punishment

Corporal Punishment is not the Whole Story

Jeff/neighsayer14 Comments

A few words about corporal punishment before I get into something new on the subject. Bear with me. I promise, love it or hate it, I won’t bore you.

There’s been a lot of talk again lately, prompted by the Adrian Peterson story and it’s all good stuff, pretty encouraging. Here’s a great article, even if it does reference the racist aspect of the current spate of outrage:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/09/corporal_punishment_in_black_culture_what_charles_barkley_doesn_t_understand.html?wpsrc=fol_tw

 

That article breaks it down racially, which doesn’t interest me much, but it references one study that says that between 73% and 89% of most Americans (not all races are represented) stated that they spanked their children. These number aren’t changing very much. I think the big studies from decades ago give pretty much the same numbers. Corporal punishment of children is not going away, despite that the science is in, despite that we have known of the damage for years. Here’s what is probably the definitive metastudy regarding the damages of corporal punishment, from Elizabeth Gershoff:

http://www.nospank.net/gershoff.pdf

 

Don’t follow that link if you’re already on board, if you already oppose corporal punishment. That information is good, but it’s old, and more to the point – it’s not helping as much as we might have hoped. Everything in it about the damage is good and correct, but here’s the issue, found in the first two points in the “Recommendations” section:

 

“1. That parents, caregivers, and all school personnel in the United States make every effort to avoid using physical punishment and to rely instead on nonviolent disciplinary methods to promote children’s appropriate behavior.

  1. That all public and private schools and institutions that care for children in the United States (including foster care agencies and group homes) cease using physical punishment and rely instead on nonphysical disciplinary methods to promote children’s appropriate behavior.”

(Gershoff, E. T. (2008). Report on Physical

Punishment in the United States:

What Research Tells Us About Its Effects on Children.

Columbus, OH: Center for Effective Discipline.)

 

The problem lies in these two terms: “nonviolent disciplinary methods” and “nonphysical disciplinary methods.” This is the trap that all the brilliant and well-meaning educators and parenting gurus have set for us. This is the myth, that there exists any such thing, or more to the point, that there can be any such thing or any such thing that actually works. I don’t deny that there can be instances of nonphysical discipline; we’ve all seen them. You don’t have to punish a child every time you want the child to do something. (That sounds like I’m advocating for punishment, but I’m not. I’ll explain before this is done.)

I deny that a program of punishment, a lifestyle of punishment, can exist without physical means.

I deny that a child willingly takes a punishment, I deny that a child willingly self-punishes. A child who takes his or her timeout, or early bed, or the loss of a toy, loss of screen time in stride, with only a word from the adults has learned his or her physical lessons previously. (This is the part you’ll hate. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.) When a child volunteers for discipline, most often that child knows it’s his or her best option; that child knows that compliance isn’t really optional, and that things will very likely escalate if the child resists. Remember what old-school discipline is. The old parenting books, before Doctor Spock, the religious child-rearing books, they had people swatting their babies, for the very reason that they were babies and babies can’t be talked to, they lack language. In that world, children know what happens when they resist by the time they can talk. Those families were able to demonstrate “nonphysical disciplinary methods” too, but their verbal control of their children was very much based in physical punishment.

Allow me to try to impress on you that all punishment is physical with a few rhetorical questions:

How do we non-physically place a two year old in timeout?

How do we non-physically stop a grounded teen from walking out the door?

So before I lose track, here is my point: punishment is inherently “corporal.” We are corporeal beings after all. I’m not OK with corporal punishment, that’s not what I’m saying when I say all punishment is physical, or based in the physical, impossible without a physical basis. When I say all punishment is corporal, what I’m saying is to end corporal punishment, we must . . . wait for it . . .

we must end punishment of children, all punishment of children – I mean if we want to end corporal punishment. Because these “nonphysical disciplinary methods” are a mirage, a weird dream.

I know that’s a big ask, not an easy answer. I know you see discipline as, uh . . . not optional. It is, though. It really is. It has to be, because the damages of corporal punishment are never-ending, and there really is no other kind. Not only that, but even if there were some kind of nonphysical disciplinary methods, even if it were possible to discipline without physically forcing it – again, there are instances of it, but there cannot be a program of it – even then, much of the damage isn’t the physical kind anyway.

Many of the well documented damages are non-physical. They are in fact, overwhelmingly emotional, psychological, and cognitive in nature. I know nobody really thinks the lion’s share of the damage wrought by corporal punishment is the physical damage, but to reason it along just a single further step, it is logical to acknowledge that physical damages are the only kind that require physical causes. It is the other aspects of discipline that bring on the other sorts of damage, again, namely, emotional, psychological, and cognitive damage.

So there you have it. Two arguments explaining why corporal punishment isn’t the problem, two arguments why punishment, period, is the problem. Love it or hate it, I beg you, just remember it. Of course, spread the word, re-tweet this, re-post. Spread the word. Try this idea on, look at these issues this way for a time, a day, a week, a month . . . you’ll see. These issues can make sense, when viewed this way, it doesn’t have to be an emotional, personal choice sort of thing. It’s not religion. It’s real-world stuff. It’s right in front of us.

My wife and I have raised two daughters without the use of any sort of punishing whatsoever. Our girls are still in school, one is a senior in high school and the other is in university, after two years of college. It’s not a controlled double-blind study, but we’ve proved it’s possible, and it’s looking pretty good at this point.

Thanks for reading. Really.

Leading by Example is Not Optional

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Is that what we think? Do we say to ourselves and our peers, ‘I’m going to lead by example in this case?’

Like, the other times, when we did something and hoped no-one would see it as an example: yesterday, that thing I did? Don’t do that. Do as I say, not as I do. But today, today, I’m leading by example. This I do want you to emulate.

Like that is up to us.

I’ve enjoyed this form of literary masturbation in the past, the binocular peep show I will call the two-pronged blog, so I’ll try it again. Part One – the Middle East.

Let’s start with a harmless fantasy. How about we just get the Hell out of the ME, completely? America’s oil production is up, Alberta is already destroyed anyway, might as well milk the plateau that starts at the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains for all it’s worth, plus there’s still the Gulf. We’ve got oil here. I say we offer the Israelis some plot of land about the size of the one they have now, say Richard Gere’s place or something . . . and just walk away. Leave the various clans of Islam to sort it out among themselves. And in doing so . . .

Lead by example. We should leave them a letter or something, like –

“Dear Arabs, we’re sorry we took your oil and your blood for so long, but we’re stopping now. I don’t know why we did it, we were such pricks. All we can say is, we’re sorry. We wish we could explain it somehow, try to make some sense of it, but no, we just suck, and we’re sorry. We know that isn’t very satisfying. Of course you’re still pissed. All we can say is that we’re trying to change, and maybe, if we can be better for a few decades, maybe future generations of our peoples can have some sort of normal relationship. We acknowledge we’re leaving you in a terrible mess, but we think if there is one thing we can agree on, it must be that our efforts to clean it up only ever make it worse.

Good luck,

Love,

The West.”

and then we concentrate on getting our own house in order, see if we can’t establish something, a form of life and government that may be recognizable as an attempt to establish the Christian dream of Heaven on Earth . . . you know. Lead by example.

Because what do they see of the West over there? Conquest, war, dominance, that’s what we show Islam, and we hope that they don’t see that as an example. We don’t get to do that, we don’t get to say ‘don’t follow our example yesterday, follow it today.’ That’s not how the world works. People are watching us all the time. Everything we do is an example, we aren’t invisible until we say ‘see me now!’

Of course, part of this conversation must always be, action speaks louder than words. The world is always watching, but it is rarely listening, rightly so, of course. A great deal of what we do is far more important stuff we only say.

And so for the macro-view, geopolitics. Of course, the fractal seed, the base unit for this, is parenting. It doesn’t matter what moral lesson you are trying to teach your child if you teach it with any sort of negative stimulus, literal pain, loss of a loved object, loss of personal freedom, whatever.

Say what you will, you’re making your child’s life worse.

And your child will see it.

Why I Stayed? The Hopelessness of Popular Issues

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I’m not bitter. Well, OK, I’m a little bitter.

In my day job, as an uneducated working man, I have customers all over town and one customer in particular that is an hour’s drive away from home, an hour and ten minutes from my office, and I listen to the radio in the van, the CBC, sometimes affectionately known as the Canadian Broadcorping Castration. At least that’s what we called it in a long past job, when I worked for a competing outfit, a small town Cable company. The CBC has some good talk stuff, some good comedy and fiction programming. I turn it off when they play music. I find modern mainstream music dreadfully boring, and don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel. There is some good talk, as I said, but the noon hour, call-in, current issue show can get me down. When they talk about issues of bullying, or this week’s issue, violence against women, things I have put some thought to, hopelessness looms and the world looks like a stupid, mindless place where nothing will ever get better. It seems like no-one is trying to find a root cause for these things.

When I hear repeatedly “Why I Stayed?” and all the usual phrasing around it, I want to answer, I even went so far as to call in the other day, but I chickened out before they answered, even though I had gotten through, somehow made it past the usual busy signal, I balked for two reasons. One, it’s hard to be the curmudgeon, interrupting a naïve, shallow conversation with the nasty truth, and two, it’s even harder when the poor fools trading banalities scoff and ignore you! I didn’t want so publicly to be casting the pearls of my insight before the unassailable popularity of the clichés the talkers were employing. There are plenty of clichés we use for that sort of thing; some good ones have been attributed to Mark Twain.

Domestic violence is a specific form of bullying – and bullying is a specific form of punishment, specific, namely, in that it is unauthorized. When someone deals out punishments – verbal, physical and emotional abuse – and the crimes that these abuses are intended to discourage are not in line with a broad social consensus, then that is bullying, abuse, violence. It is abusive if the crime, such as being a minority or a female, is not considered to be a crime by the larger majority, but the tools of abuse and punishment are the same.

The punished person, the victim of abuse is told that they are wrong, told that they are bad, told that they deserve the mistreatment, and they are mistreated in any number of ways. This is life for many children, this is life for many children who are over-punished, and many of the girls who are treated this way throughout their childhoods find their way into abusive relationships. Why do they stay?

Because this is NORMAL to them. Verbal and physical abuse is NORMAL to many of these girls, it’s the only life they’ve ever known, so they stay because they’re unaware that there is any safe place to go to if they leave. Now here’s the nasty part:

If there are many women who wind up in these abusive relationships who do not report abusive childhoods, if women find themselves in that situation having had no documented history of being abused, that is our clue that even “normal” lives are making adult abusive situations appear to be normal. If they miss the clues that may have tipped them off to a partner’s impending abusiveness, it is because they have learned not to see the abuse in their “normal” childhoods first. As have we all. This is the problem with these “cycles of abuse.” The cycle operates whether or not we acknowledge abuse, whether or not abuse in some part of the cycle is “normal,” legal, expected, or even mandatory.

I’ve said it elsewhere: our “normal” use of punishment is a cause in the world, a cause of the violence we consider to be beyond normal, a large part of all the cycles of violence, cycles of abuse. That women who we wouldn’t consider victims of childhood abuse, even women who don’t consider themselves to be victims of childhood abuse find their way into these binds is evidence that they have lived in these binds before. Do the ‘math.’ If two and two make four, it cannot be allowed to matter that we don’t LIKE four.

This is what I call “reasoning” or “logic.”

If someone doesn’t like my theory here, I would ask – what is their theory of domestic violence? Is it that men are just violent swine, that it’s “in our natures?” Of course many men are indeed violent animals, and of course that is terrible, and they need to be responsible for themselves. Of course, the men who are completely free of sexism are few and far between – but to say “men are pigs” is only a description, only a label, it is not an explanation for anything. To simply call an abuser an asshole and stop there is no more helpful that to call the victims fools. How does labeling people that way explain the many men who do not abuse their women, or the many women who won’t be mistreated? Or how does it explain the abused woman’s part of the cycle of violence, how does it explain why they stay? Is this simply a manifestation of that old, logical saltpeter, Original Sin, people are just bad, and we shouldn’t try to find the reasons for these sorts of things?

Again, Original Sin doesn’t explain when bad things DON’T happen. So, I’ll ask my strawman critics again – what is their theory? What natural process explains domestic violence?

This week it’s violence against women, and last year it was school bullying and cyber-bullying. I have written on bullying before, but I’ll discuss it again soon. For now my point is, these two controversies have had the cumulative effect of depressing me. Listening to people discuss these things in a blind, unanalytical way, trying to solve an effect with no acknowledgement of the cause . . .

Well, that is just sad and pointless.

I almost want to accuse the media of knowingly and willingly selling mindlessness, because mindlessness is popular, we eat that shit up. And the hopelessness they throw in for free.

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #5

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

  1. Rape.

First and foremost, rape is violence, so for that aspect of it, see Part #2.

Second, rape is misogyny, at least man-on-woman rape is. That is Part #3.

The analogy of rape to punishment is pretty straightforward, it’s a stronger person forcing their will on a weaker one, and there is often a lot of victim-blaming: the punished child has “brought in on his or her self,” and the rape victim “was asking for it.” But it doesn’t stop there, this analogy has more.

There is the issue of force, the issue of implied violence. We would say of a large number of instances of parental punishment that it isn’t violent, that children simply take their medicine, apparently willingly, just as the male dominated criminal justice system may often judge that a woman who wasn’t severely battered may not have been raped, that she may have been willing, perhaps that she “was asking for it.” Implied violence is invisible, of course – well, “of course” in certain circumstances anyway. Especially so in these circumstances, when we have all been raised in the system of punishment, when we are all willingly blinded to the “invisible” implied violence of that system, when we have all been subjected to it, threatened throughout our formative years, and with primal memories of force and violence from our baby and toddlerhoods, when threats were ineffective because we lacked language skills – and this is the best case scenario, this describes people who were never actually struck or manhandled during the majority of their early years. So very many of us believe there was no violence behind our parents’ discipline, or at least we believe it doesn’t matter. Of course, we must, there isn’t really much choice, and by the time we can safely choose to see it, we need not to again, so we can take our turn dishing it out upon our own children. The window in which we might face that truth is pretty short, and missing it is what we call becoming a grown up, achieving maturity.

In those circumstances, when needing to be blind to our parents implied violence and then to our own, when that needful blindness rules our lives, in those circumstances, the implied violence of rape will usually be invisible.

Here’s the rest of the series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/08/25/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-4/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/20/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-3/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/

Punishment: a Self-fulfilling Prophecy and the Roots of Institutionalized Racism

Jeff/neighsayer9 Comments

“You beat a man with a whip, and he likes the whip.” I always love an opportunity to quote Charlie Manson. Or Vince Bugliosi anyway. I suppose we could still ask Charlie if he said it, but could we believe his answer? Bugliosi is still alive too, but sources aren’t important to me. I’m all about content. If a swine like Manson says something clever, I appreciate it. Moving on.

Separating the times when punishment has been a cause from the times when it has been an effect is no simple thing, along the lines of the chicken and the egg, except not so easy. We punish a person when they’re bad, but the well-intended abuse that is punishment can all too often have the effect all abuse has, the same effect the kind with bad intentions has. It makes people bad. To some degree or other, of course. Many recipients of punishment and/or abuse may never act it out. But it happens, and when it does, which came first, chicken or egg? When a person is bad, is the badness originating from their deep, original self, or is it a reaction to abuse, either well or badly intended?

Another analogy, supplied by another clever criminal: “If you’re really sick, you might take a lot of medications, but the reverse is also true: if you take a lot of medications, you will be really sick.” It’s a paraphrase from Kevin Trudeau. He’s a huckster and a shyster, but that is no lie. He backs it up with this: “All drugs are toxic. Don’t believe me? Take forty of anything.” Please don’t test the truth of that one. (I can’t remember if Kevin offered that warning.) But the analogy is apt: if you’re bad, you will receive a lot of punishing, but the reverse is also true: if you take a lot of punishments, you may be really bad. This is why it’s so hard to separate the effects from the causes: a punished person becomes bad, in effect proving the punisher’s case. The more we punish a person, the more they appear to “need” it, or “deserve” it.

This function can work on an individual level – Manson self-reports a childhood of very few happy moments – but it works at a social level as well. If a group or a subgroup of people are disproportionately punished, the effect of that abuse, well or badly intended, will make them bad, again, sadly appearing to “prove” the punishing subgroup’s case, reinforcing the appearance of the need to punish forever. Perhaps this is the correct context in which to see the recent events in Missouri, and the racist conflicts in America generally. It is a racial problem certainly, but I think the older problem, the pre-existing condition for this travesty lies in the abusive nature of punishing. Certainly there are a lot of ruined white lives as well, overly punished and abused white criminals that we should also wonder what came first, the chicken of their adult criminality or the egg of their childhood abuse and punishment.

Of course, we need to seriously question what came first with the disproportionately punished and incarcerated members of America’s black population, the chicken of their disenfranchised frustration, rage and desperation, or the egg of their marginal status in society. Of course this situation also informs the other current events tragedies of the moment, the dysfunctional relationship between the Israelis and their Palestinian citizens, and between the Canadian state and Canada’s aboriginals. Punishment and crime exist in a feedback loop, and of course, as always the real solution is love, not pain.

And just to be really, really clear: the egg came first.

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #4

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

           4. Depression.

The damages from abuse are many, but they’re becoming well known. I’ve often listed the categories of them, physical, psychological, emotional and cognitive, but the damages themselves are:

Impaired cognitive development (trouble in school, poorer grades);

Behaviour problems;

All manner of disorders: eating, depression, anxiety, self-harm,
addictions;
Physical injuries, sometimes permanent and/or resulting in impaired physical development;

Etc., etc.

The thing is, the list of damages that have been so well documented as resulting from what is called corporal punishment – that is the same list. This is why corporal punishment is fast being outlawed all over the world.

All punishment is corporal punishment – that’s the big secret. Therefore the list of damages that result from all punishment is the same list. (See Part #2, Violence.)

Now, clearly, it is usually, if not always impossible to show causation from even childhood abuse to teen or adult depression, let alone childhood punishments to teen or adult depression in specifics, but the science is in. Statistically, connections have been repeatedly shown. Documented victims of abuse and corporal punishment have higher incidences of depression and the secondary manifestations of depression listed above: addiction, self harm and suicide, as well as many, less obvious symptoms.

In a personal perspective:

1. I have suffered depresion myself, and I can’t really connect it specifically to childhood abuse or punishment. I was the last of four children, and I suffered the least punishment of all my siblings, which I accomplished the old fashioned way, by doing what I was told. Now, avoiding the punishments didn’t save me from depressive episodes throughout later life, but it’s possible that the environment of punishment is itself a cause for depression. I mean, I got the message, the one we all get, whether we wish to consciously grant it power over us or not: my parents would rather hurt me than accept any serious inconvenience from my behaviour.

Again, I can’t say specifically that that did it – but it certainly could do it. And statistically, it almost cetainly does.

2. One of my two unpunished daughters has suffered some teen depression. The environment at home wasn’t that way for her, we never sent that message. That message is everywhere for kids though, daycare, school, the homes of other kids. It probably even had a subconscious presence in our house. Both myself and my wife were raised in punishing homes; perhaps my kids felt the stress of us fighting our programming, perhaps they could feel that they were getting away with stuff that we never did as kids, and maybe they could sense the unconscious reactions we were fighting. That might do it.

Another factor may be that our girls were sort of alone, because of the way we raised them, because they were the only un-punished kids they knew. That may have set them apart, and they certainly have felt lonely and not a part of the group, especially during the teen years when the other kids were rebelling and sharing their parental war stories with each other. (My impression is that they found most of the other kids somewhat mean and . . . how to say it? Limited.) That may well be a depressing aspect in her life too.

Plus, of course, other random things in life also happen. Whether by sub-conscious transmission or something genetic, her depression appeared at the very same age as mine did. There’s very likely something there too. But the first few things, the punishment related ones, they could still be factors.

Plus, of course, other random things in life also happen. Whether by sub-conscious transmission or something genetic, her depression appeared at the very same age as mine did. There’s very likely something there too. But the first few things, the punishment related ones, they could still be factors.

Here is the rest of this series:

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/20/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-3/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/

 

Curing Crime

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          I know, no-one dreams of actually curing crime, not adults, not really. It’s just one of the fantasies we teach our kids, that anyone is actually fighting some abstraction called “crime,” be it fictional heroes and super-heroes, or the real, live police along with the rest of the criminal justice system.

          Any adult knows that once we create institutions, they have their own instinct for survival, and it’s no secret lately that the criminal justice system is big business . . . so like everything else in the money system, the very people who might have been tasked with “curing crime” are the last people who might want to actually do it. But it’s not just the prison moguls, it’s all of us who aren’t curing crime, and I can see another part of the problem. It came to me while commenting on another post tonight.

          We, as a society, have yet to define the crimes in the first place. Take for instance, violence, up to and including murder. Crimes, right? Not so much. These things are not crimes in themselves – I mean they are, they are, in reality – but not in our societies, our human societies. In many contexts, violence and murder are seen as solutions to crime and misbehaviour. It’s not “murder” when the good guys do it, apparently.

          So, here’s the point. No-one is fighting these abstractions, “violence,” “murder.” These are still unidentified as problems and they are often identified as solutions instead. So we must realize that these things are not considered to be inherently criminal. So if murder is not clearly in the “crime” section of our minds, what is? How can we stamp out violence and murder when we, as a society do not perceive them to be inherently criminal?

          We must realize that no-one is fighting “crime.” We are only fighting some of the people who commit these “crimes,” and using these very same activities to do it. And that is what we keep coming up against, every time the police do what they do for is in an overly public or blatant way, every time they cross “the line.” We are seeing the truth, that it is the people who commit crimes that our societies, through our police and criminal justice systems are fighting, and the actual “crimes,” violence and murder, walk free, never even accused.

          We need to put violence and murder in the “crime” side of the ledger if we are ever to even begin the fight against them. If murder and violence might ever be stopped, then the good guys can’t be allowed to do it either.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

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          Of course, this is a question that comes up a lot; my daughter just attended a funeral for a little girl who had cancer and suffered sickness and pain for most of her four year life. Many of the family and relatives were Christian, and someone answered a slightly different question, ‘why was she taken from us’ by suggesting that we don’t know what nightmares a longer life might have had in store for the child. The young folks telling me the story were appalled and thought that made no sense, but that seemed fair enough for to me. I certainly wouldn’t wish any prolonging of the pain of terminal cancer on anyone. I think the person conjecturing may have meant that any other sort of pain and nightmares may have been waiting for the girl even if this cancer had been cured, but true enough. Who knows? The idea was, that we don’t know, but God surely knows better.

          My point is, we can’t possibly know why people are taken, and that was a smaller question than the one suggested in my title, why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Of course, we can never answer these questions – but maybe we can learn something by exploring them.

          This from a previous post of mine:

“Our children, human children are born helpless, can’t even lift their heads, can’t so much as roll over, so our babies’ first experience of us is of all-powerful, all-providing beings. If we add punishing to that, the child’s experience is of an all-powerful, all-providing being that is also vengeful and punitive, one that must have things all their own way.

Sound familiar? After some months and years of this world, the only world the child has ever known, if we introduce the Judeo Christian (and Islamic) God, then this will fit the child’s worldview. That God will make sense to a child who lives in that world –

– So in this sense, punishment lays the groundwork for religion. This is why the religious, and the fundamentalist religious are so tightly bound to their belief: they have always known the basic narrative of the Punishing God to be true.”

          In the arc of a real, human life, we experience our parents or other caregivers before we experience God, and this prompts me to question whether the question posed by this post doesn’t also hearken back to that time in our lives. Is it possible that this question, and the sense of unfairness that it represents dates back to our earliest childhood? Is it possible that this was an important question when our parents were the Gods, before we were introduced to the universal God?

          Perhaps we were punished for things that were either completely innocent, or more commonly at least for things that we didn’t understand to be “bad” and deserving of some sort of punishment. Maybe that is why this question appeals to the atheists among us as much as it does to the religious.

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #3

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

  1. Misogyny.

First of all, violence breeds violence and the received violence in childhood punishments is the main root of violence generally (see part #2).

Second, male violence upon women has a terrible secondary effect on the world, and that is modeling gender violence for any children who have to live with it and see it. Anyone who sympathizes with the feminist movement must admit that if this modeling matters, then the modeling of adult violence on children must also matter (perhaps this also fits better in part #2).

Third, another aspect of misogyny we must admit is that it is transmitted by everyone in society; that is to say, it is a disease that affects us all, and one that we all transmit, despite that only half of us suffer directly with the symptoms. Much of all our early education, much of misogyny included, is very likely given to us by our mothers, our primary caregivers.

Much less a part of the usual conversations on the topic of violence, it may be that more of childhood punishing is performed by the primary caregiver, and in much of the world, throughout much of history and still true today here in North America, the primary caregivers are women. Is it too much of a stretch to consider that much of misogynistic violence may be the expression of infantile and childhood rage against the gender who punished us?

Here’s the rest of the series:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/08/25/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-4/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-2/

 

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2014/07/19/it-all-starts-when-we-punish-our-kids-1/