences, but also for honesty: societies love to celebrate “family values” while outsourcing the protection of children to overworked systems and occasional outrage. Vachss punctures that hypocrisy, insisting that a society that can’t defend its most vulnerable isn’t merely flawed; it’s fraudulent.