Beating Children

Someone who beats a child has probably been brought up in what we call an 'abusive' environment themselves. This fact can seem disturbing - as though it excuses their behaviour in some way. Or as though, by 'explaining' it, it invalidates the experience of their victims - that this should not happen in any decent world.

This discomfort can make it hard to reflect on some important aspects of this kind of structure.

This morning, in a discussion with another counsellor, I said that my father's violence had something to do with his growing up in a culture of violence towards children. This was reflected in everything from a self-righteous punitive Protestantism to the 'Oor Wullie' cartoons in the Sunday Post - where PC Murdoch and Pa conspired to form Wullie's character through frequent and 'amusing' beatings.

My friend said 'But that doesn't explain their reaction to what they must have seen in front of them - a child made miserable by their behaviour. How could that not count against their childhood conditioning?'

I remember an occasion when my parents and some very religious friends were discussing a child who was never beaten - even when he did something monstrously unforgivable. On one occasion, at the age of three or four, this child had locked his parents out of the house in a fit of rage. They negotiated with him through the screen door until he let them back in and then carried on as normal. As though there had been no terrible breach in the divine order...

I remember being outraged at this - I think I was about eight or nine at the time. I knew that I would have been belted until weals appeared on my legs for such a transgression, and couldn't understand why he would have been allowed to get off with it. The idea that an adult might negotiate with a child was a profound threat to the authoritarian structures upon which the possibility of an intelligible universe depended. It was as though God had just apologised to Adam and Eve for getting a bit over-wrought about an apple.

The situation was obviously novel, puzzling, and alien to my parents and their friends. They were discussing it in quite a matter-of-fact way, as though examining a peculiar plant they had found growing up beside the porch. They didn't seem to be as outraged as I was. They even acknowledged that the child seemed happy and well-adjusted, as though this just increased the mystery.

Cultural conditioning doesn't just teach a parent to be abusively violent. It teaches them to enjoy it. They beat their children because they have been promised that it will work - maybe not so much to correct the child as to salve the wounds that their own shame has hidden from them. Self-righteous rage, proved potent by another's pain, is a kind of healing ecstasy.

This is dopaminergic. Their behaviour is like an addiction - it is entirely resistant to facts, whether they are to do with the child's immediate miserable experience or to do with the value of humiliating violence as an educational tool. 

Once we have sacrificed our children to our parents and to the addictions they have induced us into it becomes very hard to walk back to a humanistic perspective. By this stage new shames, about our adult behaviour, have been added to the childhood hoard. It becomes too hard to persuade the dragon that there is any other food.

I could tell a long story about the route I have had to take from my childhood outrage to where I am now. Neither forgiveness nor acceptance seems to have been particularly useful either as guides or comforts. Both focus too much on the parent's predicament.

We have to focus on protecting and validating the children first.