I have read some heartbreaking threads here on the SDMB about people’s experiences being abuse while growing up. From my own experiences and people I’ve met, I’m aware that people who have been abused sometimes have greater difficulty coming back to ‘normal’ and starting and maintaining healthy relationships. (And sometimes, happily, they don’t.)
So how do we heal the effects of abuse? How do we promote healthy, respectful relationships and parenting?
It seems to me that this is one of the great purposes of what would in the US be called ‘liberal’ policy: that the State make up for the deficiencies of private individuals, and provide that which they cannot provide themselves.
Conservatives, of course, say that the State as no right to do such a thing: that the only external groupings that can help are voluntary social ones such as, in this context, churches.
Some people might say that no help is needed: that everything will work itself out.
Too, there are many differing ideas on what the final goal of such policy might be. How do we define ‘healthy’? ‘Respectful’? What is ‘strength’? When do parents need help? How do we help them? What do we do if they refuse help? We already have laws against the worst acts, but how do we know when to act?
There was a tread a while ago about what should be taught in schools that currently isn’t. I always thought that some basic psychological knowledge should be on the curriculum. In this case, kids should be not only warned about abuse, (all kinds, including emotional neglect) but also be taught how abuse feels like from the POV of the offender - what signs to look out for, what kind of thoughts, can tell you you are hurting someone* else*?
For instance, many abusing moms feel criticized by their constantly crying babies. That feeling adds unnecessary stress and resentment, pushing some moms over the edge and dangerously shaking a baby, when otherwise they might have had the patience left to try and soothe the infant, creating a positive spiral. Public education about psychologicel mistakes like that is IMHO possible, and dar too important to leave to magazines and Ophrah (although Ophrah is doing a very good job).
No, conservatives usually say that the government tends to cause much more harm than good when trying to tinker with social chemistry. Voluntary organizations usually are mostly smaller, focused, and more flexible in helping people. Government-provided social solutions have nasty habit of winding up erasing any good they do and adding some harm on top.
My impression is that Conservatives would like to eliminate state social programs; certainly that’s my impression of how the Mike Harris Conservatives attempted to handle things here in Ontario.
But if conservatives argue that state programs are inherently more inefficient because they are bigger and less flexible, wouldn’t that also apply to large non-state organisations? (I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that large organisations are less flexible than smaller ones, by the way.) Would they be okay with small, flexible state-supported organisations?
If schools are to start teaching children how to behave as adults, then parents are simply going to take their children out of the system at a larger rate than they already do, seing as it ammounts to **nothing **more, in the eyes of anyone that disagrees with what’s being taught as ‘good’ or normal behaviour, than social brainwashing. Of course, if the government made it clear what the intentions of such lessens were, and focussed on tackling only those behaviours that led to illegal consequences, it’d only alienate a few hundred more parents in each state.
As for the ‘cycle of abuse’, this can be tackled through giving children found to have been abused the most loving homes that can be found, by improving the quality of foster homes and orphanages, as love can often counter abuse if administered quickly and in high enough doses. Therapy may be able to weed out fears and hatreds put in the child’s brain by such mistreatment, and so should be advocated for anyone that suffered abuse.
Abuse victims should be tackled by a large-scale ad campaign, like smokers are, to tell someone about it and get out of the abusive relationship, and more resorces should be applied to help them. Adult victims of abuse should be targeted and told to come to group sessions or therapy to help cure them of their trauma.
education, I would think. education, self-awareness, inner healing would be a way to break the cycle. Same thing happens in office cultures… I work in a state agency where management has been known to be oppressive and pretty much brutal. So when an employee has been “professionally abused”, they carry over these same bad management practices that were forced on them… its like an vicious cycle of inbreeding hostility and oppression, generation after generation.
Yes, to some extent. But at the same time, such organizations much rely on donations or actual sales, and are therefore inherently focused. They must be or do not survive, and most have a specific founding purpose and no particular interest in deviating therefrom. Government bureaucrats, however, can and will expand their fiefdoms and oversights whereever possible, in order to look more important or necessary.
First of all, such a beast has rarely been seen, although a few do exist. By nature, however, governments are virtually incapable of dealing with things on a small, localized basis. Everything must fit the bureaucratic mold (in triplicate).
Take the Tea Board here in America, for example: back in the 80’s Congress got on its high horse about it for some reason. The debates along probably wated millions of dollars, whereas the Tea Board consisted of a 500$ stipend for some tea experts to grade the tea importants every year. Congress blathered endlessly about the most trivial possible issue, even proposing to abolish and replace it with some ridiculous government grading service. They finally stopped that idiocy when someone noted it would cost around a bazillion times as much, for less functional service. But that was with high publicity. If some bureaucrat could get one established in some minor notation in bill, or just have the FDA declare that a new Tea Accrediting and Standards Establisment Bureau of National President’s Council of American Tea Imports (TASEBNPATI, for simplicity’s sake) must now exist, then all bets are off.
The second bit here is another government problem. Governments don’t like competition, or the idea that they’re work is useless and counterproductive. Bureaucrats will act to stifle competition whenever possible in order to secure their sinecure. And once established, it becomes extremely difficult to get rid of them.
But we want to be sure we’re not passing on the message “if you think or feel X, you’re an evil abuser”. The problem isn’t what the abuser is feeling, it’s what they’re doing in response to those feelings. And you have control over what you do, in a way that you don’t have control over what you feel. Feeling like you’re a bad person for feeling a certain way is not going to help the situation- it’s just going to add more stress and resentment. It’s better to say “some parents feel this way sometimes, here’s a better way to deal with it than shaking the baby”.
Humans evolved from tribe-based societies. Generally speaking, the men did all the hunting, while the women were responsible for raising the children. And if one of those women was dysfunctional, abusive, or self-obsessed, the child could easily “tune her out” and receive nurturing from one of the other caregivers. Children aren’t stupid, they know what they need.
However, in just a few short centuries, we’ve gone from a tribal community to what’s called the “nuclear family” – one father, one mother, that’s it. (And sometimes only one of the two.) So if one parent…or especially BOTH parents…are dysfunctional, the child has no escape. To make matters worse, children are essentially treated as property and aren’t respected as human beings. Then you’ve got politicians using the platform of “family values” in order to gain votes, thus perpetuating the lie and reinforcing the cycle of abuse.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a proper replacement for the two-parent system. We can’t revert back to hunter/gatherer tribes (well, maybe after a nuclear holocaust, we can.) Should all children be removed from their parents and birth and raised by the State? Bad idea. Shoot, I’m stumped.
I don’t have children, so I don’t know how much education is available for women who are pregnant. One thing that might possibly help is to try to identify potential abusive parents before the child is born, and educate them to alternative ways to deal with the stress children bring. I know it would be hard to identify all of the potential abusers, but one way would be to ask a simple question: “Were you abused as a child?”
If the answer is yes, then at least some education and possibly some therapy could be used to try to break the cycle. I have read many parents on this board saying they were taken by surprise by things that happened after they brought their new baby home - how bonding didn’t happen as quickly as expected, or how the baby wouldn’t sleep unless held, and so forth. If a potentially abusive parent has a rosy mindset about how her baby will behave and the baby decides to follow another route, we have increased potential for abuse.
This idea would only be theoretically useful for parents who abuse because of stress. Some people abuse because they can - it makes them feel powerful. My personal opinion is the only thing that will stop that kind of abuser is removing him/her from the situation where they are able to abuse. This kind of abuser does it because they like it.
Re: parents… I have read that the ideal situation is for the grandparents (and the village, presumably) to have a large hand in raising the kids, because many parents are too emotionally immature when they are physically in best shape for reproduction.
In any rate, it seems clear to me that social isolation of the nuclear family is not a good thing. Everyone needs help.
Hmm. Providing help and reducing stresses on families in general would be good. How many people snap at their kids because they’re under the strain of too many bills, for example? Whether of not a pattern of abuse is passed down from parent to child, those kinds of external stresses can’t help.
I agree completely, and that’s what I’ve been trying to say (but you said it better )
It’s just that there is IMHO, so little understanding of “evil”. Plenty of condemning, but no understanding. Evil is so easily projected outside of us, creating witch hunts for abusers and molestors, and so little understanding. Abusers do and feel what we most of us will feel and do at some point in our lives. They just take it to extremes, have no functioning built-in feedback to stop them in time. Add unfortunate circumstances, no social control, poverty, pure chance, repetition, and true evil can result; hurt, and even death for kids and other vulnerable people.
Yes, it is vital that we teach our children “How to spot that you, or someone you know is abused, and how to remove yourself from that situation, how to get help” . By the way, Gavin de Beckers book “The Gift of Fear” offers, among other things, an excellent analysis of the problem of domestic violence affecting children.
But it is also vital how to recognize that we ourselves are about to hurt someone, and how to deal with that in a more constructive way. Which I guess can be summed up as “Some parents feel this way sometimes, because they might think X, but here’s a better way to feel about that frustration, and here’s a better way to deal with it than shaking the baby”.
Externalizing evil allows it to perpetuate. Owning our own “evil” tendencies allows us to stop ourselves before we hurt someone.
While I saw this from a couple of days ago, I didn’t respond right away. The tread hasn’t attracted much debate, but as someone who was abused as a child, I thought that I would weigh in.
In my case, my therapist said that at one time he will be treating at most one or two people who have had this level of problem, and it’s unusual for people to recover enough to function at my level.
Overcoming abuse is not easy. In fact, it can be an extremely difficult and long process with no guaranty of success. Compounding the problem is that many times (perhaps the majority of times) the victims are the biological child of the abuser or the partner of the abuser and has inherited problems, such as a susceptibility to depression, as well.
There are limits to what can be done, but educated the public is important. Had there been more awareness of the damage from child and sexual abuse, I think that it would have been more likely that other people would have intervened earlier. Hopefully, my mother’s family would not have just send her back when she tried to escape. Maybe her church would have offered help.
The same thing with my older brother, who was caught as a teenaged counselor at YMCA molesting a child. He went on to rape me and my younger brother, and stopping things at an earlier stage could have saved us from that experience.
In addition to education, enforcing laws, prosecuting abusers and removing children from abusive environments needs to continue and be increased.
Cite for this? Is there evidence that this was common?
To some of the posters: Advocating revolution is against the law and certainly not what I am doing.
But if there were ever a serious movement in this country to take away rights of parents to their own children, there would be a reckoning.
In other words, no threat intended, if anyone here would take away my God given right to raise my daughter as I see fit, we would have very serious troubles should that actually come into play. And I do not stand alone.
I’m sure many young children are abused. That is horrific beyond all belief as I couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone a family member doing that to my child.
But if you are going to let the fact that some people are criminals (no shit, Sherlock) lead you to the conclusion that everyone, including me, should give up the right of absolute and total choice (short of sexual and severe physical abuse) for my child, God help anyone who forces that on me as a FREE citizen.
It is starting to happen in incremental steps. I wish to avoid that, but I fear that my grandchildren will have to start 1776 all over again…
Are you saying that you feel verbal, emotional, psychological and mild to moderate physical abuse are okay? I have got to be misinterpreting you. You can’t actually be advocating and defending that outloud in a public place. But that’s sure what it sounds like.
I’ll let you answer the post above before I add comment to that, but this threat seems interesting. Is this a treat against the individuals who make the laws or the individuals who excecute the laws?
But you’ve already said that you shouldn’t have the choice to use sexual or severe physical abuse in raising your child- which means you don’t have absolute and total choice in how to raise your child. Now we’re just debating the details.
Sure, not revolution: “serious troubles”. Sure :rolleyes:
Claiming a right of absolute and total choice is claiming your children as property.
I think that as a rule, parents should be given leeway, especially in society now, since the alternative to that is supervision by bureaucracy, which is worse on average than parent-run upbringing. But the only reason I support the former in general is because it works better, not because you have a natural right to do whatever you’d like to your kid within legal bounds because they’re your property.
If society were configured in another way, in which children were raised by many interrelated adults, would you still claim your children as your own and want to nullify the rules of the alternate society which free up the access and input others in your immediate social circle have upon their upbringing?
In other words, why are you so much better at raising your child than another random person? One who is being just as much of a parent as you are, rather than doing it as a job or as a self-selected hobby?
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