Dialogue: Brutality in the home to blame for brutal society

Violence by parents, no matter how benevolent the motive, must inevitably lead to violent communities,
writes JEFFREY MASSON*.

We have lived in New Zealand now for just over a year. Coming from one of the most violent countries in the world, the United States, to one of the least violent, and thinking about the material I am collecting for my book Why I Choose to Live in New Zealand, I began thinking about violence, and the sources of violence.

I am also researching a book about the killing of mental patients by psychiatrists in Germany during the Second World War, so I have been thinking a great deal about what makes a whole society not just violent but tolerant of violence.

How did the Germans get to be a country of bystanders, witness to one of the great, if not the greatest, crimes in history?

The famous Swiss psychologist Alice Miller (who, like me, abandoned psychoanalysis because of its denial of child abuse), takes the view in her many books that children who are regularly hit and humiliated turn into adults who tolerate brutality either in themselves or in others.

The mystery is why some children, when beaten, learn to beat others in turn as they grow up, yet others vow never to lay a hand on another human in anger and stick to that admirable resolution for the rest of their lives. It is the puzzle that lies at the heart of psychology.

One child is brutalised at home and grows up to brutalise his own children. It makes simple psychological sense. We are what we learn, and we are especially sensitive to lessons that take place when we are very young, on our most sacred and most private space, our own bodies.

There is nothing quite like being forced to stand still or bend over to be hit by somebody more powerful than you. No one is genuinely unaffected by this cruelty.

What about, then, those abused children who grow up to fight in the struggle against violence, who dedicate their lives to seeing to it that others never have to experience the shame and degradation that they remember so vividly from their own childhood?

Selma Fraiberg, a psychoanalyst from San Francisco, dedicated her life to determining the answer to this question, and many years ago came up with the best answer I have seen so far.

The children who were beaten and remembered it, and thought about it consciously, were the ones who vowed never to do this to their children. The ones who repeated the violence in their own families when they became adults were the ones who could not remember the pain, or could not talk about what had happened to them.

Repression might be a useful - who wants to remember awful things? But forgetting exacts a high price.

Even more expensive, though, is the original violence. We would never have to repress such experiences if we never had them.

The blame for a violent society must be placed squarely where it belongs - parental violence in the home, no matter how benevolent the motive.

You cannot teach peace by violent means. Happiness cannot come from fear, shame, anger, rage and hatred.

It is encouraging to know that New Zealanders are considering taking the vital step of making hitting children illegal.

Dr Emma Davies, in her Dialogue article, made crucial points in support of this, not least that we now have evidence of the harmful consequences of violence against children.

And the Institute of Public Policy's Building Tomorrow initiative is exactly what can make a difference - practical, everyday steps we can all take (www. buildingtomorrow.org.nz).

But there remains considerable denial of the damage done by parental violence and even denial of the fact that hitting children is violent. Calling hitting "smacking" might help parents to feel better about what they are doing and about what happened to them as children.

But do small children understand that being hurt by the very adults on whom they are dependent is okay because it's called smacking and is for their own good?

Andrew Davies, in a Dialogue response to Emma Davies, provided wonderful examples of the human capacity for denial and distortion of reality when stating that his daughter asked to be hit rather than continue with non-violent disciplining.

One has to wonder whether his daughter really asked for it. Alternatively perhaps, this man has a distorted memory of events.

He goes on to claim that child abuse is the result of the welfare state. But torture of children by their parents has been documented from earliest antiquity, and is especially clear in the 19th century.

Sigmund Freud first took the idea that childhood is formative for adults from his experience of how often - surprisingly often - children were beaten or in other ways traumatised and how deep were the scars such violence left in the lives of the children.

Thinking clearly and calmly in this area can, it seems, be difficult for some. But it's essential that we try.

Begin with answering this one: why should it be illegal for me to hit an Act parliamentary candidate because I don't like what he is doing but legal for me to hit my two young children?

* Jeffrey Masson, a native of California, lives in Auckland.