‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’ :Time to truly love children, and stop beating them
Disciplining children without resorting to the rod, the cane, or other forms of corporal or emotional abuses is a topic that has to be addressed often to disabuse the minds of abusers whose only standards for correcting behaviour is to inflict physical and emotional pain.
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I cannot recount the absurd reasons I hear whenever discussing – on radio or TV - the issues of discipline in schools with panels of people who should know better than hurt children.
The most abusive one, the one that has become the default mantra or excuse-in-chief, for beating up children, is the cheap Old Testament quotation, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Many adult abusers stand ever ready to throw “the first stones” without ever stopping to “remove the mote” from their own eyes, in terms of society’s own contribution to the overall indiscipline and poverty we see today.
Child abuse in the Bible
Throughout history, children have been subjected to domination, murder, abandonment, incarceration, mutilation, beatings, and forced labour – to name some examples from the litany of child maltreatment. Many practices we know today to be brutal and senseless were entirely in keeping with the ethos of the past, but unfortunately some still persist.
Some of the ideas that promote the abuse of children are from the Bible. Two famous examples of the widespread killing of children were those ordained by the pharaoh at the time of the birth of Moses (Old Testament), and by Herod (New Testament) when the birth of Jesus was foretold to him. For goodness sake, if kings themselves couldn’t locate Moses or Jesus, why must children suffer?
Another one, King Ahaz, was cited also for barbarous behaviour. He “burnt incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and burnt his children in the fire” for ritual sacrifice [2 Chron. 28:3]. Such crap set the grounds for child beatings later on, as massacres were commemorated during the Middle Ages in Europe by the whipping of children on Innocent’s Day.
When Jesus himself resorted to the whip, it was not against children; it was against the crooks who had turned the temples into “dens of thieves”. Societal hypocrisies tend to be a bit much. Are the naughty children the culprits who put the ghost names on the nation’s payroll, paid out dubious judgement debts, collected bribes for judges, or propounded obscene ex-gratias for officials already much better than the people they profess to serve? Children need good sanitation, water, and toilet facilities in the public schools. Until such time that these basic human necessities are provided, they’d better be left alone!
Emotive reasons for child abuse run the gamut from anger to moral outrage, resulting sometimes in the injury to a child in the course of an overzealous disciplinary spanking of a small and helpless person by someone bigger and stronger. The historical tendency to view children as one’s property still persists to some extent.
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Sadistic teachers
In our Christian middle school, it was not uncommon to “lay” pupils by whipping their bare backs openly during morning assemblies. The reason might be truancy, avoiding worship or cutting classes to go to the cinema. I remember a particular boy – nicknamed “Bo gya gu” (To wit: Spill blood) who used to be whipped so badly; but after the whipping, he would still rise to his feet, openly shake off the pain in protest. He won our admiration for his defiance, as we shouted in chorus “Bo gya gu”, in support of his fearlessness. That was a classic case of a sadistic teacher meeting a masochistic pupil. The end result was blood shedding, and how that can be part of education could be anyone’s gory guess!
Right in the neighbourhood, in the Zongo area, a Makaranta school fared no better. Standing on a pile of blocks, looking in from a small window, we could see children sprawled on the floor - with slates, pens and black ink - copying verses. At the four corners of the room stood staunch teachers carrying horsewhips which they executed freely when the children made mistakes or were inattentive. One of the students was later to enrol into our middle school, and you wouldn’t believe the scars embossed on his arms and legs from the horsewhips.
Creepy interpretations of religions, insidious native superstitions, and cold-blooded disgusting literacy and illiteracy of all shades breed some of the spookiest offenders clothed in holier-than-thou pretenses. Preconceived notions and fallacies are still held and propagated to this day. In parts of Africa, widespread poverty made children an economic liability, and were often abandoned, sold or mutilated to make them more piteous and effective beggars.
For the modern times, in lieu of the abusive, decrepit adage, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” the United Nations introduced a charter that cut across cultures, nationalities and religions; and it is emotionally binding. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) guarantees: 1. Rights of provision (adequate nutrition, health care, education, economic welfare); 2. Rights of protection (from abuse, neglect, violence, exploitation); and 3. Rights of participation (a voice in decisions affecting the child).
The UNCRC places an obligation on states to provide and protect these rights. Ghana was one of the first nations to have ratified it. It’s now time to practice what was signed to protect the children.
[Email: anishaffar@gmail.com]