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

[dawnkitten.livejournal.com]

Jesus ... I'd have been tempted to grab her and run. Things like that make me so sad- some people should just not be allowed to breed. She's young enough now to not know what he's saying ...but 5/10 years down that's likely to be one unhappy girl

[amanda-mary.livejournal.com]

Oh my. This makes me feel like an awesome parent. It also makes me feel like smuggling that little girl out of the country :-(

[margotmetroland.livejournal.com]

Horrible.

[(Anonymous)]

Classy

stepping on toes

[fisticuff-s.livejournal.com]

i am a huge proponet of breeding sanctions. i know it pisses heteros off, but really, i don't give a shit. if you aren't fit, you aren't fucking fit. get your shit together before you bring another life into the world.

[amberholic.livejournal.com]

The worrying thing is that she took it so casually. It just goes to show that she's become used to the abuse.

[pixxers.livejournal.com]

How did you keep from kicking his ass? I would have been arrested. :|

[aeonflux.livejournal.com]

Possibly not biological father, but stepdad or (even more hopefully transient) mother's boyfriend?

[desayuno-ingles.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Why are people mean to kids? It makes me so sad!

[mirple.livejournal.com]

a few years ago my friend and i went to a car boot sale near where we lived (i can't remember why on earth we were there) and there was a young family there - a man and woman, about mid twenties at a guess, and two children, a boy and girl about five and three respectively. i had noticed them but hadn't taken much notice until the woman suddenly screamed at and shook the little girl who burst into tears and turned to her brother for comfort who gave her a big hug. It was heart breaking and touching to see how the children consoled eachother. The husband / boyfriend / father (?) just looked cowed and made no comment to any of it. They didn't seem like a happy family.

regardless of a person's socio-economic background, some people just like to bully children cause they smaller than them. It's very sad and distressing.

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.