Before:
My intended writing style is going to be a pro-con way of explaining the rights and wrongs of child abuse. I want to look at each argument and then explain which one I feel more passionately about and why. My directed audience is my reader who is going to be peer-editing this paper. I would like for them to get a feel of that I do care about my writing, that I am stating my points in my paper and that it is intriguing enough to follow along. I would like to also eliminate my technique of using humor in my paper, and try to have a more serious tone when discussing my topic of child abuse. I want to be able to write in many different styles.
Brock Kawana
Professor Harrison
English 101
16 March 2009
A Stab in the Back
In Diane Ackerman’s book “A Natural History of the Senses” she explains the conditional learning of comfort from our mother as soon as we are born, “The first emotional comfort, touching and being touched by our mother, remains the ultimate memory of selfless love, which stays with us life long.” (79)
In my own life I have been lucky enough to have been supported and loved by a family. It is a part of life that I appreciate and know that everybody is not as blessed with. Going off of Ackerman’s quote, my mother is the one I go to when I need comforted or loved. I believe it is a natural feeling just born within me. We are with our mother before we are even born, growing, feeding, and living inside of her to create our own life. In my own experience, I have come to the realization that no matter how much I was angry with my mother, disappointed, betrayed, frustrated, and embarrassed. She was always the one I would still go back to and still have an unconditional love for. I knew that she would always be there for me, no matter how bad I had screwed up.
I was brought up in a house that did not abuse their children. I am not saying that I lived in a meadow with daisies and bunnies hopping around where the sun never stopped shining, in a perfect utopia. Or that I was the perfect angel of a child, sometimes I wondered why they are not beating my ass for the things I had done? My parents would just never physically intend to beat me into doing what was right in their minds and for that I show my full respect towards them. They got their point across through reverse psychology and making me think about what I had done through analyzing the problem. What if they had though? Would I be any different?
“In 1985 the notion of there being pros to child abuse seemed so farfetched that it was thought to be darkly humorous.” (Arnold)
To think that all this time when the so called morally correct thing to do was not beat the children, there could be pros to it? When I am to think about it without looking any research up on the pros of abusing children, what comes to my mind is the general ideas that seem obvious. The kids will then do what the abuser wants, by fear of getting hit. The parents then become the alpha human by showing their dominance in a more powerful way. The fact is I found much more astonishing research when I looked up the facts. Such as; abused children learn to judge easier when people around them are angrier because they have seen it before. (Grossman)
“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin studied eleven four and five year olds where some were abused and others were not. They had them sit down in a room and play video games. Then suddenly an argument would break out in the next room over of loud angry voices of two older students about a homework assignment. The argument was staged for the analysis of the four and five year old children. Both abused and non-abused children displayed a heart arousal. They developed sweaty palms and decelerated heart rates due to the angry voices in the next room. Once the fighting had ended, the heart rates of the non-abused children seemed to go back to normal while the abused children’s heart rates remained low. It seemed to be that none of the abused children could break their attention away from the other room, even after the argument had ended peacefully. They were in a constant fear.” (Grossman)
The constant fear of the abused children shows that they are waiting for the bad to happen. They associate the loud voices with anger which in turn means to them a beating should be coming anytime now. It is a form of conditional learning once again, loud voices + anger + heart rate going up = abuse is on its way.
At this point of my paper the reader may be asking themselves, “What about if you do not abuse your children, what can happen then?” I am here to tell the reader that I believe the pros much out weight the cons of this debate. A beating may give a child a quick fix of not to do it again, or a long term solution to be in a constant fear of, “I might get hit for this.” What if the child becomes adapt to it and just then expects to get beaten? They have outsmarted their own parents. It is underlying the parent’s authority by the child doing whatever it may please and knows that it will just take a beating and that will be the end of it. There will be no thinking about it, no learning from their mistakes, just throw a frozen bag of peas on their black eye and go do some more hell-raising.
I personally have seen the effects of what abuse can do to a person. I saw those very same people put their love, their trust into that person who had abused them. It is a stab in the back whether it is parents or a significant other. In most instances the abuser does not see the pain on the person’s face after the beating. The fact is that the person who is being hit wants to get away from them as fast as they can. I think that is where abusing children is wrong. If a child is to grow up with it, they will then never perceive it as being wrong. They will do onto their kids as they were done onto as well. Almost as if it were a fraternity of sorts, nobody wants to get hazed and they talk about how painful hazing is, but yet they go on and do it to their new pledges as well almost as redemption. It becomes a cycle through generation after generation.
When I think of an abused child, it is more along the lines of an infant child. That would ignorant thinking, who is to say older children do not get abused as well? It is something that the parents might do for the child’s entire life, physically and emotionally. Another common theory is that it builds character and strength. My own personal belief of that statement is; that is bullshit. Character and strength would be more projected towards a child who is learning from what he has done wrong, asking their self, “What did I do wrong?”
Parents are building the world around us every day. These kids are going to grow up one day and become part of the “real world”. A parent should help their child, guide them down the right path, and let them become independent at the same time like a mother bird and her young. Once they are ready to leave the nest, they have learned everything they need to in life.
After:
I believe I portrayed my ideas of how I feel about child abuse well enough for the reader to understand. I feel as though I could have expanded more on some topics and took more time on my paper. I believe I am cutting down on the word you more often; it is a bad habit to use it. Also I thought my tone as the author of this paper was more serious instead of comical.
