Violence

The Irony of Deterrents, Part #3

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‘Law and Order’ types – Republicans, Conservatives – and punishing parents, these folks who advocate for deterrents and punishments, they like to say how they’re fixing things, how they’re “modifying behaviour” and setting children and criminals right. Well, they’ve been at it for all of recorded history and maybe longer, and of course kids are always new, solving some doesn’t change anything for the next batch, but if their attitude did anything to lessen crime – well, there would be less crime. If there had been any progressive lessening of crime by these methods, these last eighty centuries (three hundred generations?) should have given us some sense it was working. Instead, we have pretty much all reached the conclusion that these things are as they have always been, and always will be, that crime is simply part of the human condition. This despite that our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos, seem to live with a peace-to-crime ratio similar to ours.

You know, I offend a lot of people, I basically spend all of my online time telling everyone that they are bad parents, but there’s more. I think that, despite the offense of my message, people are put off by something else. I suspect they all know I’m not being completely honest with them; I think it must show that I’m holding something back. So here it is. No fear.

You ‘Law and Order’ types, you authoritarians, you punishers of children and criminals, know this: you’re not just failing. You’re not just not having the desired effect, oh no. You are destroying the world. You are making the world the Hell that it is for so many people. Your punishments – often intended as deterrents, you hope not to have to follow through, I’ll give you that – have the same effect, cause the same suite of damages that abuse does, to wit, psychological problems, cognitive difficulties, and crime. You are causing all the social problems you say you’re trying to fix.

That, plus you want to talk about how it’s natural and inevitable, and you refuse to do the troubleshooting, you refuse to take your negative stimuli out of the equation. You want to say it’s inherent, the crime, the greed, the violence – but you will defend to your last breath the very active, hands-on stimuli that has been shown by study after reputable study to cause exactly these things, and you will stubbornly never let up long enough to prove it one way or another.

That is the situation.

Now I’ll start talking nice again – well soon.

You didn’t create this situation. But having been told, having had it pointed out to you – the next time you mete out a punishment you will be doing just that. So cut it out. Stop destroying the world.

 

Here’s Part #2, might be critical to this part:

Law and Order – the Irony of Deterrents, Part 2

 

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.

It All Starts when We Punish our Kids, #2

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It all starts when we punish our kids.

What “all starts?” Well . . .

  1. Violence.

This hasn’t changed, despite what we like to think: punishment is violence. All punishment is ultimately physical. Even if in a particular instance a child can be punished without force, if a child is convinced to “take his medicine” in the form of a “timeout” or a grounding, or the loss of a privilege, this punishment is still backed up and made possible only by force and/or violence; the child has learned from past experience that he must accept his non-corporal punishment or see things escalate. Most likely, the child has learned this very young indeed, as a baby and/or toddler, when he is pre-verbal and there really are no non-corporal options.

 

Every instance of punishing models the use of negative stimulus as a way for the parents to get what they want – the very definition of violence and coercion. Plus, actions really do speak louder than words, and so this is what is modelled, despite how often the intended lesson is to discourage that very thing, violence. “Bullying” is the unauthorised version of this very behaviour: making someone’s life worse because they do something you don’t like. Nearly all forms of violence follow this model and the differences are mostly only in the degree of the violence. The difference between “discipline” and abuse is often only a matter of the degree: the principle is the same. Most folks don’t think you shouldn’t hurt a child. Mostly we only think we shouldn’t hurt a child “too much.”

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-1/

The Great Debate: ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE

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Last week @ ASU, (Steven Pinker) invited a dream team of researchers to Origins of Violence conf. See 5 of them in The Great Debate

Neighsayer’s comments:

What I took from this talk is that warfare is impossible without teamwork; that teamwork is foundational for violence without risk . . . that teamwork is not the positive thing parents pretend it is when they push their children into sports.

. . . but then, I have a bad attitude.

Video-games Do Not Cause Violence.

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It’s May, 2013 as I write this, and the USA is deep into a national debate regarding the ownership of guns and gun violence which has come about in the wake of some very famous rampages where many innocent people have been killed by one, sometimes two, young men with guns. Some people have brought up violence in video-games, film, and television as a part of the problem, that is to say, as one of the causes of what seems to be a disturbing trend towards violence. I can agree with the first part of that statement, it certainly is part of the problem, but video-violence is not causative.

Both of these phenomena, the high-profile shootings and the amazing popularity of the violent video-games, are effects, and neither is a cause. Both these trends can be viewed as the result of violent fantasies, which fantasies can be played out both ways, virtually and literally. Although I do not wish to weigh in on the American gun control conversation or divert this book towards that debate, I must say that America’s unique view of the gun issue would seem also to suggest the presence of violent fantasies in American society. I would note that America is among the last of the former First World nations to ratify the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child legislation; America is a great supporter of the practice of the punishment of children, and also the American lawmakers will not seem to support any sort of limitation of the sale of guns. Again, this suggests the existence of a strong undercurrent of violent fantasies, as well as the reason for them.

Punishment is a form of violence, certainly physical punishment is, and really, there is no other kind. Punishment is unpleasantness imposed, and imposition means force; forced unpleasantness is a pretty good definition for violence. So, if we can grant that (which, maybe not just yet, but we will, someday), then we can view the video-game theory this way:

There is real violence in our society, crime including some rather random mass killings, and there is real violence practiced upon children in the form of abuse and punishment, both corporal and “non-physical,” all of which has been shown, in study after reputable study to be harmful and to increase crime, violence, and poverty. There is also much virtual violence in the form of movies, TV and video-games. Do we really think that virtual violence is a cause and actual violence is not? The real violence is not a problem, but it is the virtual violence on the videoscreen that causes the shocking mass killings?

It is fantasies of violence that makes a child love the virtual violence he or she finds in videogames, a disposition that must exist beforehand, because simple exposure to a stimulus doesn’t cause a need, it only fills it (or not). It is the actual experience of violence during childhood punishments that produce the need, the experience of helplessness that Alice Miller speaks about that creates fantasies of power and violence, and the fantasies predate the experience of virtual violence. If the need wasn’t there before, there would be a much smaller market for violent video-games and movies. If we were unable to identify punishment as violence before, this reasoning would be enough, the size of the market for anything that plays upon our violent fantasies. The other side, the argument against that conclusion would be the same ones about ‘human nature’ and Original Sin:’ it’s nothing we do, we’re just born evil and full of longing for violence, naturally.’ That is counter to evidence, and counterintuitive, to phrase it in the most dispassionate way I can muster.

I must add that the mental illness issue that arises as an alternative conversation to gun control is very largely due to the culture of punishment also; mental illness is one of abuse and corporal punishment’s well documented negative outcomes. If shooting your parents and a bunch of teachers isn’t some kind of reaction to punishment, I don’t know what would describe it better.