So, is there any conclusion here? If the parent is beating or otherwise mistreating the kid, will your taking action necessarily make it worse? Considering nacho’s heartrending story, if it hadn’t been this incident that set the asshole off, don’t you think it would have been something else? And if the parent is whipping the kid in public, can’t you assume the same or worse is happening behind closed doors?
I think the worst thing about such situations is the feeling of helplessness. And for that reason, I’d suggest doong something, whether it be tell the abuser they are being a jerk, or inviting them to try that switch out on me. (Of course being 6’3", 300#, trained in street fighting gives you some leeway.) Or calling a cop.
Maybe it won’t accomplish anything beneficial. But you can be pretty certain that inaction won’t either. And I personally would rather feel bad and know I TRIED to do something, however ineffectual, than feel bad and knoiw I did nothing. So maybe I’m saying I would act out of selfish reasons…
And, sqrl, don’t be too tough on yourself about your decision/indecision, action/inaction. Those are the tough ones they don’t prepare us for. Just put that little experience in your pocket, tho, and apply it to make yourself an even better person. See, there’s always gonna be assholes out there. The only thing we KNOW we can control is trying to be the best people we can be ourselves.
MikeG, you are a stud! I love it. “He hit me first!”
My apologies. An attempt at adding levity in a negative situation. The answer can be found in my first post to this thread (about halfway through the thread).
It’s “A Boy Called It”, I believe, and yes, I’ve read it on-and-off during my time doing community service in the library. 'Tis rather unnerving, to say the least, to see such a horrid example of the lengths people will go to in order to hide the abuse in their family.
I’m a single father who somehow managed to raise two daughters successfully (got lucky, maybe) and greatly enjoy my grandkids. I cannot tolorate abuse to children.
It’s best that I was not there to see this incident.
Sadly, this sort of insanity has become all too common in our society. People have kids without wanting to take the responsibility for them and end up hating them.
pepperlandgirl, I, as a worker for a child protective agency, would not recommend direct action when one sees abuse occuring. It is generally not a good idea to step in between any domestic dispute, be it between spouses or parent and child. You may be confronted by both the offender and the victim. Then there are other witnesses in the situation who may sanction such ‘dicipline’ and may jump in the confrontation against you. Instead, report it to the cops, and, if you know the names of the parents, to you child protective services.
A couple of guys where I work are at each other’s throats because one of them interfered with another.
Guy #1 was whaling on his son (age 8 or so) and Guy #2 saw it and beat up Guy #1. Guy #1 has filed assault charges, and Guy #2 has been harassing Guy #1 at work, telling everyone he’s a child-beater, etc.
Guy #1 keeps coming to HR and wanting us to do something about Guy #2. We’d like to say, “Well, besides cheering him on and giving him a raise, what would you like?” But we can’t.
The authorities did get involved though, and Guy #1 has a court appearance coming up to decide whether he can retain custody of his son. I think it may be different here, where the CPS caseload might not be so heavy.
I would not have stepped into the middle of this, but I cannot keep my mouth closed either. I just cannot. When I turn on the T.V. news and hear about some poor child who was killed by an abusive parent, I will not be one of the neighbors interviewed on T.V. saying “We heard a lot of commotion, but we never thought it would come to this!”
I lived in an apartment building. Twice a month you could hear the neighbors fight. I mean knock the pictures off my wall kinda fighting. None of my buisness, I said to myself. Until one day the fighting started and I heard the daughter (she was about 6 or 7) screaming “No Daddy! Please no!” I called the cops. They came within 5 minutes and took the man away in handcuffs. A few weeks later he was at the door begging to be let in again. I’m happy to say the wife refused. And continued to refuse for as long as I lived next to her.
Another incident: I was in a large department store. There was a whiny, fidgety child with his mother. Whap! she smacked him. He started to wail. Loudly. Whap! she hit him again and started yelling, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about!” Whap! another smack.
I sidled up next to her and turned to my daughter who was with me.
“Yeup,” I said, “The best way I can see to get a kid to stop crying is to smack him repeatedly in the face. Right Pumpkin? That works on you doesn’t it?”
My daughter just shook her head in disgust. The woman stopped smacking the child-- in my presence at least.
I used to get roundly hammered because ‘people were looking’ and then get some more at home for showing the care workers up.
Unless you can follow up your actions or be confident that the welfare authorities will, then all that happens is that things simply get hidden behind doors.
Making some stand and walking away can be worse than saying nothing at all.
In my time I’ve had plates broken over my head, scalp inuries from high heels, my nose broken from being pushed at a sink and god knows how many strappings with belt buckles, garden canes, hairbrushes and whatever was to hand.
About the worst though was to be slapped around when I was wet, I’ve no idea why but, damn, that used to sting and leave huge red marks.
One thing it did was make me mentally hard and unemotional.I never talk about my feelings and find it hard to understand how people can be left so helpless after emotional trauma.
If any stranger commented on incidents that occurred in public then the beating would stop there and then - but I always got lots more when we got home.
Eventually it stopped when I came within an inch of strangling one ‘care’ worker.Strange but I still don’t regret doing that, in fact I feel a certain amount of pride and to be honest I’m still not sure I should have allowed her to live.
No regrets at all - I survived.
SqrlCub you could not have done more, by airing this on the boards you have at least made others think a little.
PLG
I’d be interested to know how much success you have had in such cases - did the errant adult/s change their ways permanently ?
Hope you have had some success I could use a little heart-warming right now.
Your parents were cruel and evil. That you hoped no one said anything while you were being mistreated in public is a symptom of how completely you were beaten down by the abuse.
casdave, you were beaten because “people were looking”? If no one looked would you not have ever been beaten? Sara, did your father drown your puppy because your neighbor cared enough to say something or because your father was a straight out psycho?
As to the OP, how you discipline your children is your own buisness, however repeatedly slaming a 3 year old to the ground is not discipline, it is abuse. When do you think it is proper to at least say something? When the child is covered in bruises? When she cracks her head open on the steps?
I will not be witness to it. And it seems the people who lived through this horror would like me to be. So, what should a person who is witnessing real child abuse do? Shake their heads sadly and sheild their eyes so as not to enrage the abuser further?
Guess you are missing a point here, I used the words care-workers not parents-whom I have never seen.Which goes to show that orphanages (and I hate that term try Childrens Homes or State Care please) are hardly any better than rotten parents.
Yes I can say with all honesty that much of the punishment was because other people were looking rather than for infringements like say dropping litter which would have been otherwise ignored.
It also might seem odd but I hated it too when others stepped in because it made me feel inadequate, as if I was showing so much weakness that someone felt moved to do something.
You may think that jumping in helps but as I said earlier, unless you can follow that up all you are doing is salving your own conscience.
Put it another way why would you leap into such an unknown situation when you knew that this would actually make things worse, hard as it might be for you to consider this, it is true.
If we were looking at a case where your next door neighbour was behaving like this then yes you will be able to monitor things and improve matters, same if it was a relative who you saw regular.Maybe all neighbours should look out for the kids in their area.
Ideally Sqrlcub should have been able to call upon some agency there and then but there is no rapid response unit that has the ability to deal with such matters.
Intervening is a fine judgement call, if there is obvious and immediate threat to life it is easy but things are not usually so clear IRL.
Some of the Child Protection Agencies seem to miss the point too, if beatings and abuse are all that you know then you have no referance point to work from, this becomes normality and as such it’s unlikely to be reported by the children themselves.
You might also note that my values are somewhat screwed up.
There is still the question of what to do when we know we are witnessing something wrong, illegal and even fatal in some cases and even the victims tell us to do nothing.
Yes, my conscience would bother me if I did nothing. I’m very proud of my conscience. I wish more people had one.
Is it more important to appease your concience or to do what’s best for the victom? That may mean innaction, it may mean you feel bad. Better you feel bad than the kid get it worse. Would I love to beat the living hell out of every parent that I hear say, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” Yes, of course. What will that do? Make things worse for the child most likely. What will talking to them do? Make things worse for the child most likely.
Reporting them isn’t even sure fire. Its a crappy, crappy situation. However as Nacho4Sara suggested voulenteering time at a shelter for battered woman and other such causes is more productive. Doing things to try and cut this off at the source may not be as instantly rewarding but its actually doing something.
Yes if its a matter of the child’s life then you should intervene immediatly. In those cases the authorities can actually do something, usually. However most of the times the child’s life is not in immediate danger.
What I am saying is that we must all act on our conscience. If I thought that saying something would hurt these children futher, than don’t say anything. If I see a three year old slammed repeatedly into concrete steps, keeping my mouth shut would endanger that child much more than what could possibly happen to that child when she is out of my sight.
If I see a woman, who is obviously upset and as out of control as her child, continually smack the child out of fustration, I am not going to jump in between them physically and have a showdown with her. Tell her she is acting badly? Yes. This is not behavior anyone should tolerate.
We should not tolerate this behavior. We should do what we can to stop it. Again the question is what should we do. I am eagerly awaiting the answer.
Sometimes the answer is unfortunately nothing. That there isn’t any action that we can take that will make things better. Someone who is beating their child in public is probably not someone who can be embarrased out of doing it ever again.
Does it suck that its almost impossible to do anything helpful, yes. I really wish that there was a clear way to make things better. I do know that intervening with human scum that abuse their children doesn’t help much. You can’t expect the sub-human jerk off that do it to react in anything but the most primitive and savage manner, which means the kid is in for worse after any intervention where they are still with their parents, or ‘care’ takers.
Tim, I think your missing my point. Yes, I will agree with you that sometimes doing nothing is the best course of action. I think where you and I part company is when the possible harm to the child outweighs the actual harm already being done.
If you hit your kids with a switch in public, then it is very possible you are doing more damage at home. But even though hitting your kid with a switch is a wretched thing to do, it is not fatal. I would not interfere. Slamming a small child onto concrete steps is beyond what anyone should tolerate watching.
Ok, I don’t think I’ve been missing your point as I agree when the child’s is in sufficient danger you need to do something. Maybe we’re getting different impressions from the OP.
I think it was Mike G that beat the bejesus out of the ‘father’ who had severely injured his little girl. In that case he acted in a brutal manner to save the child’s life. In the OP I don’t think the situation was one in which the immediate danger justified putting the child in greater danger later.
As for the slamning on the steps that is a bit much. I’d have to be there to see what that actually consisted of. Giving sqrl the benifit of the doubt, it was probably not savage to the point of a bone cracking, life threatening attack.
Arguing over sqrl’s actions are hard, no one else was there, only he knows how bad it was. Arguing in general I think that we can agree that you have to take it case by case, when you are actually there.
I am also speaking in general terms. I did not mean to imply that Sqrl doesn’t have a conscience as the exsistance of this thread obviously indicates that he does.
I am not advocating jumping up and challenging every injustice that you see either. Everyone has to have his own personal guidelines. Immediate danger to the child will get me involved.
The ones who think that publicly chastising a child shows us that they’re doing their job, not letting their kids misbehave. But there’s no discipline at home.
I grew up closely with a family like this (nine kids, three of them close to my age). I always hated going anywhere with them and their mom. She always bragged that she could take her kids anywhere and they’d behave. But at home, the kids were hellions.
This is a small percentage of abusive parents. They bear no relationship to the psychotic people we’re talking about here.
I’ve seen the reverse, where kids are well behaved at home but the minute they got out they make all sorts of trouble. There was no abuse involved, the kids were just jerks I think.