Child Abuse, a disease with a history.



For more than 100 years Haut de la Garenne
 had been a center of child abuse

Child Abuse is a disease that is running ramped across the United States about as fast as Head Lice and is kept just as quiet. School officials are now trained to look for signs of abuse on a child just like a school nurse is trained to look for Head Lice in children attending school. If a child is found to have Head Lice a notice is sent home to notify parents, however parents don’t discuss this with friends and family because of the myth that Head Lice is considered to be a sign of being dirty. Abuse is the same now, as the news reports almost on a daily or weekly of someone who has been caught and arrested. Letters are sent home every time a sex offender moves into any school district informing parents (At least here in NY) a general location where this person is living.

        This is a good practice and it shows just how many pedophiles are out there but it is not a deterrent to stop them from preying on our children. Back when I was abused there was no checking children, in fact in my medical records when my personality changed such as withdrawing, becoming agitated and disruptive, and not following directions I was sent to the doctor and tested for hyperactivity. There was no checking to see the bruises that were on my body and when I sat against the wall during play time alone, I was not asked why I would not play. So looking at growing up in the 70’s compared to today’s society we truly have come along way in making the world aware of Child Abuse. Children are now speaking up, they are being honest about life at home and they are opening up to friends who help them break away by telling their own parents when the child might still be afraid to speak. We have come long way, but we have still have a long way to go before abuse becomes no more.

            Thinking about this today I did a little research on the history of Child Abuse after knowing that in the 70’s it was not a widely known epidemic, and hearing stories that prior to that it happened yet was taboo to tell anyone what happened in the house behind closed doors. What I found shocked me on just how Child Abuse was not only happening but was also accepted in the world. Historically, the routine use of children as poison containers to prevent adults from feeling overwhelmed by their anxieties had also been universal. Examples from the history of childhood regularly reveal children are expected to "absorb" the bad feelings of their caretakers. As one peasant community in rural Greece puts it, you must have children around to put your bad feelings into, especially when the "Bad Hour" comes around. An informant describes the process as follows; one of the ways for the Bad Hour to occur is when you get angry. When you're angry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a child for instance, will the "bad" leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted. Newborn infants, in particular, were perfect poison containers because they were so "unpolluted." The newborn then became so full of the parent's projections that even if he or she is allowed to live (up to half the children in early societies were murdered at birth), the infant had to be tied up--tightly swaddled in bandages for up to a year or more---to prevent it from "tearing its ears off, scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or touching its genitals," i.e., to prevent it from acting out the violent and sexual projections of the parents. Most early states practiced child sacrifice. Typical was Carthage, where a large cemetery has been discovered called The Tophet filled with over 20,000 urns deposited there between 400 and 200 B.C. The urns contained bones of children sacrificed by their parents, who often would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a favor--for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port.

            By the thirteenth century in the West, abandonment via oblation, or the giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses, had ended, and the first disapproval of pedophilia appeared. The first childrearing tracts were published and some advanced parents began to practice what has been termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing, where the child was not born completely evil, but was seen as being still full of enough dangerous projections so that the parent, whose task it was to mold it, must beat it into shape like clay. Church moralists for the first time began to warn against sexual molestation of children by parents, nurses and neighbors. Pediatrics and educational philosophy were born, parents of means began suggesting that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be wet nursed in some peasant village--and thereby condemning over half of them to early death--the mother might herself nurse her infant. The baby, said some mothers who began to try nursing their own babies, even responded to this care by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her breast and face and cooing. And if the father, as often happened, complained that his wife's breast belonged to him not the baby, these bold new mothers suggested that the father should be allowed to hold the baby too. These childhood reforms immediately preceded and thereby produced the humanistic, religious and political revolutions we associate with early modern times. Prior to this, children were masturbated by adults and even licked on their bodies as though they were substitute breasts. For instance, Little Louis XIII, in 1603, was described by his pediatrician as having his penis and breasts kissed by everyone in the court, and his parents would regularly make him part of sexual intercourse in the royal bed. But childrearing reformers beginning in the eighteenth century began to try to bring this open sexual abuse under control, only it was the child who was now punished for touching his or her genitals, under threat of circumcision, clitoridectomy, infibulation and various cages and other genital restraint devices. These terrorizing warnings and surgical interventions only began to die out at the end of the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of brutal and totally unnecessary assault on children's bodies and psyches for touching themselves. Despite the reformers' efforts, progress was so uneven that one British journalist wrote in 1924 that "cases of incest are terribly common in all classes. [Usually] the criminal goes unpunished. Two men coming out from [an incest] trial were overheard saying to a woman who deplored there had been no conviction, what nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like that. It doesn't harm the child.'" By the nineteenth century's socializing mode, some parents no longer needed to terrorize, beat and sexually seduce their children, and more gentle psychological means began to be used to "socialize" the child. The socializing mode is still the main model of upbringing in Western nations, featuring the mother as trainer and the father as provider and protector, and the child is seen as slowly being made to conform to the parents' model of goodness.

            Changing childhood is a communal task. And it works. In 1979, Sweden passed a law saying that hitting children was as unlawful as hitting adults. Imagine that, children were people, just like adults. Parents who hit their children weren't put into jail--that would just deprive the children of their caretakers. Instead parents were taught how to bring up children without hitting them. And at the same time, high school students were taught how to bring up children without violence. Twenty years later after this passage, these high school students had their own children, and no surprise they don't hit them. To those who object to the cost of communities helping all parents, we can only reply: Can we afford not to teach parenting? What more important task can we devote our resources to? Do we really want to have massive armies and jails and emotionally crippled adults forever? Must each generation continue to torture and neglect its children so they repeat the violence and economic exploitation of previous generations? Why not achieve meaningful political and social revolution by first achieving a parenting revolution? If war, social violence, class domination and economic destruction of wealth are really revenge rituals for childhood trauma, how else can we remove the source of these rituals? How else can we end child abuse and neglect? How else increase the real wealth of nations, our next generation? How else achieve a world of love and laughter of which we are truly capable? Our task now must be to create an entirely new profession of "child helpers" who can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence. I was very amazed at the information that is out there and it appears we have our work cut out for us. Until Next Time…

Most information taken from http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html
Photo taken from http://www.highstrangeness.tv/articles/jerseydevils.php