http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/301/violenceagainst-kids.jpg“Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself
They come through you but not from you you
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you”. [Khalil Gibran, The Prophet].Dikpak Naker on why it is not OK to beat your children.

The other day I was talking to a colleague who is an activist for preventing violence against women. When I asked her if she beats her child, she responded, “I don’t batter him but if he gets out of line, I won’t hesitate to use a slap”. Her response astounded me and led me to start my own experiment of asking friends and colleagues the same question. The pattern continued. Most adults responded by saying that in moderation, beating children was a useful way of guiding their behaviour. Some added qualifiers such as, it has to be part of a larger disciplinary approach or only as a last resort. Nevertheless, many adults felt justified in using violence against children in the guise of controlling their behaviour. Even those that had seen the corrosive effect of the dynamics that lead to violence from a man to a woman, responded with a question of their own: what is wrong with beating children to teach them how to behave? Some asked in genuine bewilderment, while others simply because they couldn’t comprehend relationships with children that does not involve the adult asserting power over children.

Many of us have had years of experience in which we have learned that adults should control children around them and that in that enterprise, beating them is necessary. Most of us have witnessed children being slapped, shouted at and humiliated in the name of ‘discipline’. Perhaps you have survived a childhood where being beaten, silenced and intimidated was normalised and made acceptable by the prevailing value system. If that was the reality you grew up in, why would you come to think otherwise? Why would you abandon everything you have known, to learn a new way of relating with children? Why wouldn’t you ask, with genuine incomprehension, what is wrong with beating children to teach them how to behave?

If you are reading this, it is likely that you may have some personal or professional interest in the issue. Perhaps you work for a child-centric agency where all the literature or prevailing culture declares that beating children is wrong. You may have read the conclusions from the UN Global Study on Violence against Children or many other similar documents that conclude the same thing: that beating children, regardless of what you call it, is wrong. If you are not convinced by the rhetoric that you may have encountered in the usual documents or literature produced by civil society organizations, you are probably not alone. Maybe you do not want to risk your job or appear uncouth by articulating a dissenting point of view in certain circles. This piece is aimed at you. If you have been asked by people who live in your community about what is wrong with beating children, and not been fully sure what to think, this piece is aimed at you.

What I am about to argue is not new. However, what I hope may be compelling is that it emerged from children themselves. Ultimately if you are interested in creating a better world for children, who better to ask how to do that, than the children themselves and the adults who care about them?

We did exactly that in Uganda. We went to five diverse districts, from east to west, north to south. We asked 1400 children and 1100 adults, in many different ways about their thoughts, feelings and experience of violence against children. We asked boys and girls, younger and older, children who were in school and those who weren’t. We sought out children who were living in rural and urban areas, orphans as well as those living with their parents. They said many things about violence against children (see but above all, unanimously they said two things; the violence against children was too much, and that it did not teach children anything except fear and shame.

Ninety eight percent of the children said they had experienced physical violence, a third of these children said they experience it at least once a week. Approximately one in eight said they experience violence on a regular basis from people that are supposed to take care of them; their parents, teachers, neighbours, older siblings, relatives and community members. When children were asked how this violence makes them feel, the response ranged from rage to resignation. In this confidential space, away from the watchful eyes of adults whose approval they needed, not a single child said being beaten filled her with pride or a sense of being loved or cared for.

That may surprise you. After all, have we not trained our children sufficiently to swallow what Alice Miller, the famous pro-child psychologist calls the ‘poisonous pedagogy’; that being beaten is for your own good? It was not unusual for some children to begin that defence in focus group discussions and soon abandon it when they found that we were not there to change their mind. We were there to simply listen and learn from their views. Once the ‘defence’ was deemed unnecessary, authentic feelings and thoughts emerged.

We learned many things about violence against children through this study. The first thing we learned is that children think of violence against them in a very different way than adults. Adults focus on the act while children focus on the experience. What that means is, when an adult is beating a child, they think of it as an isolated incident that is over when the physical act is over. But children learn the fear and the shame of the incident and how the act makes them feel about the person who commits it against them. They learn that people bigger than them can treat them unfairly without there being consequences for the abuser. In an important way, they learn about the nature of power in intimate relationships and that whoever has more of it, prevails. Children learn that the best way to protect themselves from the abuse is to have power over people. We are all familiar with the consequences of that lesson when these children become adults and acquire power.

Secondly, when adults were asked why they beat children, a majority said to guide children and to teach them how to behave. Yet rarely did the adult take the time to talk with the child, discuss what they had done wrong or explain their error. If they did, they are more likely to use an alternative to a beating as a form of punishment. When children are beaten for reasons beyond their comprehension, they rarely learn what was wrong with their behaviour and they certainly don’t learn how to behave better.

Thirdly, adults severely underestimate the emotional response their violence provokes in children. When children feel humiliated, their reaction can range from fury to depression. Because most children do not have the option of expressing their feelings, it ends up being stored within them, wreaking terrible havoc in storage. Children violated over a long period of time can victimise others, behave anti-socially or just withdraw from developing their identity. They may feel hopeless and some may become suicidal. It affects their performance at school and it affects their self-confidence. It affects who they are likely to become.

Fourthly, despite the fact that beating of children is common, more than half of the adults were not sure that beating was creating a desired change in behaviour. Many admitted that often they beat children out of frustration rather than a carefully thought out strategy to teach children something. Many times children are beaten because they are children rather than because of their actions.

Finally, when children’s dignity is routinely insulted they lose trust in adults who make them feel that way. They outwardly learn to fear and internally resent the adult who inflicts violence on them. They develop ways to cope with the violence rather than spend that energy developing their intelligence. They become much smaller individuals than what they could have been.

As we reflected on these things, it became clearer to us how diverse societies have come to legitimise violence against children. The only way we can sustain such patent injustice in our intimate relationship is by refusing to empathise with the child. How else could we live with another human being on a day-to-day basis, while deep in our hearts knowing that we regularly do them injustice? After all, that is the oldest trick in the book for dominating another group of people. We learned about other blatant ways in which adults ignore the evidence in front of their eyes. If beating taught anything to anyone, none would need to be beaten twice or at least repeatedly, and yet that is what continues to happen to children.

Most importantly, we learned from children that beating children is not a harmless vice that parents succumb to and we can turn a blind eye to. The violence has powerful short-term, and profound long-term consequences, not only for the child but also for the entire community (perhaps even entire countries). For these and many other reasons, beating a child is counter-productive. It does not achieve the aim of changing behaviour. It does not help the child learn what was wrong with their behaviour. It undermines their confidence and contributes towards the child learning to trust you less. If you are interested in helping children learn, beating them is the last thing you would want to do.

If you are still reading this, I presume that you are willing to ask the deeper questions. If I can be presumptuous, I would like to ask you the following. How might your possibilities as an adult be different, had you not been beaten and shamed as a child? I wonder what you might have been, had you not been humiliated as a child. Would you persist in believing that it has done you no harm or would you be honest enough to see the injury it might have caused you? Wait! Don’t answer just yet. Let it circle in your head and come back to it when you are about to fall asleep at night…just when you are entering that intimate space and maybe in deeper touch with your heart, and then, answer to yourself as honestly as you can.

* Dipak Naker, Co-Director, Raising Voices

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