Child Abuse Is Domestic Violence
Feminists make simplistic assumptions about the way the world operates. Women good, men bad. “Bigger” means “stronger” and “bully”, hence it follows that men are bad, and there is no rational argument that can change the minds of feminists. Any attempt to refute feminist fictions will be taken personally, and only serves to reinforce their perception that men are nasty and the primary perpetrators of dv. Why is this? Why do feminists make the latter association between size and violence? Perhaps one reason might be that feminists are bigger than children, and that there is something about being bigger and a bully that resonates with their own impulses.
Another problem with reasoning with feminists is that they see everything from their own level. If feminist women perceive men as brutes, then this is because it resonates with their experiences in the choices that they’ve made in men, and so amidst their blatant lies, there will lie some tiny nuggets of truth. In order to tackle the domestic violence industry properly, we need to provide a perspective that resonates with their subjective experiences. This is where the reality of child abuse comes in. We have to speak in terms that feminists can understand, from a perspective that they will have more difficulty refuting:
Children good, mummy bad
This article explores the connection between child abuse and domestic violence.
Basic facts
Here are some simple facts:
- Every adult abuser/victim was once a child;
- For millenia, most children have been raised by one or two parents;
- Throughout history, the primary nurturer has tended to be the mother.
These simple facts have implications within the context of a solid theoretical framework. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into the theory in any detail. For those who are interested, I discuss this alternative approach, which provides the foundation for my analysis, in detail in various publications (my book, Sanity’s Insanity, and articles in journals). And though I don’t spell it out in my previous article, The wage gap myth is hazardous to men’s health, it nonetheless provides the basis for my reasoning there, too. As compelling as this theory is, it is not a prerequisite for understanding the rest of this article… the only requirement is common sense.
When your mother is a wolf
But first, just a brief outline of how the theory relates to child abuse…
We know that when we domesticate animals, such as cats and dogs, they develop personalities that we can relate to. Their behaviour is very different to what it would be like if they were feral. What is happening is that they are making choices from the options that we give them, in much the same way that we make choices from the options provided by our culture. They make these choices with the mind-body that they are endowed with, and their genetic/biological constitutions predispose them to making interpretations based on whether they are a cat or a dog. To put it simply, for the purpose of this article, a domesticated animal is an agent of human culture, just as a human is, but because it has a non-human mind-body, it will not behave as a human does, and it will not engage with the culture as a human does.
And what happens when we reverse this scenario? What happens when an infant is raised by wolves? The answer is that it becomes a feral child. And just as cats and dogs imperfectly imitate human culture when they are domesticated, so too, human infants imperfectly imitate lupine culture when they are raised by wolves instead of being eaten by them. In terms of chaos theory, we might say that the primary nurturer provides the “initial conditions” that set much of a child’s behavioural trajectory into adulthood.
John McCrone (1993) observes that the behavior of feral children has much in common with the behavior of the wild animals that raised them – for example, their lack of memory and self awareness. Even the voices of people are, like background noises such as the rumbling of distant traffic, without meaning to them. These ideas relate to how the brain self-organizes into functional specializations (cerebral cortex, medulla, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus and so on), and the cutting edge work of Norman Doidge is relevant. That is to say, a feral child’s brain has a functional structure (brain map) that is very different to that of a child properly engaged with human culture.
It therefore follows that the primary nurturer will play a particularly crucial role in providing the sort of environment – the initial conditions – that first start to “wire the brain” (not to mention the question of initial conditions before birth, in the mother’s womb).
The schizophrenogenic mother
With the influence of liberalism and feminism since the 1960s, it has become unfashionable to apportion blame to women, much less mothers, for anything. And so the notion of the schizophrenogenic mother (holding a mother responsible for the schizophrenia of her child) experienced an inevitable falling out with the psychological establishment. It is certainly politically incorrect to entertain anything along these lines.
Given that the topic of schizophrenogenic mothers is now certified taboo, what hope do we have for reason to enter the domestic violence controversy? Nonetheless, authors who have not been briefed on the protocols of political correctness – for example, less sophisticated (read… “less indoctrinated”) authors from Russia – do sometimes broach topics that are taboo in the west. In her analysis of patterns of behaviour profiled by criminologists of perpetrators who imprison and sexually abuse their victims (with particular reference to Josef Fritzl, Viktor Mokhov, Aleksandr Komin and Wolfgang Priklopil), Galina Sapozhnikova observes that the perpetrators all had authoritarian mothers:
- Surprisingly, Fritzl, Mokhov, Priklopil and Komin are similar in both history and profession. They were all crazy about their mothers, grew up without fathers and were beaten in childhood. All their mothers were strong women. Fritzl’s mother kicked her husband out and Mokhov’s mother controlled who Mokhov brought home in the evenings even when he was 53. Priklopil was also close to his mother.
Among the worst of these crimes, that of Josef Fritzl, references to his abusive mother are well documented. For example, writing for the UK Independent, Tony Paterson observes that:
- …there was a hint of a different and more complex picture – one of the monster as victim, brutally abused almost daily by his own mother as he was growing up in what was then part of the Nazi-controlled Third Reich.
Should we be surprised? With reference to reliable sources, Ann Coulter poses the self-explanatory question-and-answer, “Victim of a crime? Thank a single mother!” And as fatherhood advocates such as Stephen Baskerville have long established, fatherlessness is correlated with high crime rates and anti-social behaviour. And so I propose a new perspective, a new way of understanding domestic violence. That is, from a semiotic or systems theory perspective, might there be something in the behaviour and values of some (single) mothers that encourages, or even induces, criminality? After all, if wolves can induce wolf-like perspectives in an infant being raised by them, does it not follow that a primary nurturer will have the greatest impact on the sorts of values that a child carries into adulthood, especially in the absence of a second parent?
Let us weave these disparate observations into a theoretical framework. Semiotics, within the context of systems theory, provides the theoretical background on which I have been basing my own work. This is an important line of reasoning that several researchers working in biology and the life sciences have been looking to in order to supplant genetic determinism. Let’s take a closer look at domestic violence from a systems theory perspective. Most of the rest of this article is excerpted from my book, Sanity’s Insanity.
DV – THE BIG PICTURE
Mothers motivating sons
On Australian Sixty Minutes (subject Human Bombs 19 August 2001), a Palestinian woman declared, raising her voice, trying to convince the ignorant westerner, who just didn’t seem to “get it”, that she wants her son to die, to become a hero for the Arab cause – as the camera panned across to the innocent face of a little boy not even into his teens.
In The Australian newspaper (15 November 2005), Natalie O’Brien’s front-page headline reads “Mum’s permission needed for terror plan.” Quoting from evidence before Sydney’s Central Local Court, spiritual leader Abdul Nacer Benbrika is quoted as saying, “Some people claim to love jihad but don’t respect their own parents… You need permission from your parents to go to jihad. If your mother says no to jihad, then no jihad.” Two days later, Mazen Touma (alleged to have been training for jihad) asked for his mother’s permission to undertake jihad. Her response did not appear in the police evidence, and she refused to speak to the media.
- [We need to introduce a bit of theory here, which is covered more thoroughly in my book - Woman’s role within the context of culture relates to sustaining the known, whereas Man’s role within the context of culture is as the dynamic agent of change. Men are the producers of variety and women are the filters of variety]
Thus is the power of mother over son. The sustainer of the known provides the framework to which a boy will refer in his transition into manhood. The sustainer of the known will provide the goals and standards that boys and men will feel obligated to uphold and carry out. The matriarchy provides the basis for the cultural known around which the producers of variety will gravitate and test the limits. Many of us might remember a wisdom of old that is now regarded as quaint and old-fashioned… the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. Within the context of this new theoretical base, though, perhaps it is not so far-fetched. Maybe we no longer rock babies in cradles, so perhaps we should coin a new phrase to suit our zeitgeist:
The hand that abuses baby is the hand that ruins the world.
THE OPPRESSION OF CHILDREN
- [My book examines infanticide, where the Gendercide Watch website notes that “Infanticide is a crime overwhelmingly committed by women, both in the Third and First Worlds.”]
We’ve already seen how women are the primary perpetrators of infanticide. Let us shed some more light on the role of men and women in the abuse of children.
From Child Maltreatment 2002, a document published by the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States, women comprised 58.3% of the perpetrators of child abuse and men comprised 41.7% (Figure 5-1 of the Child Maltreatment Report and accompanying Table 5-1, Age and Sex of Perpetrators). Most of the abuse of children (Table 5-3 of the Child Maltreatment Report) was broken down as follows:
- 53.3% of all perpetrators neglected children;
- 11.0% of all perpetrators physically abused children;
- 6.9% of all perpetrators sexually abused children.
Women were more likely to neglect children, while men were more likely to abuse children. 32.6% of child fatalities were perpetrated by the mother acting alone, while 16.6% of child fatalities were perpetrated by the father acting alone (Figure 4-2 of the Child Maltreatment Report, Fatalities by Perpetrator Relationship). That is to say:
- Approximately twice as many mothers as fathers are responsible for the fatalities of their children.
Why does the fact that women are the primary abusers of children seem to surprise many of us? After all, it is already well established that:
- Infanticide and Munchausen’s syndrom by proxy are crimes overwhelmingly perpetrated by women.
The high representation of women in the abuse statistics is usually attributed to the fact that because women are the primary caretakers of children, they spend the most time with children, and so it follows that women are more likely to abuse children. It is thus implied, at least from a feminist perspective, that women’s nurturing responsibilities ameliorate the abuse perpetrated by women against children. But this perspective is ignorant of systems theory. From a systems-theoretical perspective, one should realize that little boys and girls grow up to become men and women. What goes around comes around. That is, the nurturers of today have a direct hand in creating the abusers of tomorrow.
If we applied exactly the same feminist “logic” to reason that men’s provider responsibilities ameliorate the abuse perpetrated by men against women, then we’d have to doubt that anyone, least of all the feminists, would be receptive to such an argument.
Of course not all abused children go on to become abusive adults, but the point is that abusive primary nurturers have a direct hand in how our cultures evolve. And whether or not an abused child goes on to become an abuser is quite a different question to whether or not they have actually liberated themselves from the culture of their early childhood. In other words, is the mindset of a victim really all that different to the mindset that spawned abuse? But this takes us into topics of philosophy and phenomenology, well beyond the scope of this article.
A systemic perspective would recognize that a mother raising a child is in a power relationship that is culturally sanctioned. Contemporary demographic and political changes notwithstanding, the reality is that women continue to be the primary nurturers of children. They are more exposed to the opportunity to abuse children. But nurturing her children is a mother’s responsibility, it’s her job. She can either act responsibly, or she can abuse her power. What goes around comes around. When mothers abuse children, with the predisposition to abuse boys more, then they play their part in creating the abusers that come around to abuse another day. This is Systems Theory, a theory that connects the abuses that go around with the culture that comes around to impact on all our lives.
The neglect of child abuse
How has this come to pass that women are the primary abusers of children, yet the dv industry continues to persist with the myth of men as the primary abusers of both women and children? How are they getting away with this? Here’s a part of the reason:
- Children do not get in our faces. They don’t know how to raise our conscious awareness regarding their plight. They don’t go on marches to take back the night.
- Children do not form lobby groups to influence politicians. They do not write to newspapers to voice outrage in the media at the injustices perpetrated against them by their primary abuser.
- Children don’t know how to assert their rights. They don’t know how to seek protection in dv shelters;
- Children don’t know when they are being abused.
Abused children must bear their pain in silence, because when they no longer have their parents to protect them, they have no way of being heard.
The last bullet point, though, is of particular significance because it relates to how it is that we acquire our understanding of the world, and why the primary nurturer is so important. That is, it is impossible to realize that you are being abused, if this is “just” the way the world is, or, if you believe that you “deserve” the punishment. In other words, there are a lot of abused children who will never be identified as abused because they don’t realize that they were abused. This makes child abuse especially pernicious and intractable.
The importance of the primary nurturer
Ultimately, what we can conclude is that the mother’s role is not that of trivial, helpless bystander. Child abuse, whether by neglect or by physical/sexual abuse, often results in child fatalities and in this, we see that the mother’s role is far from trivial. Feminists keep reminding us of the higher, more noble purpose of Woman as nurturer. Let us not take this away from them. But let us hold them to account when they do stuff up.
Mothers can’t have it both ways… they can’t portray themselves as devoted, moral, loving, courageous nurturers of children and then deny their responsibilities if their children become anti-social, promiscuous, irresponsible misfits, drug-addicts and abusers. The primary nurturer has a responsibility for establishing the terms according to which a dependent child learns to negotiate their culture.
CONCLUSION
Regardless of what the statistics show regarding domestic violence between adults, which partner is the victim and which one is the oppressor, it is a serious, negligent ommission to ignore the domestic violence directed against children. Child abuse is not separate to domestic violence… it is a part of the same environment, the same system, and the same patterns of behaviour. Child abuse is part of a family’s sub-culture. In any discussion on domestic violence, ignoring the children presents an incomplete, partial picture of the domestic violence situation, because it does not address the causes of domestic violence. The causes of domestic violence? If we were forced to commit to a best answer, would we not be inclined to say that it begins and ends with the primary nurturer, regardless of whether that primary nurturer is male or female, human or non-human? It is the children that carry into their adulthood and our future, the patterns of behaviour that are first learned from their primary nurturer. And we all know that for millenia to this day, the primary nurturer is still most likely to be the mother.
Of course this is not about blaming women, for ultimately we are all in this together. But feminists believe that they can overturn in less than 50 years that which has existed for the millenia of human history. The reality is that women have always enjoyed their authority as matriarchs who knew what they wanted and how to get it. In accordance with natural law, they have always had their part to play in the ever-evolving cultural zeitgeist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Administration for Children and Families. Child Maltreatment Annual Reports (1995 to 2004). Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C. Child Maltreatment 2001 report downloaded from: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/index.htm (accessed June 28, 2009)
- Coulter, Ann. Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America. Crown Forum, 2009.
- Doidge, Norman. The Brain that Changes Itself. Scribe Publications, 2008:
http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html (accessed June 28, 2009) - Feral Children website – http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php (accessed June 28, 2009)
- Gendercide Watch website – http://www.gendercide.org/ (accessed March 2003).
- Jarosek, Stephen. Sanity’s Insanity: Applying semiotics to understand the hidden world of mind, culture and gender roles – http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/sanitys-insanity-applying-semiotics-to-understand-the-hidden-world-of-mind-culture-and-gender-roles/828275
- McCrone, John. The Myth of Irrationality – The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star Trek. Macmillan London, 1993.
- O’Brien, Natalie. Mum’s Permission Needed for Terror Plan. The Australian, November 15, 2005.
- Paterson, Tony. Josef Fritzl: The making of a monster. The Independent, May 3, 2008:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/josef-fritzl-the-making-of-a-monster-820370.html (accessed June 28, 2009). - Sapozhnikova, Galina. Russian and Austrian sex maniacs share shocking similarities. KP.RU, June 25, 2008:
http://www.kp.ru/daily/24119/341715/ (accessed June 28, 2009) - 60 Minutes Australia, reporter Richard Carlton. Human Bombs. Channel 9, August 19, 2001.
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