The Reality of Child Abuse

 

In his latest column, Xerxes the Leftarian condemns “punishment-based systems”—he cites English public schools—and congratulate the Canadian government on Bill S-251, which apparently will criminalize spanking.

I’m not sure whether he is opposing all punishment, or only physical punishments. 

Let’s first deal with punishment in general first:

If punishment is wrong intrinsically, then having laws and a police force and a prison system must be wrong. We should instead simply point out to criminals that their behaviour is undesirable, and all will be well. After all, they are old enough to understand. Pity, too, nobody tried that with Hitler.

Surely that would not work. So why would it work with children?

Moreover, so long as you give kids marks in school, or allow them to play sports, you have a punishment-based system: students who do not do the work, or even are simply less mentally capable, are punished by being shamed, often publicly shamed, with low marks. Kids who can’t skate or swing as well lose the game, and mess up in front of friends, family, perhaps an audience of strangers. Yet we need to have marks in school; we mustn’t think of abolishing grades. For one thing, it is the only way to know whether anything useful is happening in a school. For another, for the same reason that we need specific training and qualifications for someone who is going to work as a doctor, or a child-care worker, or a plumber. Competence is an objective quality. And we need to teach children for the real world, the world they will live in; we cannot keep them babies forever. Children need to know whether they are doing the right thing, and whether they are doing well or badly. They do not know by instinct. To leave them without guidance is the ultimate cruelty. 

You might argue, “Oh, but make it a rewards-only system.” That cannot work, any more than you can have up without down.  Give out any sort of reward, and, unless you give to everyone, the absence of the reward remains damning.

So perhaps Xerxes is objecting to corporal punishment specifically. I suspect so. I suspect he means to assert that this is somehow worse than emotional punishment, say: such as causing a child to feel shame, perhaps in front of fellows or parents, or sending him to his room to brood alone, or making him write something on the blackboard 100 times.

But think about it. Why is it worse? Surely only if you hold the body, the physical, to be more important than the spiritual. This would seem to reverse the proper valences: we should be teaching our children not that their bodies, but their character and their conscience, are the most important of their possessions.

This is actually in part what the tradition of spanking or the like does. It teaches the child not to overvalue their physical comfort, and teaches physical courage. There is the usual revelation; “that didn’t hurt that much.” It is an important lesson, and reduces unnecessary fear forever after.

Even if you do not consider the Bible sacred, it is nevertheless the repository of thousands of years of acquired wisdom. It does not speak out against physical punishment of children. In fact, Proverbs 13:24 says: “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.”

Chesterton’s warning applies here: do not tear down an old fence because you do not know why it is there. Tear it down only if you know exactly why it is there—and can be sure it is no longer needed.

While seeing no problem with striking a child even with a rod, the Bible does condemn child abuse. And sternly:

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!”

This is child abuse—not something so trivial as a spanking. It is misleading a child; gaslighting them. 

To characterise spanking as “child abuse” or “bullying” is the perfect way to conceal and enable this real child abuse: either not teaching children moral values, giving them no guidance, teaching them false values, or forcing or encouraging them to go against their conscience.

Like teaching them their body is sacred, but not their soul.

On Spanking

When I was young, I was terrified of needles. I was terrified of going to the dentist.

Now, having had so many needles, and having had teeth pulled, I more or less take it in stride. Yesterday, doing a brain scan, they poked me five times before finding a vein. Oh well…

The experience of pain toughens you to pain. The experience of suffering toughens you to suffering. Because it is really the fear of the suffering that is worse.

We do not seem to understand this simple fact.

It is one reason why it is important to spank a child, so long as the punishment is just and proportionate. It is important to tell them fairy tales with the scary parts still in. If you do not expose your children to some fear of pain, and some anticipated actual pain, you are actually causing them more suffering over the long term. You are making snowflakes who need to retreat with a colouring book in the face of any stress.

Spanking is just like that needle. It is an inoculation.

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.