A Defence of Eugenics

[dotinthesky]

I stopped at the supermarket on my way home. Coming out, I nearly tripped over a toddler. Her father, a curly-haired figure with beady eyes and a five-o'clock shadow, apologised for her. I said it was no problem and fell behind them. When the little girl turned the wrong corner, her father said "come over here, you stupid cow."

"Silly?" She asked. She made some noises that she didn't want to walk anymore.

"You are a lazy cow. Now come over here. You are a pain in the ass." He picked her up. "Now look what you've done, I have to carry the beer with my other hand." He was carrying a container with six cans of beer.

I was speechless. Mind, she didn't seem phased at all. She kept chattering to him as if it was all very normal.

Comments

Except in the good ol' USA perhaps...

[msanthropist.livejournal.com]

I think the answer to the "why" questions or the "who" questions are pretty obvious. Man's capacity for cruelty to one another is ageless and almost limitless. We commit atrocities to each other on large scales and on small scales daily and have since the beginning of time. We're all just human beings trying to learn how to make better choices, right? Most child abusers were abused themselves as children whose parents were also abused, ad infinitum. I'm not making excuses, and absolutely we must all do everything we can to stop the cycles of abuse, even speaking out when we witness these scenes of unacceptable treatment of precious innocents in public. Just my opinion.

Luckily violence and even verbal abuse against people, especially children and women, is becoming less and less tolerated throughout the international community. Child advocates in many countries have argued that corporal punishment (spanking) violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the European Network of Ombudsmen for Children (ENOC 2001) urged the governments of all European countries as well as NGOs concerned with children to work to end all corporal punishment worldwide.

The work to eliminate all violent and humiliating forms of discipline is a vital strategy for improving children's status as people and reducing child abuse and consequently all other forms of violence in societies.

The U.S. is one of only two countries (the other being Somalia, which has no central government) that have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

All this coincidentally I am learning in my current class on Relational Violence and got directly from our text: Family Violence in the US by Hines and Malley-Morrison.

Re: Except in the good ol' USA perhaps...

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

There has been a spate of violence in London related to knives - on top of the already present ones - which leaves me very weary of confronting anyone like that (even if they are carrying a toddler.) The truth is that people won't change their behaviour because a stranger called them on it in the street - who am I after all? But I wish there was something else I could have done - it's so easy to just keep walking...