Abuse: how do we break the pattern?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Obsidian]
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.
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I’m not saying that those things are “okay”. I’m wondering how you would quantify something like “emotional” abuse in order to take a child away from his/her parents? My definition of emotional abuse may differ from yours and as it would apply to my children, this is something upon which reasonable people may disagree.

Some people view spanking as “physical abuse”. Once you’ve started down the slippery slope, there will be a day when every action you do will be held up to ridiculous scrutiny, and you will lose custody of your child.

Nobody reasonable believes that you should sexually abuse or beat a child unconscious. That, in and of itself, shows that I don’t view children as “property”.
I don’t understand why the poster views it that way. If children were “property” then I could throw them in a dumpster, or sell them, or barter with them, sexually abuse, or whatever I wanted. I don’t know what you would like to call a parent-child relationship, but “property” is far from accurate.

I believe that I have a natural right to raise my child as I see fit. Any alternate society which would have a community-based system of raising children would not be valid. I have a genetic like to my daughter which activates a protective instinct that is unique to a father.

Could some other guy be a better father than me? I’m sure with 6 billion people in the world, there are a lot. But I contend that it is one of the “inalienable rights” that are granted to me to raise my children as I see fit, unless I commit something very heinous as to forfeit that right.

They are not property. Once she turns 18, she can tell me to go fuck myself. That is then her right.

And no, I’m not directly threatening anyone. I’m just saying that I would have a very difficult choice to make should society enact laws that say that my children are controlled (and thereby property?) of the state or community..

22

It’s a paradox. As civilization has progressed, our standards of humane treatment in nearly every context have risen. However, as the population grows, our societies become more and more anonymous. It’s more difficult to hold people accountable on a social level.

Several years ago, when I lived and taught in a very small town, I joined the cast of the community theater for a run of Snoopy. Two seven year old girls swapped the part of Woodstock. During rehearsals, one of them was having a hard time getting her cue to go on stage, so I stood behind her with my hands resting on her shoulders to give her a silent, physical cue (pokepoke) to run on out.

I noticed that her left collarbone had an offset in it and asked her about it. She said that when she’d been a baby, she’d fallen and broken her collarbone. Mmm hmmm. This thing was off by nearly a quarter of an inch (imagine if you’d snapped a pencil in half and then set the two halves together so that the opposite edges touched. It was that bad.). If she’d been taken to the ER, as I can only imagine a parent doing, it would have been set much better. Her parents hadn’t taken her to the ER. So, there was either some horrific negligence or, more likely to my mind, physical abuse that they covered up by not getting her medical care.

Again, this was in a very small town where the teachers and principal knew all the students, and her older sisters had probably been in public school when it happened. If there was no way in such a small town to identify the type of abuse going on and protect a little girl against it, how can we expect to completely break the cycle in cities with five million inhabitants?

23

I’ll ask you about this first. Can this be taken to imply that anything short of that is permissible? So is it OK to break a child’s bones if they still remain unconscious? What if hit hard enough, as my father did, to leave a visible hand print on a child’s face? What if this were repeated daily? Five times a day?

This argument is disingenuous as well as false. Living in society means accepting that there are laws which govern our actions, and that society exerts some control over a matter, does not necessarily mean that total control will follow, even if that were possible.

You do agree, that there are limits to what is acceptable corporal punishment; the rest is simply a question of what degree is allowed. If you’ve been following the news then you’ll probably notice that there aren’t thousands and millions of cases of children being pulled out of homes because of physical abuse. If each parent isn’t being held up to ridiculous scrutiny now, for spanking because we no longer allow parents to beat the hell of their children, then how does it follow that such action would follow for causing emotional abuse?

Society used to agree with you, that children could be treated as the parents wished, but fortunately – in my opinion – there is a recognition that the needs of the children must also be protected by society if the parents do not. It may surprise you, but child can and are being taken from abuse environments were the abuse is not simply physical.

From your earlier thread.

Since this would be a hijack to this thread, I’d be interested if you were to open a new one debating on how the democratic process is doomed to fail and another one on how a group of citizens who wouldn’t be able to muster enough influence to change laws or elect enough people to have regulations changed would be able to gather enough people to start a successful revolution, and how to win that.

24

[QUOTE=JohnnyEnigma]
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.
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Yes, how can we teach self-awareness and inner healing. I think we can teach ourselves principles of emotional awareness. But it would look a lot like religion, so could we do it with parent approval, probably not. Learning how to forgive, find the best in others. It would be a great thing if we could. Our whole society is built on competition with others, could it be changed to cooperation with others. We test intelligence, why shouldn’t we test emotional equivalents as well. How many times have I seen a person with a doctors degree throw a temper tantrum. Well, far to many.