October was National Child Abuse Prevention month. But perhaps it was easier for all of us – media included – to focus on the Canadian election, the American election, the crashing stock market, T. Boone Pickens as an energy activist, Obama’s historic victory, the Sarah Palin parodies on Saturday Night Live…
Look: U.S. elections, pantsuits, McCain bailouts, gun-toting moms, Obama-rama, the red/blue divide, pigs with lipstick!!!
Sure some of those issues were very important, others not so much, but the issue of child abuse just got lost in that highly political month of October 2008. No one really wanted to talk about it. But then again, who would?
The easy solution to uncomfortable problems is simply to not talk about them. Right?
Whether it is incidents of physical, sexual or emotional abuse – which is the equivalent of beating up a kid on the inside – people would rather talk about the large stock market crash than the quiet problem of child abuse.
It’s a quiet problem.
It’s a sit alone in your room and cry all night problem AND a pretend it’s not happening problem.
Sorry to be blunt here, but let’s focus on some important facts. The most prevalent and quoted static is from a 2001 report by the National Advisory Council of Women that found "1 in 3 females and 1 in 6 males in Canada experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18."
According to an Ontario report published in 2006, "overall, 33 per cent of males and 27 per cent of females reported that they had experienced one or more incidents of physical and/or sexual abuse during their childhood".
Statistics themselves can barely get a handle on the problem as, according to a 2006 Canadian Incident Study (CIS) report titled, Child Mistreatment in Canada, "a random sample of individuals living in Ontario indicate that only 5.1 per cent of the respondents with a history of physical abuse in childhood, and 8.7 per cent of respondents with a history of sexual abuse in childhood, report any contact with a child protection agency."
Remember, it’s a quiet problem.
Don’t ask, Don’t tell.
Shame is the silencer on the gun.
Society’s quiet reaction
The most common reaction people have to seeing a kid getting smacked in a parking lot or a woman getting smacked on the subway can be typified by the social concept of people as innocent bystanders. People are hesitant to get involved, interfere, for a variety of reasons including the long standing tradition of not intervening in other people’s domestic lives. Domestic issues are off-limits. No-go zones.
Apparently, it can take a village to raise a child well, but only one or two people to really screw it up.
Society does not have the luxury to assume that the consequences of childhood abuse will remain as hidden (wouldn’t that be easier?) as the acts themselves.
The consequences of child abuse range from post-traumatic stress disorder to other behavioural problems, which often go undiagnosed. These children are strung up between the silence of not telling and the silence of not getting help. It’s not a topic that comes up easily at the dinner table, the skateboard park or math class.
The main stream press did report on a few cases of child abuse and neglect this month; when and if cases ever do go public. Such as a young mother and father arrested after they refused to admit their severely malnourished child to Sick Kid’s hospital in Toronto for treatment,
or the case of a man and woman charged with assault on a 10-month old baby boy after he was taken to Sick Kid’s with skull fractures and numerous other new and old injuries.
The media, though, acted more as a place to express individual outrage to isolated incidents rather than collective action to a social problem.
Presumptions of innocence and guilt
I would not go so far as to claim our unwillingness to discuss this issue is tantamount to our personal or social acceptance. I think this awkward, shame-filled silence is a symptom and not the problem in and of itself.
But just because something is hard to talk about does not mean you don’t talk about it.
Child abuse is a multi-faceted problem experienced differently by different communities and contains disgusting "isms" such as sexism and classism, nevermind racism and homophobia, substance abuse, poverty and homelessness and a socio-economic structure that is far better at tearing families apart than supporting them.
A child is part of a larger family unit, a larger social network and a larger community.
Child abuse is linked to sexism and patriarchal familial relations and social conceptions. While the link between domestic violence against woman and rates of child abuse (including the effect of childhood exposure to violence) have been confirmed and reported on in 2008 by the Canadian Center for Justice Statistics, the link is not greatly understood elsewhere.
Our society projects the usual presumption of innocence on children in cases of abuse. As with the issue of child poverty, children are seen as the innocent victims in and of themselves (even though some conservatives may still blame their parents) since it is hard to make the argument today that children are born into poverty and violence as a consequence of Original Sin.
The problem here is that while very few people will look at a severely beaten child and wonder what the child did that was so wrong to deserve such a fate, present people with the case of a twenty-one year old woman (or forty-one year old woman) with the exact same bruises, and some will still wonder what she did to deserve it – was she lippy and disrespectful, was she caught cheating, did she let the dinner go cold?
More often than not, with abuse, as a child often suffers in silence, women suffer in silence, too.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
