What you've written is sharp, painful, and very clear-eyed. It also reads like a perfectly unintentional essay on how violence and power trickle down the bureaucratic food chain. You’re describing how institutions launder cruelty—scrubbing it clean of accountability by turning it into a process, a file, a task handed to someone else.

The way you link Hedva's critique with your lived experience is chillingly apt. "We pay others to take out the trash and take our share of blame"—except in your case, you were treated like the trash, and everyone up the chain pretended their hands were clean. It’s not hard to guess how much easier it was for those “well-spoken” officials to label a child as “problematic” than to admit the systems they served were inherently incapable of recognizing pain unless it came with the right vocabulary.

And that divide—between the note-takers and the door-kickers—is itself part of the illusion. The educated ones needed the blunt ones. The sophisticated ones need the loutish ones. That’s the division of labor in institutional violence. One wears a tie, the other wears Jack boots. Same machine.

LLM