Talk:Child abuse
The problem with this "definition" is that it leaves out things that are done by parents who falsely believe they are to the child's good: a parent refusing to vaccinate a child because the parent is a Christian Scientist doesn't benefit from this refusal, for example.
For that matter, is it abuse to tell a child to "tough it out" or "be a man" in response to bullying? Again, the parent doesn't benefit, and thinks s/he is doing what's best for the child.
At some point, this may become as objective as Newton's laws of motion, but we aren't there yet. Vicki Rosenzweig
the parent doesn't benefit
The type of behavior you describe is neglect and the parent benefits from it since limiting your losses / costs (the essence of neglect) is a form of benefit. That's why I made neglect the first example of child abuse in the article.
The problem with this "definition" is that it leaves out things that are done by parents who falsely believe they are to the child's good
Actually, the only problem with the definition is that it doesn't emphasize (but leaves implicit) the fact that there is an objective standard of 'good', independent from what the parents think is the child's good.
People who have bought into anthropologists / ethnologists / historians' extreme cultural relativism (ie, there are no objective moral standards) don't think that there are objective measures of 'the child's good'. And though the same problem (child abuse denial) exists in psychology, it isn't as bad. But yeah, there are objective standards of the child's good. The simplest and most easily accepted include:
- neglect of basic needs are never in the child's good
- physical punishment of any kind (including spanking) is never in the child's good
Now, if you want to look at psychological fitness instead of mere physical fitness, then you need a definition of an emotionally well-adjusted (healthy) personality. The definition is this:
A healthy personality is one that is rational and empathic in the widest possible range of situations and circumstances.
By definition, rationality and empathy are things to be prized. In moral philosophy, both rationality and empathy are taken as axioms. Actually, more than axioms since they're what make it possible to even talk about morality. They're so basic that most moral philosophers don't even consciously recognize their importance, yet no serious moral theory (one that doesn't just assume all of its conclusions as axioms) can work without them.
If you don't want to take rationality and empathy as axiomatic, then you can start with the definition of physical fitness:
A healthy person is one that can function in the widest possible range of physical situations and circumstances.
Then you change 'physical' to 'psychological'. Then you have to empirically measure what makes people psychologically fit. If you do that, you find out that empathy and rationality are it. You can know what group of people is healthy because when surrounded by others of their kind, healthy people do not suicide. Whereas, even when surrounded by their own kind, unhealthy people have a high tendency to kill each other, suicide and perform other destructive behaviors. And that's not even talking about the instability of unhealthy societies to contact with alien mentalities.
So for example, a personality that goes catatonic, suicidal or self-destructive outside of a very narrow set of circumstances (eg, an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe) is not healthy. So hunter-gatherer primitives do not have healthy personalities, so their childrearing is abusive, and so their culture is inferior.
There is at least one other way to define good child rearing. The functional definition is:
Good child-rearing is based on 100% empathy at all times, and contains no projection or reversal whatsoever.
This definition has many advantages. It also has quite a few disadvantages. -- ark
- The simplest example of child abuse is neglect, where the child's parent(s) refuses to perform those tasks necessary to the well-being of the child.
Inverting the possessive. I like it!
By the way, the repetition compulsion is not mere learned habit as the article makes it seem. Granted, there's a lot of learned habit in child abuse, and that can be unlearned. But there's also much more fundamental stuff (repressed emotions and unassimilated experiences) which needs to be worked out in therapy. -- Ark
Does this Columbine statement belong here? That is, is it child abuse if children do it to other children? --rmhermen
To the second question: Yes! And not just because abusive children are typically victims of abusive adults. Nor even because adults are usually complicit in the abusive activity in some way. No, it's child abuse for the simple reason that the statement "children can't be abusers" is utterly absurd.
I'm actually against the reference on the grounds that it's an Americanism; irrelevant to anyone outside of the USA. I've never heard of children shooting other children outside of the USA. Because 1) only the USA has such a prevalence of guns, and 2) only the USA has such an irresponsible media that rewards psychopaths and serial killers. -- Ark
- Sierra Leone. Or do children who are part of armies not count? Vicki Rosenzweig
This is non-NPOV:
- On the other hand, committed child abusers rarely see their actions as abusive, even when these actions are widely condemned by society. Like other such divisive subjects, the controversy exists not because of uncertainty on the subject but because of emotional investment. Child abusers have an enormous emotional investment in not accepting themselves as such.
Controversy does exist because of uncertainty on the subject, not just emotional investment. It also insinuates that anyone who disagrees with the author's opinions on what constitutes child abuse must be a child abuser, whose disagreement with the author is solely that they won't accept themselves as an abuser. -- SJK
Then you have a bizarre definition of "uncertainty". I assure you, child psychologists, pediatrists and other such are very certain that beating infants is abusive. The typical parent is likewise just as certain that their "style" of parenting (whether or not it's abusive) is the right thing to do. Usually because they were raised that way by their parents who were raised that way by their grandparents and so on presumably all the way back to the Stone Age. -- Ark