Obama Administration Promotes Use of Child Soldiers

In 2008, President Bush signed the Child Soldiers Prevention Act into law. This law provides protection for children across the globe by preventing the United States government from providing military aid to nations which utilize child soldiers.

Barack Obama has chosen to evade the 2008 law. Obama has effectively placed his own administration above the law in allowing military aid to Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Yemen.

18,000 women and children trafficked into UK sex trade

Up to 18,000 females, including girls as young as 14, are working in brothels across Britain after being smuggled into the country to meet the booming demand for prostitutes. Police, unveiling the results of the largest ever crackdown on people smuggling yesterday, revealed that nearly five times more women than previously thought are working under duress in massage parlours and suburban homes.

The Relationship Between Feelings and Behavior

Feelings play a crucial role in determining human behavior. Our behavior toward other persons is determined by our feelings toward them. Obviously, we behave differently toward those we like than toward those we dislike.

Assuming that we have no reason to hide or disguise our feelings, if we like certain people, we are more likely to spend time with them, talk with them, confide in them, do nice things for them, and in general we strive to make them happy. On the other hand, if we dislike or are angry with certain other people, we are likely to avoid spending time with them, avoid talking with them, avoid doing nice things for them, and in general we do not strive to make them happy. If sufficiently angered, we may even do things to hurt the other person.

Natural Childhood is being redesigned

Natural Childhood is in the process of being redesigned.

Post's will continue throughout the process

I thank you for your patients while the blog redesign takes place

Nature or Nurture?

I was recently asked about the book The Nurture Assumption, and the argument that peers, and not parents, are most responsible for who children become.

I'll start with an excerpt from a wonderful article on the origins of teenage rebellion, "The Relationship Between Feelings and Behaviour" by Dr. Sidney Craig:

    "If we want our children to spend time with us, to like us, to confide in us, to value some of the things we value, and to try to make us happy (for example, by refraining from the use of dangerous drugs), we must behave toward them in ways that create feelings of love toward us rather than feelings of dislike or anger. We cannot reasonably expect to receive 'good' behavior from our children unless we create 'good' feelings in them."

Because it is so painful, often too painful, for an adult to recognize and remember the pain of betrayal in infancy and early childhood, he/she can easily fool themselves into self-deception. They'll blame anything outside themselves rather than face the painful truth. In her landmark article "Childhood Trauma", Alice Miller explains:

    "...information about the cruelty suffered during childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience of such treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down completely under the pain and the fear, they must repress that knowledge. But the unconscious memories of the child who has been neglected and maltreated, even before he has learned to speak, drive the adult to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again in the attempt to liberate himself from the fears that cruelty has left with him."

Early childhood is the starting point for all love and for all cruelty in later years. To the degree that an infant/child has been given compassion, they will pass it on to others in the future. There's a Swedish saying, "man far den respekt man ger": "one gets the respect one gives". Unfortunately the converse is also true, when we give disrespect (including all forms of punishment) to a child, we breed disrespect, anger, and retaliatory impulses within that child that will be passed on to others later.

Here is an analogy: compassionate early parenting is like a well-built boat, protecting the child from the sea of all subsequent disappointments, temptations, frustrations, and sorrows. Blaming teenage crime on peer pressure (or video games, movies, music, clothing, the Internet, the media, or anything else in current culture), is like blaming a storm for overturning a child's poorly-built boat. We know that there will always be storms in our children's lives. There will always be temptations, disappointments, sorrows, even tragedies. Their ability to cope with these events is what really matters. Do they have a strong enough boat, or do they have a boat with holes? Do they have any boat at all, or have they been put to sea without any protection? And when they drown, do we blame the wind and the rain, the wake of passing motorboats, and the clutching hands of their boatless peers, or do we start building better boats for all of our children?

Let me use my son Jason as an example. Because he has been treated with love, compassion, and trust from birth, he is riding over the sea of life in a very sturdy boat. I find it difficult to imagine any circumstance or experience that would lead him to an inhumane action, because he would simply withstand any such attempts. I will go even further and say that he would not only withstand them, he would put every effort into helping his peers to have their relevant emotional needs met in a more sane and healthy way. I've seen him do this.

Because of the pain of recognizing the hurt and disappointment in our own childhood, we'll blame anything else to avoid feeling that sorrow. But the truth is as simple as a bumper sticker I once saw: "A happy childhood lasts forever."

By Jan Hunt

Source: The Natural Child Project

Girls 'routinely sexually harassed'

Almost a third of young women say they have been subjected to unwanted sexual contact at school, a poll has found.

Many more face harassment such as name calling on a regular basis, it said.

The End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), who commissioned the poll, is calling on ministers to address violence against girls in schools.

The poll of almost 800 16 to 18-year-olds found that 29% of girls questioned had been the victim of groping, kissing or touching while at school. Around one in seven (14%) of the boys questioned said the same.

More than a third (37%) of all the young people questioned said they had heard girls being called names such as "slut" or "slag" at school on a daily basis.

And less than three in 10 (29%) said they had never seen sexual pictures on mobile phones during school hours.

Nearly one in four (24%) of everyone questioned said teachers had never told them that unwanted advances such as touching or name-calling were unacceptable, while a fifth (20%) said they had never received lessons or information at school about sexual consent.

EVAW chair Professor Liz Kelly said: "Not only is sexual harassment against girls at school routine, everyday and unquestioned, our results show that sexual assault is in fact commonplace in school environments.

"Disturbingly, our results show that students rarely hear from their teachers that these behaviours are unacceptable. Schools are failing in their legal and ethical responsibility to effectively challenge all forms of violence against women and girls and provide safe and supportive environments for their female students."

She added: "Violence against women and girls in our communities will not be eliminated unless the attitudes that excuse and normalise these behaviours are challenged before they are formed. The EVAW Coalition is calling for prevention through education, led by the Department for Education, to be a priority in the Coalition Government's forthcoming strategy to tackle violence against women and girls."

© Press Association 2010

Source: The Herald

State Violence against the Zapatistas in Mexico

Zapatistas from Pamalá, in the municipality of Sitalá, had informed the JBG that, at the end of August, Manuel Vázquez had been forcibly ordered by the authorities and leaders of the political parties in San Marcos and Pamalá to dismantle the autonomous school. The authorities told him that they were then going to attack other communities which had autonomous schools. The JBG stated that "the purpose of these attacks is to prevent the education of our children and to stop the progress of construction of our autonomy". Manuel Vázquez was thrown into prison on the 21st August, where he was threatened, harrassed and intimidated in an attempt to force him to abandon autonomous education. When Pedro Cruz Gómez came to help Manuel Vázquez, he was also imprisoned. A knife was planted in his trousers in an attempt to accuse him of intention to murder. When the prisoners were freed, they were told to abandon the Zapatista organisation and to leave the lands they had bought ten years ago. Threats were made to cancel the land rights of fifteen families.

On the 24th and 25th August the aggressors seized 29 hectares of land with 5,850 coffee trees, 10 hectares of maize, beans, cattle, horses and three houses, and destroyed a banana plantation. On the 8th September, they took cattle, pulled down fences and fired shots into the air. They threatened to "take the land next, and to evict the men and kidnap the women and children and burn the houses". "The three levels of the bad government don't know how to stop the Zapatista struggle for national liberation, so they are trying to stop our autonomous education", said the JBG. "However, we are going to continue with autonomous education throughout Zapatista territory; our sons and daughters will no longer attend the official schools where they will never teach the truth about how we live as indigenous people and how all the poor of Mexico live. We demand that our evicted companer@s be allowed to return home and be treated with respect".

The Network for Solidarity and Against Repression immediately issued a statement "This act of barbarity designed to destroy the autonomous school, has led to the displacement of 170 people from the lands they have worked for ten years....If it were not for our Zapatista compas, there would be no schools in these indigenous communities.....Lies, deceit and repression are the way the state government constantly behaves....Zapatista education in the autonomous communities is an example of how another Mexico is possible, where with honest hard work a level of community development can be achieved which those from above neither understand nor accept. To fight power and its money with learning and knowledge is the best way to build the foundations of a new Mexico".

Source: No Sweat
Also See: Schools For Chiapas

Alice Miller's Gift to Humanity

Alice Miller died on April 14, 2010 at the age of 87. The contribution of her writing to her readers, as well as to the cause of children and of humanity, is unparalleled.

The lives of all who have read her books, from The Drama of the Gifted Child to Free from Lies, have been deeply transformed. To read Alice Miller is to be brought back to your own center, to the child you once were. No matter what invalidation or mutilation you have suffered, you regain contact with this child. You are able to sweep away the judgments that have been leveled against children – about their foolishness, their original sin, their innate bestiality, and their drives – that the culture of contempt for children has stuck onto them. You can dare to declare that as children we were totally innocent. No one before Alice Miller had been so radical. Starting from the certainty that her books communicate to readers, a true resurrection becomes possible, simply because each reader is able to reconnect with the child one was, with the source of life within oneself.

Alice Miller contributed infinitely to the cause of childhood. She showed, without minimizing as others often tend to do, all the forms of violence to which children are subjected: lack of tenderness, neglect, absence of care, sexual abuse, and, above all, ordinary educational violence, which is the most widespread and is everywhere considered normal and pedagogical. For many people, the profound effect of her work is surely seen in the adoption by 25 countries of legislation prohibiting all forms of corporal punishment and humiliation. Thanks to her and to her studies of the major mass criminals of the 20th century, we have been able to understand how what had happened in the intimacy of the family microcosm led to extremely grave consequences in the macrocosm of the social and political life of adolescents and adults.

We must hope that in the future all that Alice Miller contributed to the cause of humanity will be understood. In showing that the life of adults – their familial, social, and political life, all their history – revolves around childhood and children, Alice Miller, like her fellow countryman Copernicus four centuries earlier, put the world right-side-up again. Freud had failed to do it. By inventing the theory of drives, after his father's death and so as not to accuse him, he thereby returned to the old accusation against children as being the agents of the worst drives. Alice Miller, through empathically listening to her patients, understood that this theory was false and had the courage to denounce it. And courage was certainly needed because she found herself immediately rejected by a number of her former colleagues. However, in shining light on the principal origin of human violence, Alice Miller's work gives us hope for reducing, in its many forms, this violence stemming from ravaged childhoods.

Alice Miller is no longer with us, but her books remain for us. Likewise, we still have her website that I hope Brigitte Oriol will continue to take care of. Would it not be possible for Alice Miller's readers, with the agreement of Brigitte Oriol, to undertake the translation of the articles on this site into the maximum number of languages so that Alice Miller's thinking becomes accessible to all and is spread even more widely than when she was still here?

By Olivier Maurel

Translated from the original French by Mitch Hall, April 24, 2010.

Source: Project NoSpank

Alice Miller, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 87; Laid Human Problems to Parental Acts

Photo by Julia Miller

Alice Miller’s theories on children created a sensation.

Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems, died at her home in Provence on April 14. She was 87.

Her death was announced Friday by her German publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag.

Dr. Miller caused a sensation with the English publication in 1981 of her first book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” Originally titled “Prisoners of Childhood,” it set forth, in three essays, a simple but harrowing proposition. All children, she wrote, suffer trauma and permanent psychic scarring at the hands of parents, who enforce codes of conduct through psychological pressure or corporal punishment: slaps, spankings or, in extreme cases, sustained physical abuse and even torture.

Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormenters, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.

“The Drama of the Gifted Child” struck a chord with mental health professionals. “Clinically, she is almost as influential as R.D. Laing,” the British psychologist Oliver James told The Observer of London in 2005. “Alice Miller changed the way people thought.”

The book also stirred the general public, selling more than a million copies. Its central argument was easy to grasp and, for many readers, offered a tempting explanation for their sorrows and failures.

Dr. Miller is often credited with turning the attention of therapists to child abuse, both physical and sexual, but also with encouraging millions of adults to regard themselves as victims.

Daphne Merkin, assessing Dr. Miller’s book “The Truth Shall Set You Free” in The New York Times Book Review in 2002, wrote that Dr. Miller “could be said to be the missing link between Freud and Oprah, bringing news of the inner life, and especially the subtle hazards of emotional development, out of the cloistered offices of therapists and into a wider, user-friendly context.”

Dr. Miller further developed her ideas in two books published immediately after “The Drama of the Gifted Child’: “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence” (1983) and “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child” (1984). She applied her theory of childhood development to explain the passivity of the German people in the face of Nazi tyranny and took aim at Freud, whose theories, she believed, cast parents as innocents and children as depraved.

Often she used prominent artists as her case studies. In “The Untouched Key” (1990), she held up Friedrich Nietzsche, Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz and Buster Keaton as illustrations of her theories. In “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting” (2005), she put Dostoyevsky, Proust and Joyce under the microscope.

Alice Miller was famously reclusive, and deliberately kept details of her early life sketchy. She was born in Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), on Jan. 12, 1923. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Warsaw, which operated underground during the war.

After the war, a Swiss charity arranged for her to continue her studies at the University of Basel, where she wrote her dissertation on the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and received a doctorate in 1953.

After undergoing Freudian psychiatric training in Zurich, she went into practice as an analyst. In the 1960s a wave of revisionism swept over the profession, as psychoanalysts adapted the ideas of Freud and Jung to social criticism.

Strongly influenced by the education writer Katharina Rutschky’s notion of “black pedagogy,” a term for the authoritarian style of German parenting, Dr. Miller came to view all forms of parental coercion, and even mild physical discipline or emotional coldness, as fatal to healthy psychic development. In her English books, the term is rendered as “poisonous pedagogy.”

“Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away,” she writes in an explanatory essay on childhood mistreatment and abuse on her Web site, alice-miller.com. “Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love.”

By the time she wrote her first book, published in German in 1979, Dr. Miller had stopped practicing psychiatry. The relationship of analyst to patient, she came to believe, replicated the insidious power relationship of parent to child. Her initial critique of Freud led to a full-scale break described in “Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries” (1990), a semi-autobiographical work that revealed her own abuse as a child, which she discovered through paintings she created spontaneously.

“Not once did she apologize to me or express any kind of regret,” she later wrote of her mother in “The Body Never Lies.” “She was always ‘in the right.’ It was this attitude that made my childhood feel like a totalitarian regime.”

Having broken with Freud, Dr. Miller resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1988 and embraced a number of alternative therapies. She became a disciple of J. Konrad Stettbacher, an advocate of regression therapy, and expressed enthusiasm for Arthur Janov’s primal-scream approach, but soon rejected both. Over the years she became increasingly reclusive.

She is survived by a son and a daughter.

Uncompromising and often strident, Dr. Miller preached her message with an often messianic fervor and a polemical style of argument that cost her support from early admirers. The underlying precepts remained unchanged in later works like “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence” (1991) and “Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs” (2009).

By WILLIAM GRIMES, The New York Times, April 26, 2010

Source: Project NoSpank
AliceMiller's Website

Preface to From Rage to Courage

I have decided to publish these answers in book form because there are still people who have no access to the internet. But even those who can read these responses online may find it more convenient to own the book for quick reference when they are looking for a particular passage. A degree of computer literacy is however necessary for those who wish to read the original letters.

When I was young, I was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud. But I lost my interest in psychoanalysis when I started working with patients. I found that the concepts and theories I had been confronted with during my psychoanalytical training were an invitation to blame individuals themselves for their distress. Those theories were in fact designed to “repair” them or “put them straight.” In this approach I detected elements of the disastrous and highly abusive ideal of education and upbringing known in German as schwarze Pädagogik (“poisonous pedagogy”).

What interested me was how this distress had come about, the childhood factors that might explain the sufferings of these adults, and the ways in which they might be able to free themselves from the severe consequences of cruel parenting. None of the theories I came across seemed genuinely willing to engage with childhood reality, and this put them fully in line with the attitude of society in general.

It was my patients themselves who provided indirect answers to my questions. Their reports on what they had been through in childhood revealed facts that had hardly ever been addressed during my training: the severe cruelty inflicted on children by their own parents.

At the same time, I became aware of my patients’ deeply entrenched resistance to remembering these painful events: they were extremely reluctant to feel the tragic situation they had been in as children and to take it seriously. Some of them described acts of monstrous cruelty with a complete lack of emotion, as if they were something that was only to be expected. They believed their parents had loved them and that as children they had richly deserved severe punishment because they were so insufferable. The regularity with which true feelings were denied or split off made me realize that almost all of us tend to deny, or at least play down, the pain caused by the injuries we suffered in childhood. We do this because we still fear punishment at the hands of our parents, who could not bear to accept us as we truly were. These childhood fears live on in the adult. If they remain unconscious, that is if they are not identified as such, then they will retain their virulence to the end of our lives. Unfortunately, these fears also live on in those who advance theories that camouflage childhood reality and that concentrate instead on the nature of “psychical structures.” This approach began with Freud and was later taken over by C.G. Jung and others. Like present-day “spiritualist” interpretations, these theories all served one purpose: to allay the fears of the maltreated children these therapists still were.

As almost everyone on this planet received beatings when they were small and do their best to repress the fear of punishment at the hands of their parents, it is difficult to make this unconscious dynamic apparent. After all, no one wants to be told about sufferings they have been fighting to suppress for decades, sometimes sacrificing their health in the process. After listening to the tragic stories of my patients for 20 years without letting myself be confused by the theories of Freud and others, I wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child, in which I pointed the finger at facts that almost everyone knows but strongly denies. Subsequently, I published For Your Own Good, referring to three biographies to indicate the social consequences that cruel parenting can have. One of the things the book revealed was the way in which the complete and utter eradication of empathy from the earliest years and constant persecution by the father turned the former child Adolf Hitler into a mass murderer with the blood of millions of people on his hands. In my later books I have repeatedly demonstrated how the political careers of mass murderers like Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and others were rooted in the denial of the humiliations inflicted on them in childhood.

I received a great deal of praise for my investigations, and yet no one followed in my footsteps. Why? Presumably because almost all of us are victims of more or less severe cruelty, but this is something we either cannot or will not acknowledge until we have finally faced up to the fact.

Naturally I cannot prove this hypothesis because I cannot investigate the lives of all the people in the world. But the letters addressed to my website in the last few years reveal the reality of childhood abuse in a way that can hardly be denied. The authors of those letters have decided to break their unconscious vow of silence DESPITE their understandable fear. Encouraged by my books and articles, they have attempted to unearth the memories of their early childhood years, to admit to their true feelings, and to take seriously their indignation, anger, and rage at the behavior of their parents. They were astonished that instead of being punished for this they achieved much greater freedom by recalling those memories. Suddenly they were able to understand the course of their own lives much better and to revive their lost empathy for the children they once were. In this way they learned something they were never allowed to learn as children: to take their own pain, and other feelings, seriously. One reader wrote to me recently: “When I was small, I once fell off a wall. An adult passing by asked me if I had hurt myself. I shall never forget it because it was the first time in my childhood that anyone had ever asked me that question. For my parents my pain and my sorrows just never existed, so I had to wipe them out too.”

The man used this example to illustrate the entire atmosphere of his childhood, something we have to discover in order to free ourselves of it and the consequences it has had. This goes well beyond the active engagement with individual traumas that present-day trauma therapy sets out to induce. It is the discovery of years of unremitting captivity, a discovery achieved by finally owning up to our feelings. That captivity was a time defined by indifference, lack of understanding, refusal of contact, cruelty, sadism, deceit, lies, and very often perversion.

The contents of these letters are by no means exceptional. Millions of people have shared the same fate, but this fact has been concealed (so far) by their silence, their inability or reluctance to put their sufferings into words. So the writers of the letters I answer here are pioneers. They are exceptional because they have dared to overcome the fear of their parents, because they have had the courage to admit to their own truth. I can no longer ask them for their permission to publish their letters in book form, but those letters can be found on my website. My answers show how I have attempted to accompany these people in their quest for their own selves.

Very severe cruelty in childhood is hardly ever recognized as such. Usually, it is considered part of quite normal upbringing. The extreme – often total – denial of the pain we have suffered not only thwarts recognition of the wrongs done to us. Above all, it negates the anger of the little child that has to be suppressed in the body for fear of punishment. Parents are honored out of fear, the adult child waits a whole lifetime for their insight and love, thus remaining trapped in a form of attachment sustained by the fear of being abandoned. The consequences of attachments that are dependent on the absence of true feelings are mental and physical disorders and the suppression and sacrifice of life satisfaction and happiness.

These answers to the question posed me by my readers show how they have attempted to find the way to their own truth. Initially they recognize the lifelong denial of their reality and sense for the first time the pent-up though justified anger caused by the threats they were exposed to - beatings, humiliation, deceit, rejection, confusion, neglect, and exploitation. But if they manage to sense their anger and grief at what they have missed out on in life, almost all of them rediscover the alert, inquisitive child that never had the slightest chance of being perceived, respected, and listened to by the parents. Only then will the adult give the child this respect because he/she knows the true story and can thus learn to understand and love the child within.

To their great surprise the symptoms that have tormented them all their lives gradually disappear. Those symptoms were the price they had to pay for the denial of reality caused by awe of their parents.

Unquestioning adulation of parents and ancestors, regardless of what they have done, is required not only by some religions but by ALL of them, without exception, although the adult children frequently have to pay for this self-denial with severe illness symptoms. The reason why this is the case is not difficult to identify, though it is rarely taken into account. Children are forced to ignore their need for respect and are not allowed to express it, so they later look to their own children to gratify that need. This is the origin of the Fourth/Fifth Commandment (“honor your father and mother”).

This intrinsic dynamic is observable in all religions. Religions were obviously created not by people respected in childhood but by adults starved of respect from childhood on and brought up to obey their parents unswervingly. They have learned to live with the compulsive self-deception forced on them in their earlier years. Many impressive rituals have been devised to make children ignore their true feelings and accept the cruelties of their parents without demur. They are forced to suppress their anger, their TRUE feelings and honor parents who do not deserve such reverential treatment, otherwise they will be doomed to intolerable feelings of guilt all their lives. Luckily, there are now individuals who are beginning to desist from such self-mutilation and to resist the attempt to instill guilt feelings into them. These people are standing up against a practice that its proponents have always considered ethical. In fact, however, it is profoundly unethical because it produces illness and hinders healing. It flies in the face of the laws of life.

----- Original Message -----

By Alice Miller R.I.P

© 2010 Alice Miller
http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php

Norton, 2009

Collected for the first time, Alice Miller's most helpful, therapeutic, and invaluable answers to thousands of readers' letters.

The renowned childhood researcher, psychotherapist, and best-selling author Alice Miller has received, throughout her long and distinguished career, countless personal letters from readers all over the world. Here, in From Rage to Courage, Dr. Miller has assembled the most recent, producing an insightful work that illuminates the issues and consequences of childhood abuse. Whether exploring the connection between repressed anger and physical illnesses like cancer, the reasons why many survivors of abuse turn to drugs or crime, or the cycle that condemns generations of families to cruelty in childhood, Dr. Miller's answers are sensitive, honest, and supported by decades of experience. A practical guide to Dr. Miller's unique therapeutic concept, this work once again affirms the healing and liberating power of retrieved emotions.

"Alice Miller makes chillingly clear to the many what has been recognized only by the few: the extraordinary pain and psychological suffering inflicted on children under the guise of conventional childbearing." –Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are

Alice Miller's still best-selling study, The Drama of the Gifted Child, brought her much international attention and recognition. Since then she has written a great number of books, including Free From Lies. She lives in France.

http://www.alice-miller.com/books_en.php

Update Alice Miller Died, she left us on April 14th, 2010.

INFORMATION.

Friday April 23, 2010

Dear readers,

It is with immense sorrow that I have to communicate that Mrs. Alice Miller died, she left us on April 14th, 2010. In these lines she wanted to tell everybody her utmost gratidude for all the hearty and encouraging letters she received during her last days of her life, granting the respective honours to her literal works.

Alice Miller is not among us anymore but she will always be remembered by her considerable literal works and also in the web you will be able to call her website should you need any advice or want to continue specific research.

There is not any doubt that Mrs. Alice Miller’s greatest wish in her life was that everybody does fully understand that maltreating a child has a disastrous impact on his future life and finally will reflect negatively on the entire society.

Alice, thank you very much indeed for having sacrificed a considerable part of your life with your outstanding literature, we will always take into special consideration your studies and are convinced that they are a very essential heritage for our future.

Brigitte Oriol

http://www.alice-miller.com/readersmail_en.php

Comment: Alice Miller and her books changed my life and made me want to live an authentic emotionally honest live. R.I.P. Alice Miller I cried when I heard you had left us. You were one of lives great pioneers and the mother of Children's Human rights, gone but never forgotten.  

All-party pact over children's referendum scrapped

THE Government has scrapped the cross-party agreement for a children's rights referendum because it would have knock-on effects on other areas of law and mean more funding would have to be allocated.

The Irish Independent understands the majority of concerns have been raised by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education.

The Department of Justice fears that under the equality provisions outlined in the wording, it could see an avalanche of refugee and asylum cases.

There is still no sign of a date being set for the vote.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen announced yesterday that the all-party committee's proposed wording of a referendum article to protect children would not be used.

The Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children, chaired by Fianna Fail TD Mary O'Rourke, put forward the wording earlier this year.

The Irish Independent understands there are at least two major roadblocks to the children's referendum.

The Department of Education is understood to have expressed concern about the development of socio-economic rights if the referendum is passed -- with huge consequences for budgetary resources.

The Department of Justice is also said to be concerned it could face an avalanche of refugee and asylum cases on behalf of children if all children are treated as equal under the Constitution.

Yesterday, Children's Minister Barry Andrews said the implications included concerns about children being left in inappropriate care. It was also feared it would have implications for immigration policy and the idea of providing a so-called 'voice of the child' would lead to inappropriate arrangements.

An example of this would be if the child was suspended from school it could result in legal representation being required on both sides.

"There will be some changes to the wording. It is more important to get this right than the timing of the referendum," Mr Andrews said.

Landmarks

He said there were "various" electoral landmarks next year that would give the Government an opportunity to put a proposal to the people.

Mr Cowen said an examination of the wording by ministers had uncovered far-reaching implications, which could give rise to substantial costs to the State.

"Consequently, the Minister for Health and Children was asked to develop further work on the referendum, in co-operation with the Attorney General, and that has to be brought back to Government in due course," Mr Cowen said.

However, chief executive of Barnardos, Fergus Finlay, said any significant change to the wording could result in the current consensus falling apart.

- Patricia McDonagh

Source: Irish Independent

Cuba to Consolidate Children's Protection

The Cuban program "Por un Mundo al Derecho" is celebrating its tenth anniversary of promoting actions for providing more protection for childhood, in line with the UN Convention on Children's Rights.

The project was founded in 2000, via an agreement with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and with financial support from Finland.

Its goal is to raise awareness among children, teenagers and adults regarding laws protecting minors under the age of 18.

The Justice Ministry reported that the program aims to strengthen respect for children's rights and pave the way for the promotion of a culture on the issue.

In that sense, the ministry and other government agencies are preparing a series of social and cultural activities to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the project.

"Por un Mundo al Derecho" is also targeted to achieve more children's leadership, increase participation of minors within society, and create a strategy of training and promotion.

The Convention on Children Rights is a UN treaty and is compulsory.

That international rule covers civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, reflecting the different situations of children and youth worldwide.

The convention has 54 articles that recognize that all children under 18 years old have the right to full physical, mental and social development and to express their opinion freely.

Cuba signed the Convention on Children's Rights on January 26, 1990 and ratified it on August 21, 1991 and it came into effect in September of that year.
by PL

Source: Escambray

Children spot neglect in peers but services to help face cuts

Needing a helping hand: There has been a steep rise in the number of children showing signs of neglect in Scotland.

Most Scottish children have witnessed signs of neglect in their classmates, a new survey has revealed as a leading charity warns that public spending cuts may hit essential services for vulnerable young people.

A poll of more than 250 eight to 12-year-olds found most were aware of problems with their peers, and 55% identified telltale signs in someone they knew.

Charity Action for Children said the findings blew the lid on the prevalence of child neglect in Scotland, less than one month after official figures showed a steep rise in cases referred to authorities.

Young people were asked confidentially whether they knew anyone who regularly turned up at school dirty, or who said they did not get meals at home. Other signs of child neglect include people whose clothes don’t fit, are old or unwashed, or smell. Children with no friends at home or whose parents don’t know what they’re doing in their free time may also be at risk.

The 253 children surveyed each knew an average of three people who fitted the bill for neglect. Though the survey does not arrive at any figure for the number of children who are neglected themselves, it shows that friends and classmates of those affected are aware of the problems from a very early age.

The Action for Children poll comes on the back of official figures, published last month, which record a 6% year-on-year increase in the number of child protection referrals in Scotland between 2008/09 and 2009/10. There were 13,523 in the past year, the Scottish Government said – equivalent to 37 every day.

Of these, 421 were flagged up as risk cases before they were even born, largely because their parents were drug addicts or their siblings had already been subject to neglect.

Sexual abuse cases were up by 12%, and emotional abuse by 4%. In the vast majority of cases (84%), the primary known or suspected abuser was the child’s natural parents.

Action for Children warned that around one in 10 children in the UK experiences neglect at some point, and neglect is the main reason for children to need protection plans.

Young people affected are likely to be dirty, smelly, lonely and hungry, the charity said, and they may experience bullying from classmates who spot their vulnerability.

Louise Warde Hunter, Action for Children’s strategic director in Scotland, said the country faced an uphill struggle to nip neglect in the bud before it ruined more lives.

“Child neglect is a real danger if it is not tackled early on. It’s worrying that children as young as eight are spotting these issues in other children, confirming our fears that child neglect remains a widespread issue,” she said.

“We must raise awareness and make sure that the resources are there to help children as early as possible to tackle child neglect and prevent it from cascading down generations.”

The charity was concerned that with the Comprehensive Spending Review due just one week from today, budgets for essential child protection services could be cut across the UK. It is urging politicians of all parties to ensure that these issues are prioritised.

The Herald revealed last month that teachers in Glasgow were struggling to overcome a catalogue of social issues in some of the city’s most impoverished areas.

In one east end P7 class, 21 pupils out of 24 were identified as having additional needs, ranging from parents with drug and alcohol problems to having to cope with domestic violence.

A parenting programme already piloted in five Glasgow schools was due to be rolled out across the city to tackle the problems preventing these children from getting an education.
Case study
‘I just felt embarrassed about my life’

Rosie, from Central Scotland, was flagged up to authorities last year after teachers noticed her erratic attendance at school.

A Children’s Hearing exposed a bleak picture of her and her two sisters’ grim existence. They were dirty, underweight, and lived in a filthy house. The three girls also had problems with gum and tooth decay.

Though Rosie was only eight, her mum forced her to carry out household chores and bring up her younger siblings.

The final straw came when Rosie’s mum was alleged to have beaten her. Social workers became involved, and the three girls were placed in foster care.

Action for Children assessed the mother’s capacity to parent children, and on the strength of their findings Rosie and her sisters were adopted. All three are now thriving.

Other young people spend far longer in the shadow of neglect.

Jane, 18, from Glasgow, lives with her mother and father, both of whom are drug addicts.

Jane said: “I was bullied at school; mostly by people saying my mum was a smack head.

“I feel embarrassed about my life and haven’t really thought about it as neglect until now.”

“It was hard bringing any pals home because of the state of the house and my mum and dad. I can also remember getting a bike one Christmas, which my dad had stolen from another family.”

Jane now discusses her problems with an Action for Children key worker, and is learning the skills that will enable to lead her own life.

By Chris Watt

Source: The Herald