Last movement of Beethoven's "Tempest" Sonata
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Child Abuse
This page was last modified on Tuesday, 09-Apr-2002 11:29:58 EDT
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In our society children are unnecessarily vulnerable and are too frequently victimized.   Sometimes the child is abused by his parents.   We have a few irresponsible parents who abuse their children by neglect, abandonment, exploitation (sexual and/or economic), or through physical violence often associated with alcoholism.  There have been cases in which a child has been abused in the name of religion.  This can be a very thorny problem because of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion.  The courts in such cases are forced to draw a line separating freedom of religion from abuse.   The rights of children are not well defined amd are sometimes simply neglected.   Many of our laws are based on the old English Common Law in which a child was the property of his parents and essentially had no rights.   In addition, there is a prevailing attitude that a child is better off with his own parents even when the parents are known to be irresponsible or violent.   Thus when social agencies try to act in the child's best interest they frequently run into the hostility of the parents.   The social agencies employ professional social workers who may or may not be well trained.   But whatever their training, they have a tough job because they risk criticism no matter what they do.   If they intervene the parents complain and if they don't intervene they are accused of negligence.      Many children in dysfunctional families quite logically run away from home.  When they do this they subject themselves to exploitation by the strangers with whom they come into contact.  Occasionally they are lucky and are rescued by a competent person who understands their plight.  This probably happens more frequently than most people realize.  But there are also the horror stories in which the child is subjected to sexual abuse or is exploited to create pornography or becomes involved in drug abuse or develops a criminal lifestyle.      These are real problems, and we need to do more to improve our laws so that children have rights too, not just their parents.   We need to train law enforcement officers and social workers better.   We need to improve our social agencies.   But having said this, there are some popular misconceptions that also need to be addressed.      In the first place, if you have abused your child or he runs away from home, it isn't necessarily a disaster that causes "irreparable harm. "  In fact, abuse would have to be extreme indeed to cause irreparable harm.  Children are tougher than they are given credit for.  There are many successful well-adjusted adults who were abused by their parents or who ran away from home at some point in their lives.  Especially damaging is the belief that if, for instance, a child has been abused sexually that he is doomed to suffer because of it for the rest of his life or that he requires expensive treatment so that he can be "healed."   One problem here is the definition of sexual abuse.  The fear of sexual abuse is similar to a lot of other fears such as the fear of snakes or spiders.  When you actually study snakes and spiders you find that they aren't nearly so dangerous as you thought at first.  The same is true for many cases of sexual "abuse."      The Truth Tree's position on sexual abuse is that the mere occurrence of some sexual activity between an adult and a child is not necessarily abusive.   In order to be abusive the activity must be really harmful.   Any such episode that continues for more than one or two encounters is likely to interfere with the child's social development.   Such a relationship often requires secrecy and the child is placed in a most untenable position.   Growing up is difficult enough, and there's certainly no need to add to the difficulties.   Clearly any sexual behavior that involves physical force, physical harm, threats or other forms of coercion, or which significantly interferes with a child's social or sexual development is abusive.   One problem with these criteria is that opinions vary as to whether any sexual relationship between an adult and a child can be consensual.   It is common in the literature to find assertions that no child can have a consensual sexual relationship with an adult.   Sometimes the position is taken that the child is unable to refuse a suggestion of an adult because of the difference in status.   If this were true parents would have no trouble at all getting their children to eat spinach or clean their rooms!   And clearly the definition of "child" and "adult" can lead to serious problems of interpretation.   What about the numerous occasions when a "child" of seventeen has a sexual relationship with an "adult" of eighteen?   Drawing arbitrary lines is not going to help to solve the problems in this area.   And the other criteria have equally thorny problems associated with them.   Particularly problematic are the widely differing views on the nature of psychosexual development and normative opinions as to how this ill-defined process should proceed.   Judges who hear complaints about sexual abuse will have to exercise sophisticated wisdom to disentangle what is harmful from what may only be socially outrageous. When Kinsey interviewed his subjects for the first study of human sexual behavior he noticed some relationships that he classified as "sexually tinged."  Sometimes an aunt, uncle, or older cousin will introduce a youngster to some sexual play or other.   In the present atmosphere of emotionalism about this kind of thing many social workers will become very alarmed and will start to take heroic measures.   Many of these incidents are not serious.   In our society alarmist attitudes have themselves contributed to the harmfulness of a number of different sexual behaviors.   It wasn't so long ago that the occurrence of masturbation was considered to be so harmful that extreme measures to prevent it were taken.      Associated with the general alarmism over sexual abuse is the idea still popular in the minds of some mental health workers (notably social workers) that there is something so special about sex that if a child has some kind of sexually tinged relationship with an older person it will cause extremely serious psychopathology.   Sigmund Freud deserves some of the blame for this.   There is currently a faddish belief that the questionable diagnosis of "multiple personality disorder" is caused by early childhood sexual experiences with an older person.   This is a belief that is not substantiated by reliable scientific evidence.   (For example, actress Anne Heche claims to suffer m.p.d. as a result of childhood sexual abuse.)   The idea that memories of sexual abuse have been "repressed" and can be "recovered" through hypnosis or some other "therapeutic" method recently went through a sort of fad.   A number of clients of social workers, and perhaps other professionals as well, learned through their "therapy" that they had been abused as children and were encouraged to confront their parents.   In some cases this led to criminal prosecution.   The penalties for sexual behavior between consenting individuals of differing age are absurdly severe and are not based on rational considerations.   (See Recovered Memories, Child Sexual Abuse, and Education in ancient Greece.)   As has been true of prohibitions of various kinds of sexual behavior in the past, it is the reaction of adults and the society at large that causes the greatest trauma.   The sexual behavior itself may be innocuous enough.      But there is another kind of child abuse that is not often discussed.   It is the abuse inflicted on the young through indoctrination.   Indoctrination means here teaching children that they must believe certain propositions without question when there is no evidence for the truth of the propositions.   Or else "evidence" will be presented fraudulently to aid in convincing them to believe.   It is clearly abusive to misinform children about the nature of the world they live in and then to require them to believe the misinformation.        Sometimes children are punished for doubting or refusing to believe.   Believing something is largely an involuntary thing.   In the ordinary course of events people have alternative beliefs suggested to them and they come to believe one of the alternatives because their own experiences and what they can learn of history from their own reading and the reports of their friends and acquaintances seem to them to validate a particular belief.   Scientists, of course, have rigorous methods for establishing the credibility of propositions.   They, after all, are professional truth finders.   But people who aren't professional scientists generally follow somewhat the same guidelines.   Often a person will say, "I feel that ..."   This "feeling" is the involuntary decision that the preponderance of the evidence has produced in that person.   To tell a person that he must believe something is like telling him that he must like spinach. It is really asking the impossible.   But kids will do their best.   They often try like anything to believe the things their teachers tell them they should believe.   But formal programs of indoctrination such as those employed in some Islamic schools, Hitler's Nazi schools, the home schooling provided by some parents, and some religious schools constitute a serious form of child abuse.   There is a distinct difference between education and indoctrination.   Education (which means "drawing forth") consists of presenting evidence and explanatory principles but leaving the door open for the student to think about the matter and reach his own tentative conclusion which he may modify later as he learns more. Alternatively, he may of course just accept what he is told.   Nothing is wrong with this if his teachers are reasonably well informted.   Accepting what you are told about something you know little about by a supposed expert is easy to do.   But when the supposed expert is not actually an expert but is merely indoctrinating the child into a belief system for political or religious reasons one cannot correctly call the process "education".   It is seriously abusive.      The Truth Tree recommends that, if you can find the time, you will become a big brother or sister to a child whose parents are either abusive or negligent.   This will not only rescue the child and save taxpayers precious dollars it will greatly enrich your own life and make a very positive contribution to our society.   But be warned that people will be suspicious of your motives! Go here for help.