Orwell, Schools, and Child Abuse

St. Cyprian's Preparatory School

 

Everyone says they are against child abuse. I guess they believe it. But most people seem to have no idea what it is. And what they do is moistly destructive. They think child abuse means either physical punishment or sexual contact. These are both red herrings. Busy fiercely punishing irrelevancies, they enable real child abuse to continue unrestricted.

Before we go any further, do not misunderstand. Sexual contact with children is always morally wrong. All sex outside marriage is morally wrong. But it is not, by itself, child abuse.

For what child abuse really is, I refer you all to George Orwell’s posthumously published essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.”

George Orwell was a macho guy. He volunteered for the losing side in the Spanish Civil War. In his books, he took on the Stalinists and the Marxist left, no doubt causing him some problems with his many leftist friends. He is a great writer largely because he stares evil in its face and calls it by its name.

The constitution of Animal Farm. Postmodernism in a sentence.

Yet he did not allow this essay, about his days in a British prep school, to be published until after his death. I presume the trauma was too great. The horrors of Animal Farm and 1984 were only echoes of St. Cyprian.

Here is Orwell’s short description of what child abuse is and what it feels like, although he does not call it by that name. He writes of

“a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

This is also a perfect description of depression, and for good reason: as even the psychological professionals are beginning to accept, abuse is the cause of depression. For all we know, it may also be the cause of bipolar disorder (manic depression), schizophrenia, and more.

One abuses a child when one gives him or her no option of being good; when one teaches the child, implicitly or explicitly, that they are evil in their essential nature, and there is nothing they can do about it. A lot of parents do this, and a lot of schools do this.

One can abuse an adult in the same way, and in the same way produce depression. But it is far easier to do, and far more lasting in its effects, with a child.

Physical punishment is entirely neutral in this regard, so long as this double bind is not part of the experience. An absence of physical punishment is no improvement at all, for a child, so long as this double bind is still there.

Sexual contact is also neutral. It leads to this double bind if and only if the child gets the message that they are evil for having engaged in the activity, yet they cannot avoid it. No doubt many sexual predators deliberately impress this belief on their victims, in order to avoid detection. But it is a separate matter. I have known many, perhaps you have too, who were “sexually abused,” i.e., played with sexually by adults, as minors and have no scars to show for it.

The reality of abuse should not be difficult to understand; the matter seems pretty straightforward. In fact, the same understanding of abuse is portrayed again and again in fairy tales: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and so on. It seems almost a standard feature. Indeed, one important purpose of fairy tales is surely to alert abused children that they are indeed abused, and that it is not their fault—they could be like Cinderella or Snow White or the Ugly Duckling. I imagine such tales have saved countless children from lives of emotional anguish.

So what is the modern response? The professionals are eager to point out themselves that fairy tales commonly portray child abuse. And what is their response? They want to suppress them.

Cinderella

It is hard to believe that the professionals are not trying actively to enable and assist child abuse. They seem, firstly, to deliberately misrepresent its nature, as either physical punishment or sexual contact; yet they themselves are quite capable of recognizing that Cinderella or Snow White are being abused, with no sexual contact nor physical punishment. Then they want to conceal the crime from its victims, and to deny them any help.