Condoning Child Abuse

While society is concerned and paranoid about the sources of abuse from without, and views those who bring harm to children unknown to them as inhuman devils gnashing teeth and dancing on bones, much of society openly advocates the routine abuse of children. Discipline is healthy, and a child spared of discipline could almost be considered handicapped, because no one should get a free ride through life. However, the line between abuse and discipline is a tightrope, and its walkers are often thrown in perilous different directions--either abuse is mistaken for discipline, or discipline mistaken for abuse. In either extreme, children are at the mercy of the overreaction of an adult--either they are deprived of healthy discipline, taken out of healthy homes and placed in traumatizing state care, or routine abuse is seen as "consistent" punishment. As above, the abuse of children is often permitted in society for various reasons.

Irrational people make tirades justifying the abuse of children. It almost seems like the abuse society hates the most is the kind that happens by social rogues in one-child, one-shot affairs, and the abuse society hates least, and even advocates for, is the routine, daily recurring abuse from people society invariably trusts. By the same note, welts and bruises of the same magnitude are examined and understood differently based almost entirely on whether or not society trusts the category of human being they originated from. This is not especially widespread, and most parents usually agree that any "discipline" that leaves physical marks such as bruises or lacerations is in fact abuse, but there are irrational people who will trust that a child has been correctly dealt with so long as those markings were caused by parents, teachers, or people whom society trusts. If dealt by people society hates--rogues, minorities, pervert slugs--only then has a tragedy occurred.

In all objectivity though, markings are markings, regardless of who made them, regardless of whether it's a parent or a child molester, so it makes no sense to treat them differently according to where the perpetrator falls in society's prejudices. A word of caution though ought to be had when determining the course of action stemming from an incident of abuse. It makes no sense to turn one bruise dealt by an otherwise caring parent into a lifetime of systematic, institutional abuse for that child under state care, which can and does happen. It makes no sense to treat parents as potential devils in disguise, as the rouge members of society have been cast. It is hypocrisy on the part of our culture to condone abuse from some sources, almost jokingly, and despise abuse from other sources vigilantly.

In reality, no human being is objectively a "monster" or a "beast," and such characterization (a sick glorification of the abuse) does nothing for the victim of the abuse. They are simply people with various psychological malfunctions, as in the case of child molesters or kidnappers, or they are people who have been culturally force-fed this notion that because children are a subservient class of person, they deserve nothing short of the physical assertion of adult dominance in their daily life to grow healthy. The later group are the aforementioned irrational people, the ageists. People who deal abuse don't have to don horns or sprout wings or dance on bones to abuse a child, sometimes they just have to be a part of the population that western culture doesn't understand. Sometimes they just have to believe in something western culture has understood for centuries--the so-called superiority of the adult. From these two things, all child abuse spews forth.