An additional incentive may have been the possibility of reducing investment in teachers and teaching processes in a society committed to exemplary pedagogical process. The power of learning though witness, rather than direct exposure, must have easily demonstrated its merit in terms of best use of scarce resources 11 in minimising attrition in the schooling 12 process. Most people are convinced of this: the decision makers, who must feel able to predict the outcomes and therefore the responses of their constituencies with some measure of certainty (and what is more certain than obedience under duress?) and those decided for and about, who usually respond with more confidence and enthusiasm to the prospect of predictability (however torturous) than the off-chance of surprising delight. Caring and competent educators in every situation and role are therefore mandated, rewarded and recommended by society to commit violence (moderated, controlled, measured and restricted, but still violence) for the good of the child, for the good of society. These values could possibly be posited to have emerged from an experience or the archetypal memory of survival under threat, survival of the fittest, survival of the most compliant: the vital demand to adjust, qualify, prevail and survive – or die. Religious and moral literature of almost every institutionalised belief system presents a wealth of strictures and sanctions (in the sense of official permission) regarding violence against children, founded on a clear and explicitly articulated set of values. It also, of course, signifies rationales and motivations, expectations of benefits that outweigh costs, the beneficiaries and the investors/invested and certainly, if not obviously, those who (by design or default) decide these matters. Systemic violence presupposes a powerful, strategised institutional procedure that defines the targets, methodologies, processes and mechanisms, sanctions, normative and legal frameworks, limits and penalties. “Violence against a child” is to “Violence against Children” as “circumstantial” is to “regulated” The structures of our lives run on the assurance and threat of widespread repression – making us, common well-meaning people, the foremost and most efficient enforcers, as we are ourselves also the beneficiaries (of the status quo). The exclusion of children from the purview of the fully human validates and assures the entrenchment and perpetuation of similar systemic exclusion and casual disregard of many discriminated-against and oppressed groups that characterises global societies today. The seeds of tyranny and oppression must be sown early for the harvest to be bountiful. 9 This inevitably draws us to the conclusion that while child abuse and neglect may be, in terms of specificities and individual targets, the outcome of chance, it is somehow integral to our social structures. The moral and ethical grounds of justification, the cultural rationalisations, the socio-economic excuses for permitting child abuse and neglect to go unchecked 8 are innumerable, more creative and certainly more intensive than the efforts to eradicate the phenomenon. It is possible that a larger proportion of children are deliberately and avoidably abused or neglected today, both in large groups and as individuals, than ever before. ![]() 6 The impacts of these are so ingrained in the social psyche that they are invisible, “normalised”, even perceived as desirable. The phenomenon cuts across cultural, socio-economic and geo-political matrices, exhibiting only disturbing variations of form and manner – from the outright brutal and indeed pedaphobic 5 to a more insidious and general attitude of discounting, an ubiquitous belittling of the condition of childhood. 3 Even in those societies where material needs are assured, child abuse and neglect are common, 4 certainly common enough to warrant the United Nations Secretary General’s concern expressed in the initiation of a study of violence against children. Today, when there is the least excuse of ignorance or of overall unavailability of resources and means, and there is a fairly universal standard of norms, 2 child abuse and neglect are still not decreasing.
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