Warning : The following article and links to Video show graphic images of murdered children.
What goes through George Bush’s mind when he sees the dead bodies of Iraqi women and children loaded on the back of a pickup truck like garbage?
Is there ever a flicker of remorse; a split-second when he fully grasps the magnitude of the horror he has created?
March 15 was another defining moment in America’s downward moral-spiral in Iraq. Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a wanton act of slaughter executed by American occupiers. Photos taken at the scene show the lifeless bodies of young children, barely old enough to walk, lying motionless in the back of a flatbed truck while their fathers moan inconsolably at their side.
What parent can look at these photographs and not be consumed with rage?
The US military openly admits it attacked the house in Ishaqi where the incident took place. Reuters reports that, “Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said US forces landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including five children.”
“After they left the house they blew it up”, he said. “The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed,” (policeman) Hussein said. Police had found spent American issue cartridges in the rubble.” (Reuters)
The autopsy report at the Tikrit hospital said, “All the victims had gunshot wounds to the head”.
Iraqi policeman Farouq Hussein noted, “It is a clear and perfect crime without any doubt”.
The evidence provided by Reuters suggests that we have entered the “My Lai phase” of the Iraq war, where the pretensions about democracy and liberation are stripped-away and replaced with the gratuitous butchery of women and children. The carnage in Ishaqi illustrates the growing recklessness and desperation of Washington’s failed crusade.
Military spokesman Major Tim O’ Keefe justified the attack saying they were searching for “a foreign fighter facilitator” for Al Qaida in Iraq. He added, “Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building. Coalition Forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets….Two women and one child were killed. The building was destroyed.”
In fact, 11 women and children were killed and there’s no evidence to verify that the house was being used as an Al Qaida safe-house.
The US military made similar claims after bombing raids in January and December when a total of 17 family members were killed.
The grim fact is that is that the lives of Iraqi women and children are of no real consequence to US officials. As General Tommy Franks boasted, “We don’t do body counts”. The victims of American aggression are simply dismissed as collateral damage undeserving of any further acknowledgement.
The story has received scant attention in the establishment media, which prefers to highlight the stumbling oratory of our Dear Leader as he reaffirms our commitment to western “pro-life” values.
In truth, George Bush is as responsible for the deaths of those children as if he had put a gun to their heads himself and shot them one by one.
At present, we have no way of knowing how frequently these attacks on civilians are taking place. The Pentagon strategy of removing independent journalists from the battlefield has created a news-vacuum that makes it impossible to know with confidence the extent of the casualties or the level of the devastation. The few incidents like this that find their way into the mainstream create a troubling picture of military adventurism and brutality that is no longer anchored to any identifiable moral principle or vision of resolution. It is simply violence randomly dispersed on a massive scale; traumatizing the Iraqi people and bringing the United States into greater disrepute.
There were no Al Qaida fighters in the home in Ishaqi. The attack was just another lethal blunder by a blinkered military fighting an invisible enemy.
“The killed family was not part of the resistance; they were women and children,” said Ahmed Khalaf. “The Americans promised us a better life, but we only get death.”
By Mike Whitney
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12404.htm
Children of Araham - Death in the Desert (Warning Graphic images of murdred children).
Monday, March 27, 2006
'Urgent need' to help self-harming youngsters
The Government has been urged to launch a national scheme to tackle the problem of self-harming among young people.
A two-year inquiry said a lack of understanding about the condition was preventing victims from getting the support they needed, and recommended an awareness campaign for parents and professionals working with young people.
The study found that one in 15 young people in Britain have self-harmed and more than 24,000 teenagers are admitted to hospital every year for deliberately hurting themselves - with the average age for a child to start self-harm put at 13.
The inquiry, carried out by the Camelot Foundation and the Mental Health Foundation, also revealed that young people who self-harm are more likely to turn to friends their own age for help, than relatives, teachers or doctors.
Self-harm is regarded as a coping mechanism for dealing with difficult emotions, and the most common methods involve cutting, burning, scalding or scratching the body, breaking bones, pulling hair or swallowing toxic substances.
Susan Elizabeth, director of the Camelot Foundation said: "There is an urgent need to provide information and guidance for parents and carers, friends and professionals - people are struggling in the dark.
"We must rid the fear, misunderstanding and stigma that surrounds self-harm."
And Catherine McLoughlin, who chaired the inquiry, said: "It is vital that everyone who comes into contact with young people has a basic understanding of what self-harm is, why people do it, and how to respond appropriately.
"At the very least they should avoid being judgmental towards young people who disclose self-harm, should treat them with care and respect and should acknowledge the emotional distress they are clearly experiencing."
Source: Telegraph
Also see: The Observer- Teenagers' epidemic of self-harm
The Report of the National Inquiry: Truth Hurt's - Full Report
Truth Hurt's - Executive Summary
Source: http://www.selfharmuk.org/
Friday, March 24, 2006
Children Continue To Be Main Victims Of U.S. Occupation
One of the most tragic consequenes of the Iraq war has been its effect on children. The war continues to claim them among its main victims, while the health of the majority of the population also continues to deteriorate. In the 1980s, Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the region. Following the 2003 invasion by the coalition forces, an ongoing cycle of insurgent violence and occupation forces’ counter-attacks have significantly damaged the basic health infrastructure in the country. As a result, Iraq’s health system cannot respond to the most basic health needs of the population.
In 1991, there were in Iraq 1,800 health care centers. A decade and a half later, that number is almost half and almost a third of these require major rehabilitation. This is paralleled by the country’s fall in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index from 96 to 127, one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history.
According to Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s special expert on the right to food, the rate of malnutrition among Iraqi children has almost doubled since Saddam Hussein’s ouster in April 2003. Today, at 7.7 percent, Iraq’s child acute malnutrition rate is roughly equal to that of Burundi, an African nation ravaged by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than the rates in Ugand and Haiti, countries also devastated by unrelenting violence.
The population health problems are dramatically different than those facing young Iraqis a generation ago, when obesity was one of the main nutrition-related public health concerns. High rates of malnutrition started in the 1990s as a result of the U.N.-imposed sanctions to punish the Saddam Hussein regime for invading Kuwait in 1990.
Lack of dependable electricity and shortages of potable water throughout the country have led to the deterioration of the population’s health, resulting in outbreaks of typhoid fever, particularly in southern Iraq. The collapse of the water and sewage systems is probably the cause of outbreaks of hepatitis particularly lethal to pregnant women. According to the Iraq Living Conditions Survey of 22,000 households, a joint effort of the Iraq government and UNDP (United Nations Development Programme,) some 47% of urban households and only 3% of rural households have a sewage connection.
Presently, thousands of children born after the war have none of their required vaccinations, and routine immunization services in major areas of the country are all but disrupted. In addition, the destruction of the refrigeration sytems needed to store vaccines have rendered vaccine supplies virtually useless.
Even antibiotics of minimal cost are in short supply, increasing the population’s risk of dying from common infections. Hospitals are overcrowded and many hospitals go dark at night for lack of lighting fixtures. The Iraqi Minister of Health claims that 100 percent of the hospitals in Iraq need rehabilitation. As a result of all these public health failures, Iraq is the country that has least progressed in reducing child mortality since the 1990s.There are increasing number of orphans, many of whom have become homeless and have had to resort to prostitution to survive. Although the Iraqi Ministry of Labor has created programs to eliminate this problem, its efforts have not been successful.
War has affected the psychilogical well-being of adults and children alike, many of whom present serious symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is estimated that less than one hundred psychiatrists remain in Iraq (approximately one for every 300,000 Iraqis) and none of them specializes in child psychiatry.
That children continue to suffer the terrible consequences of the war indicates that new ways have to be found to protect them better. An independent international medical commission should investigate children’s health status, and suggest measures for its improvement. Iraqi children should urgently be provided with basic nutrition, immunization and psychological care to alleviate the tremendous damage brought by a war that has taken a brutal toll on their health and quality of life.
Dr. César Chelala, an international public health consultant, is a co-winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12467.htm
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
From the Scottish Socialist Voice
At the Scottish Socialist Party’s recent conference in Dundee, members adopted a radical new policy on corporal punishment of children - a so-called ‘anti-smacking’ policy.
Neil Scott, whose SSP branch put the successful resolution to conference, argues that legislation to stop physical punishment, in tandem with a programme of education, would be good for both parents and children. Rather than criminalising parents, changing our culture could lead to less children being taken from their families into care. Meanwhile Catriona Grant, the SSP’s women and equality spokesperson, looks at links between violence against children and other types of abuse in the home.
Last week I was cooking a curry for tea. I’m quite good at curries; dopiaza, korma, thai - basically any curry you name I can do, and do well. I take pride in my curries. I had bought all of the spices, creamed coconut, yogurt and started to prepare them. I told my wife that the curry would be ready soon. After the meticulous preparation, the dish was to simmer for ten minutes.
I went into the living room where my wife was reading and, to my horror, stuffing herself with a box of chocolates. Now, I know my wife and I know that if she eats anything before her dinner it will put her off her food. My planning and preparation were all to be in vain.What should I do?Would anyone advocate I hit her? I know little children who are hit for the same reason.Society has moved on and we look back in horror at the days when people argued in Parliament against legislation that would outlaw men hitting their wives. Yet people actually argued that it was something we should not criminalise - what went on in their homes was their business, they said.
Today, would anyone say that the legislation introduced to protect women was wrong?
Nowadays the same arguments are used against attempts to introduce legislation to protect children from physical punishment. The fact is that there are people in our society who think it is OK to hit children - and some say it is their religious and moral obligation. Quite a few of these people would not see the dichotomy of having laws to protect adults and advocating the protection of the ‘right’ to physically punish children.
British common law currently permits physical punishment of children, under the legal defence of ‘reasonable and moderate chastisement’.In 2004 this was reinforced by the Children’s Act which, whilst offering protection to children against ‘assault occasioning actual bodily harm’ at the same time implicitly reinforced a parent’s right to ‘reasonable punishment’.
The terms ‘physical abuse’ and ‘reasonable chastisement’ are imprecise and ultimately subjective. What constitutes physical abuse and what reasonable chastisement? Is a spank on the bottom with an open hand abuse? What about if it were across the face, or with a stick? Does abuse rather depend on how hard you hit and if so, how hard is too hard? Furthermore, is the nature of the misbehaviour important in determining whether the punishment is abusive or not?
In 2001 Elizabeth Gershoff undertook a study of the association between corporal punishment and certain behaviours and experiences.Gershoff found that children’s fear of physical punishment inhibited the development of internal motivation - problem solving skills. Corporal punishment, she concluded, may further decrease the learning of a moral code if its use results in little or no parental explanation of the problem the child is being punished for. Children live what they learn. In other words, behaviours that have been modelled for them by their parents are the behaviours they themselves imitate.
One of the main arguments therefore against the use of corporal punishment is that it models aggression for children and legitimises violence. In this way, children are more likely to show aggressive behaviour, violent criminal behaviour and aggression towards their own children.
Gershoff made the point that it is particularly poignant when children are physically punished for aggression, because corporal punishment models the very behaviour that parents are trying to discourage in their children. She goes on to say that, despite the risk of imitation, parents use corporal punishment more in response to children’s aggression than to any other child misbehaviour. Gershoff also concluded, in decreasing the moral internalisation (hitting rather than teaching) of society’s values, corporal punishment may predispose an individual to non-violent delinquency and adult crime. Their ability to internally judge what is morally right or wrong has been distorted by the unsparing use of the rod. The painful nature of corporal punishment may induce feelings of fear, anxiety and anger in the child or young person, which if associated with their parent may decrease the quality of the relationship between them. The child may become fearful of the parent who inflicts pain as a form of discipline, may withdraw from, or avoid them, resulting in an erosion of communication and trust between them.
Gershoff argued that children who experienced positive moods and emotions are more receptive to parents’ controls and that in contrast, feelings of pain or anger can motivate children towards resistance and retaliation. Gershoff cited evidence which indicated that coercive forms of discipline have a bad effect on the child’s confidence and assertiveness and increase feelings of helplessness and humiliation, and there is a significant association between harsh physical punishment and distress and depression in adolescence and low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism and suicidal tendency in adulthood.
Her suggestion that, when administered too frequently or too severely, corporal punishment becomes physical abuse is supported by statistics from an American study which showed that in 30 per cent of the families studied there was an escalation from the use of mild punishment to levels which could be considered abusive. Ultimately Gershoff presents a convincing argument indicating little evidence for benefits of corporal punishment but possible detrimental effects of physically punishing children.
In 2002 the Scottish Executive consulted on proposals to outlaw the physical punishment of children up to the age of three. Of the responses, 17 per cent were from people who were totally against a ban - people who were actually pro-smacking. The majority of these were individuals from the Christian right who believed that God, through the Bible, has instructed them that children MUST be physically chastised using an implement. So hitting their children brings the parents closer to their God. This response was typical: “I feel strongly that parents should be allowed to continue to use reasonable physical punishment for disciplining their children. This of course is useful only in a loving environment.“The only guideline that can be referred to is the Bible where it is very clear that corporal punishment has to be used and the short, temporary pain will save the child from a far worse consequence in life.”(From The Physical Punishment of Children in Scotland Analysis of Responses, page 9, see http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Justice/Civil/17867/10386)
I am a Primary school teacher. Part of the curriculum I teach to P7’s is Democracy, part of which is learning how to have proper debates. A debate we have recently had in class is the issue of smacking. No child has said to me that they learn anything when they are hit.On the contrary, they say that anger comes in the way of their learning, even if an explanation for their punishment is offered. More than one child described the feeling that they could explode with rage and that they couldn’t hear or make sense of explanations after being hit.
As a teacher I have to ask, how do people think smacking benefits children? Is it not for the child’s benefit that people hit them? Under what circumstances does smacking improve the learning experience? The teaching profession, quite a few years ago, dropped this impediment to education - though not before a sadistic teacher beat a hatred of maths into me. I would argue that in our capitalist, elitist, violence-driven, patriarchal society, it teaches people that in violence lies an answer and that it is acceptable to be violated if you are weak or not part of the elite.
I wonder how many people who believe that the current situation in Iraq is acceptable were beaten as children? Or how many in Israel can look upon the violations they are inflicting upon the Palestinian people and say they themselves were not violated? Part of becoming politically aware is becoming politically aware of your oppression. Some children are aware of their oppression every day, through the imposition of capitalist poverty and through the imposition of adult chastisement. That the violation of children is socially acceptable tells us something very important about our society. We internalise our oppression and help to perpetuate it through the violent treatment of the impressionable young.
One way the class system is perpetuated is through the perpetuation of the violation of the weak and vulnerable. Back in 1979, Sweden became the first of 15 European countries to introduce legislation that protects their children. Three other countries have civil codes, constitutional rulings or supreme court rulings. The Swedish aims were to ensure that public attitudes were changed, to establish a clear framework of parental education and ensure earlier and less intrusive intervention when child protection was required. The ban was intended to be educational rather than punitive. Since 1979, the proportion of suspects prosecuted for child abuse who are in their 20s and therefore raised in a ‘no-smacking’ culture has decreased significantly. Violence against children has decreased since violence has been made unacceptable in law. The prosecution rate has shown a declining trend. There has been no increase of parents being drawn into the criminal justice system since the introduction of the protection and education legislation. There has been no increase of children being removed from parents through intervention. Quite the reverse. The number of children coming into care has decreased by 26 per cent since 1982 and increasingly these have been short-term placements. Youth crime has remained steady since the introduction of the no smack culture. Children involved in theft and narcotics crime has decreased. The proportion of youth who have experimented with drugs and consumed alcohol has decreased.The suicide rate amongst young people has declined. Assault against children by children has decreased. People who were brought up during the no-smacking culture have been less likely to commit child abuse than those brought up before the ban. I could go on. For more statistics go to endcorporalpunishment.org (pdf file)
In fact you can find reports from all of the other countries that have introduced the ban on the End Corporal Punishment site. Perhaps some will say that it is overly simplistic to say the ban has had a direct causal effect - but it certainly has not had a negative effect. Indeed, in modifying public attitudes it seems to have had an overwhelmingly positive effect.
For more reading, go to: http://naturalchildhood.blogspot.com/ or email Neil at theteacher@elmacdesign.co.uk
You can watch the SSP conference debate on corporal punishment below
SSP Smacking Ban
by Catriona Grant
The physical and emotional chastisement of children and young people cannot be tolerated by socialists any more than domestic abuse between intimate partners or ex-partners. Socialists and all progressive people believe that domestic abuse of women is unlawful and wrong - there is no real debate around this except on how to campaign and solutions to the problem. If socialists accept that domestic abuse - which includes all forms of physical abuse, everything from murder to slapping, sexual and mental abuse - is wrong and at times criminal, then the logical step is that all forms of maltreatment of children is wrong and at times criminal. I believe that smacking children (with an implement or not) should be dealt with the same way as domestic abuse. It is an outrage similar to the bygone law that stated women could be hit with a stick no bigger than her husband’s thumb.
The NSPCC in England did a research project into the maltreatment of children in 2002 and found that abused children come mainly from families where there is domestic violence and other serious family problems. Their report Child Maltreatment in the Family is the second report from the most comprehensive research into child abuse and neglect ever undertaken in Britain. It presents the findings of a survey of childhood experiences of 2,869 18-24 year olds, carried out by BMRB International for the NSPCC FULL STOP Campaign.The first report showed physical abuse was the most common form of child maltreatment, with 7 per cent of young people reporting serious physical abuse at the hands of parents and carers, including being hit with a fist or implement, beaten up, burned and scalded. The findings showed that eight out of ten of the young people who had suffered serious physical abuse had also experienced domestic violence. For nearly half (43 per cent) of these, the domestic violence was constant or frequent.
Most children do not experience maltreatment in their families. But when they do, the research revealed strong links between child maltreatment and other family relationship problems, especially domestic abuse and particularly where parents are distant and children have no respect for them. The study also found that children experiencing frequent changes in family structure were especially vulnerable to abuse. Those who had grown up in lone parent or broken families were between three to six times more likely to have suffered serious abuse, though some abuse may have preceded family breakdown (and can be the cause of the breakdown, such as a parent ending the relationship with an abuser).
The study shows that child maltreatment often occurs in otherwise stable and loving families, but is likely to be less serious, less frequent and less long-lived - however maltreatment is maltreatment, even if it is seen as ‘just a smack’. In all, 5 per cent of children experience more than one type of serious maltreatment by parents. These children are likely to suffer years of multiple maltreatment, telling no one and receiving little help or comfort. Their situation is dire.
The debate within socialist and progressive circles around smacking children should not be around whether it is unlawful or not - though, presently, reasonable physical chastisement of children is lawful - but what we do to reduce the prevalence and to better support parents and children who have complex problems in their families and lives. There needs to be more funding into projects that support families. Greater understanding of both domestic abuse and child maltreatment is required in order to offer the necessary support to those in need. And we need public and political education regarding respect and tolerance in families and that violence in the family is unnecessary and damaging.
There is never an excuse for domestic or child abuse.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Charity reports sharp increase in suicidal children
The ChildLine children's charity has warned of a sharp rise in the number of young people who phone its helpline saying they are contemplating suicide.
Calls to the service from suicidal children increased by 14 per cent last year, according to a new report. More than 1,000 youngsters contacted the charity to talk about killing themselves and 1,500 more mentioned suicide during the course of other discussions.
ChildLine is calling on the Department of Health to set up an in-depth investigation into the rising rate of suicide and attempted suicide among young people.
Esther Rantzen, the president of ChildLine, said: "All young death is agonising, but suicide is among the cruellest of all because it is preventable. One child rang ChildLine from her science lesson - she had already taken an overdose.
"Another teenage couple had made a suicide pact and rang having cut their wrists. These lives were saved, but of the 4,500 children who try to call ChildLine each day, nearly half will not get through."
The report found that girls were much more likely to contemplate suicide than boys, with five times as many female callers to the service.
According to the mental health charity Mind, 11 boys and 12 girls under the age of 14 killed themselves in 2002. But a further 373 young men and 103 young women aged 15 to 24 also committed suicide.
The suicide rate among men aged 15 to 24 is 17 per 100,000 of the population, compared with an overall rate for men of all ages of 13 per 100,000.
Experts are concerned at rising problems of bullying, self harm and other problems among children, some as young as six. The Government has pledged to stamp out bullying in schools but ChildLine says that more needs to be done.
The charity wants to see counselling facilities and peer support available at all schools. Experts estimate that up to 10 adolescent suicides a year are directly attributed to bullying and research has shown that one in 12 children are tormented to the point that it has a detrimental effect on their education, relationships and self-esteem.
Last month, Sophie Amor, 23, won £20,000 in compensation in an out-of-court settlement for the bullying she suffered at school. Ms Amor, from Wales, tried to kill herself at the age of nine and said her life was destroyed by the ordeal.
Thousands of children are also being prescribed powerful anti-depressants for mental health problems. More than one in 10 boys (11.4 per cent) and 7.6 per cent of girls aged five to 15 suffer from a psychiatric disorder. Up to 10 per cent of teenagers are thought to be suffering depression.
More than 24,000 of the 160,000 people treated in emergency departments for injuries associated with self harm each year are aged between 15 and 19, according to a recent study.
A national inquiry into rising rates of self harm among young people and the reasons behind it is due to be published in the next few weeks. Psychiatrists are concerned that units treating children with severe mental health problems are being closed because of budget cuts.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article351373.ece
Sunday, March 12, 2006
"My warning to parents is simple:one in five children put into nursery early will develop mental health problems'
This 53-year-old author of some of the world's most popular parenting books - four million sales and counting - is, in his quiet way, angry about the increasing use of day care for babies. He argues that placing children younger than three in nurseries risks damaging their mental health, leaving them aggressive, depressed, antisocial and unable to develop close relationships in later life. This, indeed, is the subject of his new book, Raising Babies, published tomorrow.
The Tasmania-based therapist, whose previous bestsellers include Raising Boys, directs his gentle wrath at the one in 20 British parents who "slam" their children into full-time nursery care, from 8am to 6pm, from the age of six months.
But isn't he just stating the obvious, I ask? No mother uses day care as a first choice. In an ideal world, most would rather stay at home, for the baby's first year at least, but financial considerations force them back to work. "Mmm, mmm," Biddulph says in that earnest, empathic way therapists have. "Money certainly comes into it. But the 'slammers', as I call them, tend to be affluent, urban professional couples -so they do have a choice. It is the cultural norm for everyone in their circle to use day care."
In a whispery, Antipodean accent, Biddulph concedes that what he is saying can seem obvious, however: "Only, now, there is hard science to back up the common sense. One in five children put into nursery too early develops mental health problems. If you treble the hours of care, you treble the damage.
A new study in the UK, which followed the lives of 3,000 children from babyhood, has shown that a baby's brain grows whole new structures in response to the love and caring firmness given during its first two years of life. If this kind of intense love is not given at the right time, these areas of the brain do not develop properly.
"The National Institute of Child Health and Development in the US, meanwhile, conducted a recent study of 1,000 children, which showed that three times as many children - 17 per cent - had noticeable behaviour problems in the 'more than 30 day care hours a week' group, while only six per cent had these problems in the 'under 10 hours a week' group."
In Britain, nearly 250,000 children under three attend nurseries full-time, Biddulph adds, and the Labour Government has made expanding nursery places a key part of its family policy. To this end, it has created more than 1.2 million new child-care places for the youngest children since it came to power in 1997. "The Blair Government is all about control-freakery," Biddulph says. "They want women working and babies in crèches. They even have a 'toddler curriculum' in which 'development boxes' are ticked. Who speaks for human values in all this?"
So what advice would he give Tony Blair, or indeed that father of a new-born child, David Cameron? "I'd say they should give parents an actual choice: a guaranteed return to work; the possibility of job sharing; flexible work hours and financial support for while they are still at home. I'd also say look at the Scandinavian model. They have 12 months' parental leave there. It's not gendered, so you can swap. You can do half and half, or both at the same time. It works. Even though the Swedes spend six times as much as the British on crèche facilities, they hardly ever use them. There are only 300 six-month-old babies in Sweden who go to nursery, whereas it is 30,000 in the UK.'
Biddulph paints a grim picture of British nurseries: "Babies lying in rows of cots, then milling about in garish rooms through their toddler years, aching for one special adult to love them." What no one likes to talk about, he says, is that, in nursery care, children are often looked after in bulk - on a 1:3 or 1:8 ratio, compared with 1:1 at home. "It's like fast food, we can enjoy the convenience of drive-through." The nursery staff, he adds, are often underpaid teenagers with minimal qualifications, with a turnover rate of 40 per cent a year. "The worst nurseries are negligent, frightening and bleak - a nightmare of bewildered loneliness."
I ask if there is anything more than anecdotal evidence to prove that sending under-threes to nursery leads to mental health problems. "You can measure rising levels of the stress hormone cortisol in a baby's saliva. It is so sensitive, you can take a sample from a stressed baby then, after it has had a cuddle from its mother, take another reading and it will have dropped.
The cortisol readings for children in nursery were double what they were at home." For babies under a year old you need a one-to-one carer - the same one - so that the baby can build up a relationship. "Brain development depends upon this fine-tuning between the baby and the carer."
I tell him that we have three young children and that, when my wife went back to work, each time we hired a nanny. "Well, nannies come out a lot better in the research than nurseries," he says, "because it is a reasonable imitation of what would happen with the mother at home. Stable, kind and committed. Nannies can work well as a halfway solution, but only if parents are lucky with the person they find."
Isn't all this utopian theorising of his just about making working mothers feel guilty, I ask? "Mothers are adults and we infantilise them if we say we mustn't make them feel guilty. They are grown-ups who can think for themselves. They know that guilt is in their minds for a reason. Guilt is the reason we don't drive at 100 miles an hour through a built-up area."
Some "slammers", he suggests, end up never bonding with their children: "They can never get the rhythm. The danger for people who are only with their children half the time is that their children won't want to know them when they grow up. There are many people in Britain who barely see their parents. Perhaps once a year at Christmas. The British never had a very good handle on love."
Crikey, as Australians are wont to say. But Biddulph can get away with this generalisation because it turns out that he was born and raised in Yorkshire. His father was a draughtsman in a steelworks there. "My childhood was pretty rugged one way or another, so I learned what not to do. Self-esteem wasn't encouraged. Suppression of feelings was. But my parents did their best. At least they didn't put me in a nursery."
How was his relationship with his father? "Attenuated: 10 phone calls a year. But we really got to work on it over 12 months, then he got liver cancer and was dead within 12 weeks. We had done the hard stuff and could just enjoy each other's company and hang out."
So Biddulph wasn't in day care as a baby - yet he turned out "awkward and anxious". We'll let it go, because he also turned out to be successful in his career. And, judging by his books, he seems to have been a good father to his two children: a son, aged 22, and a daughter, 15.
Does he feel under pressure to have a perfect family? "I never do media in my own country, so as not to expose my children to that pressure." He and his wife, Shaaron, have been together for 30 years, he says, and married for 22. "We were hippies. We got married because the hospital in Tasmania wouldn't let de facto fathers be present at the birth - so we had to have a licence."
It is time for his close-up now. The Sunday Telegraph's photographer has arrived. As the picture desk has requested a baby to be in the shot, we are also joined by my one-year-old son, Joseph, and his nanny, Stacy. Biddulph muses that it was lucky that he said positive things about nannies.
As a final thought, I ask him about the self-help book industry: doesn't it work by creating problems? "I hate the self-help industry," he says. "I think it's a dreadful genre." So he doesn't think he's part of it? "No. I don't think you can change your life overnight. A book can be like a friend who helps you get a sense that other people have been there. But there are no formulas for happiness. There is only one thing that will buy wisdom in this life and that is suffering."
Crikey again. He sounds like a flagellant. "No, it's not that. It's just, if you can get through a bad time in a marriage, say, you're going to be much better and stronger for it. Some day you will wake up and feel stronger because you have dealt with something other people haven't."
In his case? He pauses before answering. "A miscarriage. It was a tough time in our relationship. But what I mean is that, generally, impressive people never have an easy life."
Life is so unfair for people who have had an easy time of it, I tease: I blame the parents. "Well, it's a high-risk strategy to advocate bad parenting," he counters dryly. Touché.
Source: The Telegraph
Also see: Raising Babies: Should Under 3s Go To Nursery? and His other books
Friday, March 10, 2006
Child Abuse—The Essential Reason for Murder
by Barbara Rogers
February 2006
Dorothy O. Lewis has dedicated her life’s work to study why human beings murder. Her impressive, excellent book “Guilty by Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers” is a harrowing read. It is shocking to learn about the actual acts of murder. They are usually seen as nothing but completely senseless evil acts—until the appalling, perverted physical and sexual violence and abuses, which these murderers had endured as children, come to light. Exposed to brutal, merciless whippings, beatings, and abused in abhorrent ways as sexual slaves—some of them through being sodomized—they had to manage to survive their childhoods from hell in a constant state of terror. Many people still want to believe that people are born evil; or that evilness afflicts a person out of nowhere; or that some innate evilness makes a human being kill. But that is not true.
The murderers whom we get to know in this gripping book have been through unspeakable horrors. They have damaged brains and mental illnesses. But the decisive and common factor for murderous acts is the experience of extremely traumatic childhood abuse. In many cases the barbaric, perverted torture caused the mind of the tortured child to split into multiple personalities. Dorothy Lewis, trained at Yale in a traditional, psychoanalytic way, could at first not recognize this devastating reality that helped these children survive and dissociate from their unbearable ordeals. Her interviews, wherein she gains a murderer’s trust so that the split personalities dare to come out and communicate with her—with their own names and characteristics, like a different way to talk, to look, to move—are stunning, shocking, and painfully fascinating.
Why do we look at murderers only as evil, perverted people who just must be put away or even silenced forever through the death penalty? Why don’t we try to gain all possible information about what produced their crimes? To understand what makes a murderer kill does not mean to excuse the crime or to let him or her out of jail. Society has the right to be protected. But we could learn so much from every murderer about the origins of terrible killings and how to prevent them—if we felt the responsibility to find out the reality and truth, and the reasons behind them. Thus, we could create a new, vitally important awareness about the devastating dangers and consequences of permitting violence against children.
It is a great loss for humanity’s growth that society is so blind, deaf and without any compassion for the ordeals of the victims of unfathomably monstrous childhood torture, which these murderers had to endure over and over again. In their interviews with Dorothy Lewis, they shared what happened to them often for the first time in their lives. Many of them could not remember any of it and could not explain why they had scars on their backs, their behinds and other parts of their bodies. Only dissociated parts, formed by their minds to help them survive, remembered the horrific abuses. It was frustrating to read how long it took and how skilled the interviewer had to ask her questions until these harrowingly mistreated human beings would share anything about their past—which they did only when they had come to trust this bright and sensitive psychiatrist.
It was mind-boggling to read that they did not want to reveal what they had suffered as children because they were afraid to paint their parents in a ‘bad light’ and to loose their families if they did so—which they feared especially when they were close to their executions and any information about their own plights might have saved their lives. Their parents were nothing but relieved if the truth remained a secret, hidden away—even if it meant that their child would be executed and had no chance of having his or her life spared through information that would throw light on their violent insanity.
It was moving and interesting to read how Dorothy Lewis describes her path from her confining training at Yale in the ‘Freudian tradition’ to arrive at her realizations, brought about by her experiences through these interviews—that human beings, who suffer traumatic, barbaric abuse in childhood can become violent murderers and people with multiple minds.
Murders are nothing else but the visible final acts of too many acts of agonizing violence inflicted on powerless, helpless, defenseless, innocent children—a reality which society does not wish to recognize. Society only takes note, often in sensational ways, of this final act and how to punish the criminal who committed it—but does not wish to be informed about all the crimes of their parents and other caretakers that led to this crime.
Dorothy Lewis has worked together with Jonathan Pinkus, who has written the book “Base Instincts.” They found three factors that need to come together to entice a murderous act: child abuse, mental illness, and brain damage. As I read about the cruelty and violence committed against these children, on a regular, often-daily basis, I wondered who would think that any adult could survive such ongoing torture, continuing for years, without severely damaging and traumatic consequences for his brain, mind, soul, body and sanity. Adults, tortured like that, would find sympathy and understanding, maybe even help. A child, in the possession and at the complete mercy of merciless, insane parents or other cruel, perverted abusers with power over the child, cannot find help or sympathy in his/her childhood—and rarely in court. Justice is a concept that never even touches these lives.
© Barbara Rogers
http://www.alice-miller.com/sujet/murder.htm
author of Screams from Childhood http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Smacking children should be outlawed, says SSP
Scotsman 6th March:RHIANNON EDWARD
THE Scottish Socialists yesterday backed calls to outlaw smacking, despite warnings from some party members that the move would criminalise good parents.
The SSP's annual conference in Dundee's Caird Hall passed a motion calling for new laws to ban all physical punishment of children.
Steven Johnston, from Edinburgh, who moved the motion, said: "That corporal punishment harms children is not in doubt, although this does challenge traditional Scottish attitudes."
The motion also called for a public education information campaign and increased support for "positive parenting".
However, some delegates warned against making it illegal to smack children.
Graeme McIver, an SSP member from the Borders and a father of four, acknowledged that corporal punishment was "wrong". But he went on: "While we should campaign and argue for parents not to smack their children, we should stop short of criminalising them."
The Scottish Parliament has twice rejected legislation to outlaw smacking, most recently when Labour's Marlyn Glen sought to amend the Family Law Bill last November.
In January, the Children's Commissioner, Kathleen Marshall, joined her three counterparts from the other nations in the UK in calling for a ban.
Scotsman, Monday 6 March 2006
Church admits 100 priests sexually abused children
Pictured above: Unidentified Magdalen Laundry in Ireland, c. early 20th century.
MORE than 100 Catholic priests in the archdiocese of Dublin are alleged to have sexually abused at least 350 children, according to a report released yesterday.
The number of alleged offences in the report released by the archdiocese is the biggest such admission of child abuse by priests in Ireland to date.
The alleged offences took place over the past 66 years and the report follows a detailed examination of parish records.
The Catholic Church in Ireland has been rocked by waves of such allegations against priests since the mid 1990s.
A government commission to look at the history and handling of abuse by priests throughout Ireland is to be set up later this month.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat, said the diocese would have to sell off some of its property to pay victims' compensation claims. The archbishop, appointed in 2003, said such an action would be "a necessary sacrifice to put right past wrongs, as much as was possible".
"It's very frightening for me to see that in some of these cases, so many children were abused," he said
"On the other hand, I know that the vast majority of priests don't abuse, that they do good work, that they're extremely upset and offended by what's happened."
The report, which looked at cases of alleged abuse dating back to 1940 in the Dublin area, found that 102 priests - about 3.5 per cent - had allegedly been involved in the sexual or physical abuse of children.
The office said the numbers were based on a two-year review of the personnel files of more than 2,800 priests who had worked in the Dublin archdiocese, either as parish priests or in religious orders, over the past 66 years.
According to the report, eight Dublin-assigned priests have received criminal convictions for abuse charges, while 32 priests have been sued for damages by 105 victims at a cost to the archdiocese of £5.8 million, including legal fees.
But it said costs were expected to rise much higher, as 40 cases remained unsettled. Church authorities have positively identified 350 abuse victims, and a possible further 40 people who may have been abused have still to be traced.
Last October, Seamus Hegarty, the bishop of Derry, revealed that about 40 child sex abuse allegations have been made against 26 priests in the Derry diocese over the last 50 years.
Up to 13 of those priests are still working in the Church.
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK IN DUBLIN
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=353912006
Rights For Children Music Video
Music video, Human Rights For Children Now! Music by Black Eyed Peas "Where is the Love". Images of children from around the world. By www.naturalchildhood.blogspot.com
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
The Wellsprings of Horror in the Cradle
Whoever they are and however dreadful their crimes, deep down inside every dictator, mass murderer, terrorist cowers the humiliated child they once were, a child that has only survived through the complete and utter denial of its feelings of helplessness. But this complete denial of suffering once borne creates an inner void. Very many of these people will never develop a capacity for normal human compassion. Thus they have few if any qualms about destroying human life, neither that of others nor the void they carry around inside themselves.
In my view, and on the basis of the research I have done into the childhood histories of the most ruthless dictators, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ceaucescu, terrorism in general and the recent horrifying attacks on the United States are a macabre but precise demonstration of what happens to millions and millions of children the world over in the name of good parenting. And unfortunately, society turns a blind eye. The horrors of terrorist violence are something we can all watch on our television screens; the horrors in which children grow up are very rarely shown in the media. Thus, most people are not informed about the main source of hatred. They speculate about political, religious, economic or cultural reasons but the speculations are turning in darkness because the true reason must remain obscured: the suppression and subsequent denial of early rage that often ends up in hatred with an endless number of ideologies.
Hatred is hatred and rage is rage, all over the world and at any time the same, in Serbia, Ruanda or Afghanistan. They are always the fruits of very strong emotions, reactions to injuries to their dignity endured in childhood, normal reactions of the body that were not allowed to express themselves in a safe way. Nobody comes to the world with the wish to destroy. Every newborn, independently from the culture, religion or ethnic origins needs to love, be loved, protected, and respected. This is his biological design. If he is maltreated by the cruel upbringing he will develop the very strong wish to take revenge. He will be driven to destroy others or himself but only by his history and never by inborn genes. The idea of destructive genes is a modern version of the fairy tale talking about the "devil's children" who need to be chastised to become obedient and nice.
In these dreadful weeks, all of us have experienced as adults what many children go through every single day. They stand helpless, speechless, and trembling before the unpredictable, incomprehensible, brutal, indescribable violence of their parents, who thus avenge themselves unconsciously for the sufferings of their own childhood, sufferings they have never come to terms with because they too have denied their very existence. We only need to recall our feelings on September 11 to have some idea of the intensity of those sufferings. All of us were gripped by horror, dread, and fear. But the connections between terrorism and childhood are still hardly recognized. It is time to take the facts seriously.
The statistics (Olivier Maurel, La Fess'e, Editions La Plage 2001) tell us that over 90% of the people living in this world are firmly convinced that beating children is for their own good. As almost all of us have endured the humiliation inflicted on us by this mentality, the cruelty of it is something we have learned to consider as normal. But like the Holocaust and other forms of supreme contempt for human life and dignity, these latest terrorist attacks show the effects of the system in which we have all grown up. In early childhood we have learned to suppress the pain, ignore the truth, and deny the feeling of infinite helplessness and humiliation inflicted on small children by power-seeking adults.
Contrary to former belief, we do not arrive into this world with a brain fully formed. The brain only develops fully in the first few years of life. The things done to the child in that period leave lifelong traces, good and bad. For our brain contains the complete physical and emotional - though unfortunately not the mental - memory of everything that has happened to us. Today, we can actually see the lesions in the brains of beaten or badly neglected children on the screen of a computer. Numerous articles by brain specialists, notably Bruce D. Perry, have indicated these facts. If the child has no helping witness to turn to, it will learn to glorify what has been inflicted on it: cruelty, sadism, hypocrisy, ignorance. The simple reason is that children learn by imitation, not from the well-meant words addressed to them in the later stages of life. The mass murderers, serial killers, Mafia bosses, and dictators who grew up without helping witnesses will inflict, or connive in inflicting, the same terror on whole nations once they have the power to do so. And they will be doing nothing other than putting into practice what they learned by experience when they were small children.
Unfortunately, most of us prefer not to see the connections because accepting this knowledge would force us to feel the pain we had no choice but to suppress so long ago. And so we stay with the strategy we resorted to in childhood, the strategy of denial. But these latest events have shown that the time has come to stop turning a blind eye. We must grow out of the old traditional system geared to punishment and retaliation, we must refrain from reactions born of blind rage. Naturally, we must not neglect our own protection. But the video cameras at schools will not protect anybody as long as they only pretend but actually refuse to look at the facts and to know where the violence comes from.
According to an inquiry I have ordered in France in 2001, 89% of 100 mothers asked about the age of their children when they "had to hit them" for the first time, responded in the average: 1,8. 11% could not remember the exact age, but not one of the mothers said that she had never hit her children. These figures inform us with a disturbing clarity where and when children learn the violence they display in schools and later also on the political stage. Many of the big and expensive conferences dealing with violence and its sources would not at all be necessary if we stopped denying this truth. The facts are available to us if only we decide to look at them.
We must go in active search of different forms of communication from the ones imprinted on us in childhood, forms based on respect rather than the desire to inflict new humiliation by punishment. People who grew up in families where punishment-enforced totalitarianism reigned know only the language of war, and they will impose this language on others forcing them to defend themselves however they can. But this story is endless. As we know, we are easily able to exterminate thousands of people, indeed whole nations, but we cannot exterminate the disastrous effects of humiliations done to small children by their parents. Those humiliations will return to affect the whole of society as is happening today.
It is high time we awoke from our long sleep. As adults we are no longer threatened by the same danger of destruction that many of us really were confronted with in our infancy and that paralyzed us with fear and drove us to denial. Only in childhood did we have to deny in order to survive. As adults we can learn not to ignore the knowledge stored in our bodies so that we can become able to grasp and genuinely understand the true motives behind our acts. And true knowledge of our own histories can free us from the urge to revert to futile strategies and remain emotionally blind. Today, we have the chance to look around, to learn from experience, and to seek new, creative solutions for settling conflicts. Even if we have never learned to trust respectful communication, it is never too late to overcome that deficiency and to free ourselves from self-deception.
Today, the technical means of venting hatred, discharging long-ago accumulated, bottled-up rage, and directing it at innocent people continue to grow very fast. Many of these techniques for destruction are available to power-crazed dictators who are driven to take vengeance on whole nations for the humiliation inflicted on them in early childhood. To protect the world we definitely need a world-wide prohibition against hitting, hurting and other acts of cruelty against children by parents and others who have power over them. Children absolutely must be protected while their brains are developing, malleable and so easily damaged. We need to gather the courage to look deeply within ourselves and confront the wellsprings of horror. We need to spread this new knowledge through every available means--the knowledge that by humiliating small children we inevitably create fertile breeding-grounds of violence.
A new law, protecting toddlers from domestic violence, like the one which largely decreased criminality in Sweden, will doubtlessly bring about essential changes in society, if not immediately, then surely in 20 years when the never-beaten children will become adults and will not be interested in provoking wars.
© Alice Miller, October 2001
Friday, March 03, 2006
Online Peaceful Parenting Video
Clink Here : Online Peaceful Parenting Video is an 11-minute introduction to the data supporting peaceful parenting concepts as well as to the recommended approach to childhood discipline recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics in its Guidance for Effective Discipline (Pediatrics Vol. 101, No. 4, April 1998). You can "right click" the link here and select "Save Target As" from the menu to save this video to your computer.
http://www.childrenshc.org/communities/peacefulparenting.asp
Quote of the Month March 2006
"We cannot decide, once and for all, whether it is parents, teachers, counselors, psychologists, family courts, judges, or whatever, who know what is best for children. In important matters, nobody can know better than the child himself. You don't have to be very old or very smart to know your friends from your enemies, to know when people dislike you, are cruel to you, and hurt you. Any five-year-old knows the difference between a mean teacher and a nice one and is smart enough to want to get away from the mean one."
"It is only adults who ... think that the mean teacher is somehow doing the child some good. Not that the adults themselves willingly stick around people who are contemptuous and cruel to them. Not for a minute. It is only to other people, above all young people, that we say that pain doesn't really hurt, it really does you good. But a child should have the same right as anyone else to move away from whoever or whatever is hurting him and toward whatever he feels may help him."
By John Caldwell Holt
source: http://www.naturalchild.org/quotes/
Streetwise teens gang together to avoid trouble and stay safe
Groups of teenagers 'hanging out' on the streets may look intimidating, but young people often gang together with friends as a way of keeping safe and avoiding trouble, according to a study of parents and children in disadvantaged communities for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The research with families in four neighbourhoods of Glasgow found that young people pooled their detailed local knowledge to avoid hazards, including violence from more organised gangs and aggression from adults with drink and drug problems. They took responsibility for keeping themselves and friends safe by moving around in groups and looking out for each other, using mobile phones to stay in touch.
"We were impressed by the positive part that young people's peer groups played in helping them to stay safe," said Prof. Malcolm Hill, Director of the Glasgow Centre for the Child and Society, who led the research project on children's resilience. "Parents were generally unaware of its importance and young people themselves recognised that sticking together in groups could, in spite of their self-protective intentions, appear threatening to some adults."
He added: "Both parents and children in these deprived neighbourhoods were keenly aware of risks within their communities and the young people had often become experts in avoiding potential trouble. They knew about avoiding people, places and certain times of day, and they deployed a range of other strategies, including keeping a low profile or asking friends or parents to accompany them in order to keep safe."
The study, which combined questionnaire surveys of 'ordinary' families with in-depth interviews, found that parents and children usually identified positive aspects of their neighbourhoods, in spite of high levels of unemployment, low income and drug misuse. These positive aspects were often associated with family, friends and neighbours.
It also highlighted a strong commitment among parents to protect children from the worst effects of low income and to keep them safe from local dangers.
This sometimes meant placing restrictions on children's movements and activities, including visits to local amenities such as parks and sports facilities. Children were mostly accepting of rules about time and place, which they took as a sign of their parents' concern. However, as they grew older some young people kept quiet about certain activities, believing they could take care of themselves.
The report calls on national and local policy makers to build on the strengths and aspirations of parents and children in disadvantaged areas, as well as tackling the heightened risks they face, such as drug misuse and antisocial behaviour. For example, policies could do more to support the informal local networks that share information about safe activities and provide families with practical advice and support.
Schools are also urged to capitalise on the evidence of parents' positive commitment to discipline and their children's safety to engage them as allies in strategies to raise standards of behaviour.
Peter Seaman, co-author of the report, said: "Parenting has been prominent in many government policies, including initiatives to tackle crime, and there is a widespread view that antisocial and delinquent behaviour by young people can simply be blamed on 'bad' parenting. Yet the parents we interviewed described sophisticated strategies they had adopted to minimise their children's exposure to danger and to guard them against temptations to go 'off the rails'.
"They also had high aspirations for their children, wanting them to have better opportunities in life than they had experienced. What appeared to be lacking was the capacity to fulfil the hopes they held, especially in education, because they did not have the knowledge or resources to realise them."
Source: Joseph Rowntree Foundation
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