(Originally published in Guyana’s Stabroek News on 7 July 2012)
The ongoing conversation on corporal punishment is of particular interest to me because I am a survivor of domestic violence at the hands of my own mother. I comprehend that in some minds there is a difference between spanking your child and beating your child, but because of my abusive background I see things a bit differently.
Though it was years ago, I have written before on the abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother who abused me verbally, emotionally and physically, day after day, year after year, until I moved out of her house and married. In fact, the fervour that burns deep inside me against violence of any sort is ensconced in the brutal memories of a defenceless little girl.
Growing up in my mother’s house, there was not a time when I do not remember being abused. There was a time when I must have been around three or four years old and my mother, angry at something other than me, grabbed me and knocked my head into the knob of a door until my white-blonde hair turned red. This was not discipline – it was abuse.
Likewise, although packaged a bit differently, it was also abuse when a father recently told his wayward 14-year-old daughter “…to pack her clothes but as she was doing so, he dealt her several cuffs about her body. He then beat her with a belt and thereafter an electric wire, telling her ‘the belt isn’t working.’ After the thrashing, he then ordered her to take a bath.”
Thanks to a magistrate, the father will serve six weeks in jail for what he did to his daughter. I wish someone had given my mother six weeks in jail when I was young so she would have understood that beating her daughter was wrong.
How on earth can anyone think that using violence against a child will give her/him the necessary tools to make rational decisions about his/her life? Yes, that young girl was looking in all the wrong places for love and acceptance already. But how could any sane parent believe that beating her would solve the problem?
