MosesWrites

Violence

“A shower of terrific slaps on both sides of the head,” threat fulfilled, “diabolical violence,” a father beats his young son’s young wife: over the past two weeks I read Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights, two amazing 19th century novels I’ve missed until now. 

To rear children, orphans, to care and cajole: I couldn’t help pause at the overwhelming violence—the casual, the emotionally abusive, the outright vindictive violence—that animates both novels, the above from Emily Brontë’s classic.

Have we become kinder and gentler since the early 1800s?

With corporal punishment abandoned in education, and rather rarely mentioned in circles of polite parenting, school leaders don’t discuss violence with much regularity. Beyond safeguarding, which tends toward abhorrent abuse and exploitation, and which acts as a response as much as a preemption, we otherwise default to a sense that children live peaceful, tranquil lives.

Since the Enlightenment, the philosopher Michel Foucault argues in his classic Discipline and Punish, public, theatrical violence dissipates, secretes. Differently pernicious, savvier, we surveil, we pursue carceral management. Prisons civilize impulses of correction; we needn’t public executions. Schools have followed, as institutions, and in practice. We don’t rap the knuckles of an unruly child, or brandish a belt after bare buttocks; we have the time-out chair.

Yet for all the insidiously quieter forms of power Foucault highlights, physical violence still resonates across the centuries.

We know bullies most often suffered bullying themselves; we speak of wellness and safe spaces. Even in the most extreme moments of anti-snowflake cultural cant, to decry actual violence crosses all spectrums. The protest of bombs dropped on children must remain peaceful, and elections distinguish the democratic west. We forgo coups or kidnapping (despite the best efforts of 6 January patriots). Only when the righteous overthrow the rogue do we capture or assassinate of heads of state.

In schools, raising children, do we have more local contradictions to explore?

I write as a mother chides her fourth or fifth grade son for poor performance on his math exercises, seated next to me at a Shanghai café, on the fourth day of the five-day May Day holiday.

When I speak with high school seniors, to prepare them for college, the statistics of sexual assault and relational violence amongst undergraduates haunt my words. Between twenty and thirty percent of women experience sexual assault, more if we use the broader term “intimate partner violence.” Up to fifty percen report psychological abuse.
 
Young men perpetrate this violence, this abuse, this manipulation and control. Who educates them? 

Debates rage, from “boys will be boys” (who remembers Brock Turner from Stanford) to the empowerment of “me too.” Sill, I’m not sure much has changed in the way we teach children. Micro aggressions endure, and macro ones, too.

Other than the rare, genuine sociopath, I wager violence gets learned. Parents model it, families familiarize it. Perhaps some comes from porn or pop culture but by hunch I suggest an older cousin, a teammate, or a coach, has vastly more influence than a rap song or a video game.

Violence may emerge from play, from a sense of vulnerability and self-defense, a fulfilling exertion of power—as I observe with young children. We correct: be nice! No hitting! Gentle with you little brother.

UNICEF reports that “1.6 billion children (2 in 3) regularly face violent punishment at home; more than two thirds are subjected to both physical punishment and psychological aggression.” 

Headline news, I’ve not read recently.

As one of the lucky one out of three, having had a generally violence-free childhood, with just the most incidental, typical emotional trauma to contend with, I feel visceral sadness in these statistics.

Ought this occupy front-and-center conversations amongst educational and school leaders? 

From experience, I find that one person’s violence often gets masked as another person’s “strict discipline” or means to “toughen up” a wayward child.

How hard can you push—say in training—before it becomes assaultive? I remember charges filed against a US football coach when extreme training killed some boys. The internet has many stories of these young deaths. 

I’m not naïve to an untenable kumbaya world, especially given the fantastic, daily violece states sanction and perpetrate around the world. Nevertheless, I hope we can have a bit more honest and frank discussion, at least in schools. We all have anger, we all need to manage power over others, we all ought to guide our charges to flourish with freedom rather than falter in fear.

What can we do in schools, in our work with faculty and families, to moderate these enormous challenges?