Child Abuse: Secretly Endured, Openly Denied.

Children are one third of our population and all of our future. 

 ~Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

How is it that we live in a country that has no law for child abuse? Is living-while-child in Kuwait so perfect that leaders and politicians didn’t see the need to add anything there? Is our society so nice that all they give children is love and respect? Corrupt minds paddle rampant, no one is denied the possibility of abuse. How safe would you feel to know criminals under the guise of "parents" could get away with murder? 

We all know a monster, or seen one. Some of us might turn into the monster we despised. I am talking about parents who abuse their children, who go far enough to see their daughter bleed, their sons sob, and get a fine taste from that pain, like they've accomplished something great. Like they've taught a lesson. Teaching a lesson is the justification. It's not abuse, it's called discipline. 

Does breaking children feel superior? Remove the veil of anger, what's keeping that rooted? Is all anger bad? It is a feeling, just like joy. But there is a (pretty thick line) line between being angry at your kid for lying about washing their hands, and beating the crap out of them for it. A child is supposed to run around, bring their creative selves to life, and worry only about who gets to go on the slide first. Punishing your kid on a daily basis over small things, was that something your parents did? Didn't you wish they stopped?

Fear Allah and treat your children with equal justice. 

~ Reported by Al-Bukhari and Muslim.

When you abuse your kids, you’re abusing a precious gift given to you. Is this gift not good enough? Is your kid too ugly for you? But you look so much alike. The cycle of abuse continues for generations. Nothing good comes out of this family.

This is a broad, painful subject. Much too long to decipher in a couple of breezy paragraphs. Like many, it's a topic I've suffered mournful and sleepless nights from. Using discipline as an excuse to beat your kids, what does discipline teach the mind, when the body is too bruised to think? Does a bleeding body justify the discipline? The lesson is education, but a different kind. 

Children might grow up to forgive how their parents made them feel during educational moments, but emotional scars and feelings of self-worth carry on far beyond their relationships with their parents and into other aspects of adulthood. Emotional worthlessness gets passed on to the next family member and, like the plague, it spreads. Nothing good comes out of this family.

Kids can be upsetting, and that's completely understandable. They are naughty, dirty, and usually ignorant in their own right. You may start to flare up and feel a burning angst in you to give a good slap in their face. They should pay for how they made me feel. You were never allowed to act like that in front of your parents, this is simply unacceptable for them to test the limits like this. And perhaps in that moment, you can try to replace that place of feeling with a place of healing where instead you feel like a conversation can replace a beating, a glare could even be enough to send a message, or taking away something precious to them that doesn't involve extracting a bone from their body or blood from their veins. Meet children in their happy place, or meet them in the middle. If that is too much, stay in the dark place and forget about the place of healing. It's too far reaching, and the dark place is a comfortable place anyway. Growth is not for you, and nothing good will come out of this family.

According to Professor Harry J. Gaynor, Ph. D, in his paper “The Root of Child Abuse: Anger”
The following data (from the National Child Abuse Protection Agency) describes that in 1996, there was an estimate of 4,000,000 reported suspected child abuse cases. And by 1999, that number doubled. Newer statistics show that a report of child abuse is made every ten seconds, Almost five children die every day as a result of child abuse, and more than three out of four are under the age of 4. These are only reported estimates of child abuse happening in the United States alone. No one is sure of accurate numbers. Child abuse occurs at every and any level of ethnic and cultural line, within all types of religions and at all levels of education. This is the sad reality, this is the world we live in. We can choose to ignore it. We can advocate to do something about it. But in the end, it is the children who suffer.

Call to action:

Read and educate for more awareness. Start with the cited work below. This issue should be stressed. Abuse can come in different forms: Emotional, physical, sexual and child neglecting. Children won’t tell because of the fear and same it holds within them. Don’t let someone else be a victim because you were, don’t ruin someone else’s life. You of all people would know how that would feel like.

I brought children into this dark world because it needed the light that only a child can bring.

~Liz Armbruster, on robertbrault.com


WORK CITED

http://www.unicef.org/media/media_35903.html
http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics
http://www.aaets.org/article63.htm
http://www.ispcan.org/wp/index.htm
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/child-abuse-statistics.html