VIETNAM: Dramatic rise in child abuse cases

Disciplining children by striking or humiliating them has traditionally been a normal part of good parenting in Vietnam

HANOI, 29 August 2008 (IRIN) - When Tran Van De strikes his grandchildren, he says he does it out of love. "I know it hurts; it hurts me too," says the 68-year old retiree, a grandfather of four. "But it helps them become good citizens. That was the way I was taught when I was a child. It's not abuse. I love my grandchildren. How could I abuse them?"

In many countries, a parent hitting a child or leaving them in a house alone would be reported to the authorities. A social worker would be sent to investigate. The police might be summoned and child abuse charges could even be filed against the parent.

In Vietnam, this scenario would not happen. There is no accepted definition of "child abuse". There are no social workers. There are no specific laws against physical punishment, according to Duong Tuyet Mien, a professor at Hanoi Law University, and other experts in the field.

Disciplining children by striking or humiliating them has traditionally been a normal part of good parenting in Vietnam. It is a part of good teaching. Indeed, it would be irresponsible not to use physical punishment if a child misbehaved, according to parents interviewed by IRIN and authorities at the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA).

For complete article go here:

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=80059

The Threat of Christian Fascism is Hidden, but Very Real

For more on fascism:

American Fascists, The Christian Right and The War on America, by Chris Hedges
Kingdom Coming, by Michelle Goldberg
American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury by Kevin Philips
Reports on the web include:
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_edn14
http://www.theocracywatch.org/
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v19n3/clarkson_dominionism.html
http://www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.htm
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/1/5/155457/0298
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/12/0081322

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1419644386/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Amazon.com reviewer

Liars for Jesus

February 18, 2008
By Steven L. Roberts (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews

Liars for Jesus by Chris Rodda is one of the best written and most important books about contemporary American politics that I have read in years. The only problem with this book is that it was apparently published with the author's own money, making its availability somewhat limited. This book should be widely read and discussed, because it helps explain why the Christian Right seems so incomprehensibly loony to most of us who are not part of that movement, and, conversely, why they attack the rest of us with such unfettered zeal.

There has been a series of revisionist "history" books published since the end of WWII which give a "Christian" version of American history that attempts to paint the Founding Fathers and subsequent American culture in a way that is in agreement with contemporary Fundamentalism. We have now had a couple of generations of conservative Christians who have been buying into this version of history and reacting angrily to an America that assumes fundamental principals like the separation of church and state to be at the core of what America stands for.

Author Rodda systematically lists and then busts a series of myths that these spurious history books have generated. She leaves no stone unturned in doing so.

Things get really scary when she starts quoting Supreme Court opinions written by Rennquist, Thomas and Burger, and it becomes apparent that members of our highest court do not know the difference between real history and Fundamentalist wishful thinking.

The book is a fascinating study in how the desire for a different set of facts can, over time, morph into an alternative if deluded "reality".

My Comment:

There is an insidious clandestine effort underway driven by Christian fascists to polute the common person's understanding of American history and the part religion plays in that history. This is not merely the usual difference of interpretation that ethical historians normally write about. As Michelle Goldman explains in her book, "Kingdom Comming", what is dangerous is that a gradual shift has occurred so that what would have been unthinkable rubbish ten years ago is now embraced by the fascists as absolute truth.

Others, trained from childhood to follow authority blindly accept the lies as truth. Since kids in homeschools never encounter any other point of view they readily accept the lies. Which is exactly why their misbegotten parents sequester them in their sham schools.

Accordingly, this propaganda posing as history is being freely passed around over the Internet and incorporated in textbooks sold to the child abusers in charge of lying to their children. Revisionist history books by several different authors (David Barton, Peter Marshall, Mark A. Beliles (Author), and Stephen K. McDowell to name a few) are widely used in sham homeschools along with grossly distorted books on science that are teaching ID and creation myths and calling it science.

Parents do this because they trust the likes of James Dobson, Michael Ferris, Phylis Schafly, and Pat Robertson and they have no critical faculties. Dobson, the high priest of religious child abuse, insists the most important quality a child can have is obedience. According to him children are inherently incorrigible and they must be whipped to convince them to obey what they are told to do. These are the methods totalitarians use.

We know from engaging parents on public discussion forums how deranged these people are and how futile it is to try and hold an intelligent discussion with them. A constant retort is, "well that is your opinion", facts mean absolutely nothing. Their brains are reduced to a worthless pile of rotten cells that serve no function.

Child Militants in Pakistan Conned into Suicide

Boys of all ages are subject to exploitation at madrassahs, say child rights groups
PESHAWAR,
26 May 2008 (IRIN) - Authorities are investigating allegations that militants running some madrassas (Islamic schools) in Swat Valley, north-western Pakistan, are recruiting and training children as soldiers. According to local newspaper reports, the police are questioning six men accused of such offences.

The Swat Valley area, some 160km northeast from Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) capital Peshawar, has seen intense fighting between militants and government forces since November 2007.

However, an agreement was finalised on 21 May between representatives of the militants and government officials in NWFP, under which it is hoped peace will return to the area.

Shaukat Salim, the district coordinator of the Child Rights Committee (CRC) of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), an Islamabad-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), told IRIN that child militancy had been on the rise in the area.

Child militants caught

Salim said that about 25 to 30 madrassa students, aged between seven and 15, had been used by leaders of extremist outfits in Swat to carry out attacks. These children have been detained by security forces and are being held at Swat District Jail.

According to Salim, six others students from a madrassa in the Kabal tehsil (sub-district) have been apprehended by the police for their alleged involvement in an attempted suicide attack.

Salim also cited the story of Abid, 12, who he said had been forced to wear a suicide bomb jacket with which he was to blow up the district courts. He was also caught and is among those being held at Swat jail, Salim said.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78400

Corporal punishment key reason for school dropouts

For the complete story go to:

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=78275

LAHORE,
18 May 2008 (IRIN) - Quite often, Bilal Javed, 10, stands opposite the school he once attended and peers past the gates. An able pupil, who excelled at mathematics during his five years in school, Bilal misses lessons. But he has not been to school for four months and says he is "too scared" to venture through the entrance again.

Bilal's father, Asad Javed, 33, explained: "My son was good at his work and we were eager he gain an education. But one day he was beaten so badly by his science teacher, who hit him with a shoe, that he came home badly bruised and in great pain”.

“I had to give him a painkilling tablet so he could sleep," said Asad, who works as a cleaner.

The boy was punished for talking in class. He has, since then, refused to return and his parents say they are helpless.

"We want him to be educated, but we don't want him to be beaten up," said Bilal’s father, who himself went to school for only three years.

According to the Islamabad-based Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) advocating the rights of children, 35,000 high school pupils in Pakistan drop out of the education system each year due to corporal punishment.

Such beatings at schools are also responsible for one of the highest dropout rates in the world, which stands at 50 percent during the first five years of education, according to SPARC.

The Political Consequences of Child Abuse

Alice Miller
The Journal of Psycohohistory
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06_politic.html

In the lives of all the tyrants I examined, I found without exception paranoid trains of thought bound up with their biographies in early childhood and the repression of the experiences they had been through. Mao had been regularly whipped by his father and later sent 30 million people to their deaths, but he hardly ever admitted the full extent of the rage he must have felt toward his own father, a very severe teacher who had tried through beatings to "make a man" out of his son. Stalin caused millions to suffer and die because even at the height of his power his actions were determined by unconscious infantile fear of powerlessness. Apparently his father, a poor cobbler from Georgia, attempted to drown his frustration with liquor and whipped his son almost every day. His mother displayed psychotic traits, was completely incapable of defending her son and was usually away from home either praying in church or running the priest's household. Stalin idealized his parents right up to the end of his life and was constantly haunted by the fear of dangers that had long since ceased to exist but were still present in his deranged mind. The same might be true of many other tyrants. The groups of people they singled out for persecution and the rationalization mechanisms they employed were different in each case, but the fundamental reason behind it was probably identical. They often drew on ideologies to disguise the truth and their own paranoia. And the masses chimed in enthusiastically because they were unaware of the real motives, including those operative in their own biographies. The infantile revenge fantasies of individuals would be of no account if society did not regularly show such naive alacrity in helping to make them come true.

Comment:
Theists try to claim that atheist tyrants took more lives that Christian tyrants. Who can count up all the bodies on both sides? This article by Alice Miller probably comes closer to explaining the atrocities committed by communist tyrants, who were coincidentally atheists. Alice Miller is credited with being the first person to correctly identify the relationship between abused children and the abusers they go on to become. The entire article is noteworthy for original thinking and research.

Have we made much progress since 1880?

Jacob Middleton examines how the Victorians’ obsession with death extended to
terrifying their children in order to prepare them for the grave…

By Jacob Middleton
May 2007

In 1880, the philosopher Alex­ander Bain complained about the way in which Victorian society discip­lined its children. While he saw many meth­ods as ineffect­ual, he reserved his great­est hostil­ity to what he dubbed “spiritual, ghostly, or super­natural terrors”. 1 Bain was a rationalist, heavily influenced by the utilitarian philo­sophers of the early 19th century, and his hostil­ity towards what he regarded as super­stition is therefore hardly surprising. What disturbed him most, however, was not the nature of this means of disciplin­ing children, but its ubiquity; in a society that wished to regard itself as rational and modern, most children were frightened into quiescence by the threat of supernatural terrors.

The period in which Bain was writing was one in which corporal punishment of children at school and home was habitual and the treatment to which many children was subjected was considered, even then, to be cruel and demeaning. Moreover, super­natural retrib­ution had long been considered an accept­able means of disciplining children. In The History of the Fairchild Family, probably the most successful children’s book in Victorian Britain, death is painfully visited upon those who disobey parental authority. A child might find itself burnt to death for the sin of vanity, while
illicitly consuming preserved fruit would “merely” result in a near-fatal fever. 2 Such punishments were regarded as natural consequences of disobedience, a divine retribution.

You can read the rest of this fascinating article at:

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/commentary/443/pass_grade_in_passing_on.html

Media urged to play role for promoting child rights awareness

This article appears in the Pakistan Associated Press web site:

http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36879&Itemid=2

ISLAMABAD,
Apr 30 (APP): Media must play an active role in promoting awareness among people regarding child rights protection and human rights.

This was observed by the participants in a media consultation on Consequences of Corporal Punishment arranged by Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) held here on Wednesday.

The consultation was arranged to discuss the hazards, and alternatives to corporal punishment. The event began with a Song on Juvenile Justice produced by SPARC.

National Manager Promotion, SPARC, Ms. Fazila Gulrez briefed the participants about reasons and consequences of Corporal punishment.

Elaborating the causes, she said that the basic reason of these punishments are lack of education and awareness about the impact such punishments create on the mental growth of child.

As a result of punishment and physical abuses, children lose their interest in study and some times they adopt rebellious attitude which is a serious threat to their future.

In public schools, it has been observed that teachers use to behave harshly to make child more disciplined ignoring the consequences of such attitude and there is need to train the teachers for treating children keeping in view the individual differences and psychological needs, she added.

Fazila Gulrez said that domestic violence can include physical, verbal, sexual or emotional abuse. Children who witness regular acts of violence have greater emotional and behavioral problems than other children. Even very young children can be profoundly frightened and affected.

A child growing up in an abusive household learns to solve their problems using violence, rather than through more peaceful means as some of the long-term effects may include copying their parental role models and behaving in similarly destructive ways in their adult relationships,
she said.

Children may learn that it is acceptable to behave in a degrading way to other people, as they have seen this occur in the violent episodes they witnessed. Appropriate support and counselling will help children grow up learning not to abuse others, she added.

(Please go to the Pakistan AP web site for the complete article)

Let´s get serious Pope Benedict

Excerpt from http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matthew_harwood/2008/04/a_prayer_for_the_prey.html

Prior to being Christ's Vicar on Earth, Pope Benedict's previous incarnation was the Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which centuries before took the biblical command to "not suffer a witch to live" seriously and went by a different name: the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

As defender of the faith, Ratzinger could have amended the Vatican's Crimen Sollicitationis [Crime of Solicitation], which originally drew guidelines for how the
church dealt with priests that used the confessional booth to solicit sex from parishioners, even the young. In 2001, Ratzinger revisited the document in a confidential letter to bishops reminding them of the strict penalties whistle blowers faced if they took the matter outside the church.

As David France reported in his book Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal, any accusation against a priest for paedophilia, as long as the allegedcrime wasn't more than 10 years ago, would trigger a church trial. The rub, however, was that the lawyers and jurors would all be priests sworn to secrecy. "Appeals," France wrote, "would go directly to an ecclesiastical tribunal in Rome, under Ratzinger's authority." More damning, priests that took part in the proceedings could not talk about them, the Irish Examiner reports, until 10 years after the child abused reached adulthood.

Lawyer Thomas O'Shea, who represented three young men allegedly olested by a former Houston seminarian, noted in the article that the Vatican's secrecy oath ensures that the statute of limitations for such crimes will have already run out in the US if any priest decided to speak out after his secrecy oath expired. The church rejected O'Shea's accusations and said Crimen Sollicitationis merely clarifies internal procedures. Nowhere in the policy are the victims and their rights mentioned, says canon lawyer Father Thomas Doyle.

Ratzinger had the power to change these polices but did nothing. He still does, Doyle told the BBC nearly two years ago, and advised that the church's policy should be: "[F]ull disclosure to the civil authorities, absolute isolation and dismissal of any accused and proven and convicted clerics, complete openness and transparency, complete openness of all financial situations, stop all barriers to the legal process and completely co-operate with the civil authorities everywhere."

Religious objectors abuse their children

NOTE: I am posting this letter that was written in 2003 only to help reveal the attitude of our government here in the 21st century. To think congress would even consider such legislation is a mark of just how corrupted our system has become in the service of religion. I will follow up to find out what happened to the legislation. Perhaps this travesty was defeated. We can only hope so.





Letter from a Former Amish Child Sawmill Worker to Congress

United States Senate
Washington,DC

United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC
October 21, 2003

Senators and Representatives:

I was born and raised Amish. Both my brother and I were forced at a very young age to work in a sawmill that was owned and operated by our Amish uncle. As soon as we left elementary school at age 14 it was decided by various leaders in the community that we would work on the sawmill because our family was poor and needed the money. We protested this decision, but our protests were overruled by the leaders in the Amish community.

The sawmill work was extremely dangerous and strenuous. We worked around saws, belts, cables and other power equipment used to move and cut logs. We rolled heavy logs onto carriages where they were clamped and cut. We lifted and carried boards weighing hundreds of pounds. Often times we had to step over tracks while carrying these boards, which created risks for slipping or twisting. My brother and I were lucky in that neither of us suffered a serious injury, but to this day I have back problems due to the two years of hard physical labor that I did on that sawmill.

My brother and I each earned less than minimum wage in these jobs, about $20 per day. The days were at least 8 hours long, and often 10 hours. We did not receive any of this money as it was paid directly to our parents.

Our experience in the sawmill convinced me that sawmills are completely inappropriate places for children to be working. There was nothing about our Amish upbringing that made the sawmill any less dangerous for us than it was for children of other religions. I am now 31 years old, a toolmaker and a father of two young children. There is no way I would allow my children to work in a sawmill and I am grateful for laws that prevent all children, regardless of faith, from working in sawmills.

For these reasons, I was shocked and dismayed when I read news articles stating that Congress was considering a change in the law that would allow Amish sawmill owners to employ Amish children as young as 14, while preserving child labor protections for children of other faiths. This would be a tragic mistake, as Amish children need these protections at least as much as non-Amish children. Amish children, because of their parents’ financial condition and the lack of educational opportunities, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by sawmill owners. I had also thought that the U.S. Constitution would prohibit such blatant discrimination based solely on a child’s religion.

I do not think that the safety provisions included in the proposed legislation will make these jobs safe for children. Sawmills are inherently dangerous for children and cannot be made safer by simply limiting the use of power equipment or the distance between the children and such equipment, or requiring adult supervision I had all those things on the sawmill, and it was still much too dangerous for children.

I applaud those Senators and Representatives who are standing up for Amish children and ask you to please continue your opposition to this proposed legislation. I implore others who might be considering the proposal to reject it and maintain current child labor protections for Amish children as it is for any other child, regardless of religion. I speak for many Amish children who have no choice in this matter, because for them it is futile to speak out. Thank you for listening to my concerns.

John Miller
Mansfield, OH

Children suffer at the hands of barbaric adults

The following information was copied from the Facebook support group, "2,000,000 People Against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)". The author reveals in stark language how primitive and ignorant parents abuse the female children in their families. Apparently, no female child escapes this horror. If you have never read a description of the procedure you will be shocked at the brutality and callousness of the process. There are 55,441 members of this activist group on Facebook and they are adding thousands of supporters daily. Facebook offers many facilities for joining friends, family members and complete strangers together to rapidly distribute information and coordinate group action.

Thank you for your concern for the women who endure this procedure, it means a lot to them to see that the world cares and campaigns for their basic rights. Since its 2008, I thought I would (sic) something different to try and educate as many people as possible about Female Genital Mutilation or Female Circumcision.

I had my Circumcision done when I was 7 years old. When I was little and knew nothing about it. The procedures I had to endure are:
1. Set in a chair, (legs open) and let a midwife (da3ia in Arabic) cut me
and then stitched me while three other women hold me back.
2. For about two weeks I wasn’t allowed to run or play any sports.
3. Using the bathroom was painful for about 3 days. After the process was done women and children came to my house ate candy, drank juice, said Mubark (congratulation) and if I was luck (sic) I got money. Circumcision in Sudan is treated just like a wedding, graduation or even better then a Birthday.

I am asking as Woman, to please to join the group “2 Million people against Female Circumcision {FGM: Female Genital Mutilation”. Two million is the number of women who are circumcised each year {around 000 a day}.

Hopefully by the end of 2008 we can have two million members. The possible side effects of female genital mutilation are numerous. They include urine retention, haemorrhaging, infection,
pain, menstrual complications, infertility, and loss of sexual pleasure or inability to perform sexual intercourse, death and psychological disturbances. In some cases, babies have been seriously harmed during prolonged labor, due to circumcision, resulting in brain damage or
death of the child.

please (sic) have a heart Join and invite others. This is for the four to thirteen year old females who can’t make that decision. Thank you.
This group was createed on the 15th of January,2008