Children as a Barometer of Violence

by Janet Chisholm

Americans claim to love children, but the way we treat our kids is not the way we talk about them. Actual young lives measure the violence in our culture. Children are like a barometer of violence: the examples are endless. Here are some barometric readings from my own experience, in Connecticut.

•Four-year-old Sally, who was forcibly abducted from my Manchester day care center by her father; he was separated from her mother. He twisted Sally's arm behind her back, threatened me loudly, and pushed me out of his path as he hustled Sally away.

•The five-year-old killed accidentally as she sat in the family car, a victim of the drug war in her New Haven neighborhood.

•A woman who applied to be a day care assistant in New London and urged me to discipline the children as she had raised her three boys — with a baseball bat.

•Three University of Connecticut seniors studying to become teachers who explained how they would change the behavior of a two-year-old who bites others: bite him back.

•The child abuse and neglect investigations which revealed that infants had died because adults caring for them had shaken them violently, beaten them, thrown them against a wall or smothered them; and others proving that preschool-aged children had been force-fed, tied to chairs, verbally demeaned, and disciplined in a myriad of creative but cruel ways.

That is just the interpersonal violence. There is also the overwhelming systemic violence, reported to me from everywhere:

•Infants born in the Norwich homeless shelter.

•A one-year-old in Honolulu, whose mother stayed vigilant all night as he slept so that rats could not bite him.

•Children of Spanish-speaking families discriminated against by staff at an anti poverty program.

•Ill children in Meriden whose mothers spent their food money to take the train to New Haven pediatricians because the local doctors refused to take another welfare case.

•Two toddlers who wandered for days in the streets of eastern Connecticut with their homeless mother.

•Young children reported to protective services because they were left home alone or were playing in the streets; their mothers could not afford day care while they worked.

Statistics from the Children's Defense Fund offer an even starker gauge of cultural violence.

•Twelve children killed by guns every day, and the number rising.

•A declining number of children in jail and on trial for crime, but more and more children charged as adults.

•Corporal punishment used against a child in public school once every ten seconds.

•One-fifth of our children living in families considered "poor," although most of the parents work.

•One-sixth of our children without health insurance.

•One-eighth of our children never completing high school.

We must admit that we are growing our children in a culture of violence — a culture that supports increasing the military budget while health, education, and human services are drastically under-funded. It's a culture of triple evils, as Dr. King famously said: poverty, militarism, and racism, all interconnected. And we export this culture of violence: weapons to the Middle East, land mines, SOA-trained military personnel, economic sanctions on Iraq, and nuclear missiles for allies.

The pressure of violence bears down on today's children. What will the barometer read a year from now? In ten years? The UN Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World calls us all to re-commit ourselves now to building the Beloved Community of Dr. King. Let's take constructive action to build the culture we desire and wage active resistance to violence and oppression. Together, we can bring to birth a Culture of Nonviolence.

Listen to the dreams of the world's children in John Denver's song, "I Want to Live." Len Schreiner, a Seattle teacher, has been performing it and suggests it become the theme song for the Decade.

There are children raised in sorrow,
on the scorched and barren plain/
there are children raised beneath the
golden sun. There are children of the
water, children of the sand/
and they cry out through the universe,
their voices raised as one.
I want to live, I want to grow,
I want to see, I want to know.
I want to share what I can give,
I want to be, I want to live.
We are standing all together, face to face and arm in arm/
we are standing on the threshold of a dream.
No more hunger, no more killing,
no more wasting life away/
It is simply an idea, and I know its time has come.
I want to live, I want to grow,
I want to see, I want to know.
I want to share what I can give,
I want to be, I want to live.

Send us information about Decade activities and nonviolence training in your area so we can share it with others.

Janet Chisholm is FOR'S coordinator for theUN Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence.

©2001 Fellowship of Reconciliation