Peace Comes When Child Abuse Goes
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restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
Peace will come to the world a lot sooner when child abuse goes out. Peace is planted when children's rights are respected and children are given affirmation, respect, love, good example and protection from abuse. Peace is not just the absence of abuse, violence and war. Nor is it the silence of the graveyard or the inactivity and apathy of the non-involved. Peace-filled living is a way of life. It is a positive caring attitude of one human person to another where rights and dignity are respected and cherished, nurtured and protected.
When children experience from early childhood that they are valued and have intrinsic worth they grow up respecting and caring for others. Such values are planted during childhood by caring intelligent adults who understand how important is affirmation, admiration and a peaceful environment for children to grow as persons and develop a conscience.
That sensitivity and knowledge of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad and the desire and eventual ability to freely choose and embrace "the good", for oneself and others is the path to human development. Wise parents know too the lifelong personality damage that is caused by emotional and verbal violence in a family or community. They know too that physical punishment and maltreatment do the most damage of all.
Perhaps that is what turns a loving child into a teenage or adult hater of humanity. It could start with excessive parental discipline, unjust harsh punishment and abuse. Such abuse or rejection and exclusion at home, in school, or in the community builds the lonely isolated personality that hates others because he or she is unwanted and unloved, scorned, laughed at, ridiculed in public, bullied or put down. Some desire to take revenge, conquer all around them and be feared as a powerful person. They can rejoice in the role of cruel avenging tyrant.
These fantasies may spill over into emotions of hatred and contempt for others. Some become psychopaths and some desire to immortalize themselves through violence, atrocities and mass murder, awe and shock is a tactic to be the center of attention.
From the dark lonely isolation of rejection, the pain of abuse and violence come the revenge seeking psychopaths of this world. These are the abusers and killers that become mass murders, tyrants, despots and dictators that rule with death squads, secret police, and start wars to satisfy their own egoistical need to be recognized and feared. Their imagined superiority and contempt for all others drives them to dominate and get pleasure from inflicting pain and death on others.
History is full of them from the past to the present, Stalin, Idi Amin, Hitler, Marcos, the Columbine school killers, the maundering murderers and rapists of Darfur, the torturers and genocidal killers and leaders of Bosnia, Rwanda, Burma, the Ivory Coast and the Congo and countless others in the past and the present.
The Philippines, a nation of peaceful and friendly people are plagued by a culture of violence. Where it came from one cannot know but the violence of the colonial rulers in the childhood of the nation may have tainted their successors. The dominating elite control all with the iron fist of poverty, hunger, death squads, and torture, lies and empty promises.
The People's Power movement in 1986 was the non-violent answer of peace loving Filipinos to the martial law killers and torturers. Today, they still make up the majority of the population, but they await a messianic leader to ignite their hopes for peace and prosperity and an end to poverty.
In Philippine jails, the punitive power prevails and teenagers are abused and brutalized. Unless released and helped they will grow up filled with anger and hostility to society. They are now innocent but will be turned by unjust punishment into the rebels of the future by the abuse they receive today.
The ruling elite will reap what they sow, they allow the abuse of children and youth behind bars and when the children become adults many will return with a burning desire for justice. They will not find justice and then what? We have to stop this madness and make peace now through justice for children and youth. END
