Catch 22 of saving children from emotional abuse

This is the text of my recent post to Amazon.com's Parenting Discussion Forum:

The catch 22 of religiously inspired child abuse
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Today at 4:15am | Edit Note | Delete
An Amazon Parents forum participant writes:

I think everyone should just chill. The fact of the matter is, parents will teach their children whatever they want and as long as it doesn't fall under abuse as defined by the Dept. of Social Services, there is nothing anyone else can do about it.

BAM! CASE CLOSED
+++++++

Richard replies:

No, the case is far from closed, as you put it. This discussion is about parents subjecting children to harm through actions they control, and indeed are complicit in. The harm is to their child's mental health and emotional well being, leaving aside the gross violation of their personhood. Can you find a state in the country that does not have laws against inflicting emotional abuse on another person? Such laws do exist, but....

No minor child can walk into child protective services and seek help to escape the mind control program they are subjected to. The damage to their intellectual development and emotional health occurs over many years. In the best of circumstances, the crime of inflicting emotional abuse on another person is extremely difficult to prosecute -- even when the abuse is blatant and has no religious overtones. The only persons legally able to speak for a child are the same persons complicit in the abuse. That is the nub of the problem. That is the catch 22.

For anyone reading this that may suspect they know of a child that is being abused, here are the behavioral indications (quoted from the non-profit web page Helpguide.org):

"Behavioral signs. Since emotional child abuse does not leave concrete marks, the effects may be harder to detect. Is the child excessively shy, fearful or afraid of doing something wrong? Behavioral extremes may also be a clue. A child may be constantly trying to parent other children for example, or on the opposite side exhibit antisocial behavior such as uncontrolled aggression. Look for inappropriate age behaviors as well, such as an older child exhibiting behaviors more commonly found in younger children.

Caregiver signs. Does a caregiver seem unusually harsh and critical of a child, belittling and shaming him or her in front of others? Has the caregiver shown anger or issues with control in other areas? A caregiver may also seem strangely unconcerned with a child's welfare or performance. Keep in mind that there might not be immediate caregiver signs. Tragically, many emotionally abusive caregivers can present a kind outside face to the world, making the abuse of the child all the more confusing and scary."

Children have rights that are trampled in the United States by a legal doctrine that favors parents religious free exercise rights over consideration of children's welfare interests. Experts assert this legal doctrine is on weak moral ground because it is based solely on patriarchal tradition, which of course is male privilige written large.

If you examine the history of human rights progress you can see a clear pattern. The starting point is a widespread harmful cultural practice and a legal system that shelters the rights abuses. Slavery was legal because rich white landowners controlled the legal apparatus and they had a financial stake in having slaves. In the South they pointed to their bibles as justification for the practice. The abolition movement started in the mercantile North where the financial stake in agriculture did not exist.

Drunk driving, spousal abuse, miscegenation; and segregation in housing, education and public life, all follow the pattern. Women were denied the right to vote in the USA until 1920. Blacks were subject to Jim Crow. A white male power structure and public indifference fostered these injustices. Recall that most judges were white males until very recently and spousal rape could not be prosecuted. Likewise, the hierarchy of most organized religions is in the hands of white males. Coincidence?

Until women achieve full and complete equality with men imbalances and injustices will continue. Protecting children and advancing women's rights are key to solving many of our problems.

We see the legal system now fosters and protects religious mind control programs. In state legislatures around the country, Christian fascist leaders such as Tony Perkins, Michael Ferris and James Dobson (all are dominionists that would replace our democracy with a theonomy and all are part of the Council for National Policy cabal) were able to bulldoze state legislatures into revoking and revising truancy laws to enable sham homeschools to mushroom. Estimates are that as many as 1.5 million children are sequestered in their own homes and subject to brain washing 24/7. I have posted extensively on this topic.

Adherents, clerics and anyone who gets a paycheck from a church has a financial stake in maintaining the membership of their congregations. All congregations, without exception, must maintain a constant flow of new adherents in the front door as the old members fade away and can no longer chip in the collection plate. Religion is a vast multi-billion dollar enterprise. What business do you know that could allow their customers to die away and not replace them?

Organized religion has adapted the most sophisticated public relations tools known to modern man. According to their PR, society would collapse from moral rot if people were not sitting in the pews listening to and absorbing ancient fables and myths. They trumpet their charitable works, yet some recent studies show that only about five percent of tax exempt donations actually go to charity. The rest is spent maintaining property and I suppose on coffee and cake for the members. Essentially what you have is a social club operated for the benefit of the members at the expense of the tax paying public.

A new facebook group, Abolish tax breaks for faith-based groups, is devoted to countering unfair tax laws that favor groups just because they believe in mythology :

http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?id=1077947340&gv=4#/group.php?gid=48134307000

A prayer for freedom of identity, September 25, 2007 Amartya Sen
By
Brian Griffith (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time) (Paperback)
Sen is so eloquent it's overkill. To a global but divided world he speaks of identity as a multi-layered matter of personal choice: "The same person can, for example, be a British citizen, of Malaysian origen, with Chinese racial characteristics, a stock broker, a non-vegitarian, an asthmatic, a linguist, a bodybuilder, a poet, an opponent of abortion, a bird-watcher, an astrologer, and one who believes that God invented Darwin to test the gullible." (p. 24)

Sen notes several popular ways of dealing with identity. One he calls "identity disregard", and another is "singular affiliation".

In "identity disregard" we dismiss all shared identity, and treat each person as an economic self-interest group of one. As some proponents of this view argue, "If it's not in your interest, why have you chosen to do as you did?". Sen notes that this assumption, "makes huge idiots out of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, and rather smaller idiots out of the rest of us." (p. 21)

"Singular affiliation" on the other hand, defines people by their membership in one (only one) of their many social circles. This can be an externally imposed label, as in stereotypes of what Westerners are, or in can be self-imposed general conformity -- as when Oscar Wilde said, "Most people are other people. ... Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation".

Feeling both social and an individual, Sen launches his excellent exploration of identity in the modern world. He visits the great "West VS Non-West" divide, where he dispenses with the usual hoopla:

"... in disputing the gross and natsy generalization that members of the Islamic civilization have a belligerant culture, it is common enough to argue that they actually share a culture of peace and goodwill. But this simply replaces one stereotype with another, and furthermore, it involves accepting an implicit presumption that people who happen to be Muslim by religion would be similar in other ways as well." (p. 42)

In many corners of the world Sen shows the subtle handicaps which delimited identity can impose. He mentions South African doctor and anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele, who describes the impact of polarized identity on the AIDS crisis: The "mistrust of science that has traditionally been controlled by white people" hampers medical efforts; open discussion of the problem is often suppressed by "the fear of acknowledging an epidemic that could easily be used to fan the worst racial stereotyping". (p. 92)

Always sounding magisterial, Sen wades into the home-town issues of British multiculturalism, political correctitude, and the struggles of "globalism vs anti-globalism". He distinguishes between the desire for ethnic groups to leave one another alone, and the desire for a freedom to choose among many cultural options. To those who urge funding schools for each religion he is blunt: "It is unfair to children who have not yet had much opportunity of reasoning and choice to be put into rigid boxes guided by one specific criterion of categorization, and to be told: 'That is your identity and this is all you are going to get'." (p. 118)

To people who believe their identity is more a fate than a choice, Sen affirms we can do better: "We have to make sure, above all, that our mind is not halved by a horizon". The book's opening dedication sounds almost like a Buddhist vow to seek enlightenment: "To Antara, Nandana, Indrani, and Kabir with the hope of a world less imprisoned by illusion".

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

Excerpt of Quaker Speech

From a speech entitled, "Should Quakers Receive The Good Samaritan Into Their Membership?" given in 1954 by Arthur Morgan. What he had to say about hereditary religion still applies today.

It is my personal feeling that Christianity at its best has greater value than any of the other great religions, but that most religions, large and small, have values that we might acquire with profit. It is my opinion, too, that the life outlook and teaching of Jesus were very different from the religion which now bears his name. If it should be true that Christians do have the one true faith whereby men may be saved, then perhaps they should keep their present attitudes, though the heavens fall. But what if they are mistaken? Suppose we consider that possibility.

A small proportion of people acquire their major life convictions through a process of intense objective inquiry and reflection. Most of us, on the other hand, get our underlying convictions chiefly by social inheritance or by the accident of circumstance. Most followers of Islam are born of Moslem parents. The same is true of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists and others. Each believes he or she has the one true faith and that others are misled by error. This is a very significant fact, of which we seldom get the full implication.

It is the general policy in each religious faith to endeavor to teach children the essentials of the faith and to surround them with such a climate of indoctrination that they will have no inclination and almost no capacity to question it or to depart from it. This is such an old, deep rooted tradition in nearly all religions that we accept it as natural, and we do not realize how it may perpetuate error and maintain barriers between peoples. This purpose of indoctrination commonly is furthered by the influences of parents and of the religious community, and in many cases by the prevailing social atmosphere. Where such influences are fairly cumulative, a natural result is that a very strong sense of inner assurance is developed concerning whatever faith is involved. It often is immune to any contrary influence.

Continues at the paragraph starting --- The result is illustrated

http://www.universalistfriends.org/quf1998.html

Teach about religion, not a religion

The following is clipped from a New Republic article
Atheism's Wrong Turn
by Damon Linker
Post Date Monday, December 10, 2007 | Issue Date Monday, December 10, 2007

If the only role of religious education was to propagate colorful local traditions and rational ethics, there would [be] little problem, but there is more- so much more. Many religions add education on the hatred of outside groups, active dis-belief in scientific knowledge, and closed-mindedness about other views of reality, not to mention obscure taboos, self-hatred, and other impediments to mental health. This is a problem, yet the new atheists make only one concrete proposal, which comes from Daniel Dennet. That is to to teach children about religion. That's right- more religion! His proposal is to teach all students about the vast depth of human religious tradition, from the major religions including their own, to those of other cultures and other times, perhaps including even atheism, though not necessarily. This long-term, detailed study of other traditions would enable children to make up their own minds about life's cosmic questions, knowing what many of the possible answers are, not just the ones their parents told them. This instruction would be a capstone to a truly liberal and civic-minded education. The American founders responded to the recent history of religious intolerance both in Europe and in some of the early colonies by separating church and state. We have since have taken this wisdom and extended it to a state-sponsored system of education that would make the founders extremely proud. But the intolerance they tried to guard against is still with us, and particularly with other cultures with whom we deal very closely. The new atheists would surely like to wave a wand and make it all go away. But in the real world, we need to attend to the real causes of intolerance and illiberality, and one primary cause still with us is parochial, illiberal, education, which might be slightly mitigated by a liberal curriculum of cross-cultural and cross-religious education.

Report of child abuse in India

In India Rastriya Swayansevak Sangh (RSS) started and developed pre-primary and primary schools for boys and girls after independence (1947). They are named Saraswati Sishu Mandirs. These schools are developed in Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh etc. These schools aim at countering WESTERNIZATION and secularism and inculcate Indian culture, worship of Hindu heroes and the veneration of those who fought against Muslims in India like Shivaji (in Maharastra etc). The stress would be on patriotism and Hindu religion. Some schools are setup in tribal areas too.

Brain washing is the main aim and for that purpose they inculcate hate culture against Wesernization, human values, and secular principles. The primary aim is remaking the nation to establish Hindu hegemony in all spheres. Hindu political symbols are used extensively in schools. Militancy and sacredness is clubbed into children to rouse the emotions of the students. Sanskrit slokas are chanted and sanskrit is treated as a sacred language of Hindus. Rituals and extra-curricular activities are a regular practice where students are preached hate culture. Physical education with Yoga is given top importance and a strong body is a must to fight against the evil forces of anti Hindu culture. Only devotional music is encouraged in the schools. RSS wish to spread their indoctrination culture through these schools throughout the country.

References:
1.Ed Ed.Christophe Jaffrelot
SANGH PARIVAR A Reader
Oxford University press 2005
Available from Indiaclub.com http://www.indiaclub.com/Shop/SearchResults.asp?ProdStock=23533

Thanks to Innaiah Narisetti for this information about religious abuse of children in India.