Stefan Molyneux – How to Prevent Violent Criminal Behavior in the Next Generation

STEFAN MOLYNEUX – HOW TO PREVENT VIOLENT CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR IN THE NEXT GENERATION

“The child’s inclination to cooperation is challenged from the very first day. The immense importance of the mother in this respect can be clearly recognized. She stands on the threshold of the development of social feeling. The biological heritage of social feeling is entrusted to her charge. She can strengthen or hinder contact by the help she gives the child in little things, in bathing him, in providing all that a helpless infant is in need of. Her relations with the child, her knowledge, and her aptitude are decisive factors…. It may readily be accepted that contact with the mother is of the highest importance for the development of human social feeling…. We probably owe to the maternal sense of contact the largest part of human social feeling, and along with it the essential continuance of human civilization.” — Alfred Adler ¹
“Becoming a biological parent, parentage, is a matter of a few minutes; becoming a responsible parent, parenthood, is something else again, a matter of adequate preparation…. Every birth should be regarded as a contribution to society as well as to the family and to the child that has been born. A gift to be treated with gratitude and reverence, so that every child may be from birth assured of the optimum conditions for development and fulfillment. Anything short of this is to disinherit the newborn of his birthright and to deprive his society of a cooperating and contributing member.” — Ashley Montagu ²

It was one of the worst diseases in history. It’s not like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it Almost all of the people who became infections died. Some survivors were left scarred and blind. No one could have predicted that a simple procedure, vaccination, would eventually provide protection to everyone and cause the eradication of smallpox from the earth.

There are several similarities between the criminal behavior and the smallpox virus. Only the human species is affected. They are spread from one person to the next. It is possible to make the potential host immune. Neither spontaneously regenerates once eliminated.

It is possible to immunize a child against criminal activity.

How can it be done?

We can determine who is in our prison population. Not. There is present. We must ask if there is a common ingredient in the lives of those who do not become criminals and those who do become criminals.

The answer is yes. The key ingredient that seems to be associated with people who never become candidates for the penitentiary has been identified. There is no reason that it can’t be universally introduced. Violence and crime will go away when that is done.

Who is this? Not. Is that in a prison?

The person who used methods of infant care and child rearing that were gentle, patient and loving is not in prison. The person who believes that adults are the source of safety, security and comfort is not in prison. The person who always felt wanted isn’t in prison. The person who was respected, encouraged to explore and inquire is not in prison. The person who grew up seeing family members and others treat each other with respect and honor is not in prison. The person who had a lot of exposure to people who used logic to solve problems is not in prison. The person who had physical and emotional needs during infancy and childhood is not in prison. The child who is raised in a family that is not violent will never spend time in prison.

The following challenge was offered to the skeptical reader. Visit any prison and try to find out who was brought up in a household where harmonious interaction was the norm. You won’t succeed.

Who? Is it? Is that in a prison?

You will find people who were born into households where every other adult family member, including older siblings, had the right to whip them at will. People who in childhood were never cuddled, hugged, played with, protected, guided, comforted, soothed, read to, listened to or tucked in, but mostly growled at, barked at, insulted, smacked and ignored. There are people who have never had a possession that is not subject to being taken away by a stronger person. You will find people who grew up in families where the late-night sound of someone whipping a baby with a wire coat hanger was not out of the ordinary. People who were young in the past were targets for adult sexual appetites. Throughout their development years, you will find people who were rarely or never touched by any hand except in ways that frighten, hurt and leave scars.

Dr. Morris Wessel puts it this way: “Beaten and battered children are more likely to become adults who have inadequate control of their aggressive feelings, who therefore strike out mercilessly against children, spouses, friends and at times even other members of society. The violence inflicted on children by their closest relatives and caretakers has a long-lasting and horrifying effect. These children grow up with the idea that, when another person’s behavior is displeasing to them, violent acts against that person are appropriate ways to deal with feelings of displeasure. In short, members of each adult generation tend to reproduce in their interpersonal relationships the violence which they experienced in their childhood.” ³

In the same vein, Dr. Philip Greven writes: “The most visible public outcome of early violence and coercion in the name of discipline is the active aggression that begins to shape the character and behavior in childhood and continues, in far too many instances, throughout the lives of those who suffered most in their earliest years. Aggressive children often become aggressive adults who often produce more aggressive children, in a cycle that endures generation after generation. Corporal punishments always figure prominently in the roots of adolescent and adult aggressiveness, especially in those manifestations that take antisocial form, such as delinquency and criminality.” ⁴

Blaming poverty.

Poverty is blamed for violence and criminality. The standard view among advocates for the disadvantaged is this. The theory falls apart when we try to apply it to violence and criminality among the affluent. Consider the Mafia. Their bad behavior has nothing to do with the state of their finances, but everything to do with how they were treated as children.

I was amazed at how much trouble the kids gave them when I met them. The kids were in trouble all the time. They were always fighting. They wouldn’t go to school. They would leave from home. The women would beat their kids with broom handles and leather belts, but the kids wouldn’t pay attention. There is a life in a Mafia Family. , p. 73.

The culprit is the real one.

The virus of violence is caused by the maltreatment of children beginning at infancy. It stunts the child’s ability to become socially integrated with the larger community by interfering with the bonding process between child and parent. The child is handicapped with a lifetime supply of anger. It makes future irritation seem like a mortal attack and a personal insult. It shows the child selfishness, aggression, rage, and tyranny instead of problem-solving skills. Escape by means of drugs and alcohol is appealing to many. The harsher the treatment, the more severe the outcome.

Researchers Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck have found that the first indicators of delinquency are usually recognizable in children between the ages of 3 and 6, and almost always before 11. ⁵ Yet programs and services that purport to address the delinquency problem almost invariably are aimed at adolescents and young adults. Obviously such programs are of no value to the babies still at home, being abused and neglected, for whom intervention now would make all the difference later. As for parents whose children have been removed by the courts for their safety, and who are required to take parenting classes as a condition for being reunited with their children, such intervention comes only after the damage has been done. In many cases, that’s too late to significantly benefit either child or parent.

Abused infants grow into adults who are fixated on their own feelings of frustration because their most urgent needs are not met. Such people can’t recognize anyone’s needs other than their own. They can’t cope with the demands placed on them by an infant when they become parents. They remain at a stage of arrested development, all the while searching for relief from the chronic anger that derives from events impossible for them to remember, anger that smolders beneath the surface and erupts all too easily when a defenseless target comes within arm’s reach.

Being deprived of their own babies makes them hostile to them. They spank as if they were spanked. They bully their children. They produce damaged children who in turn become incompetent parents who produce more damaged children.

The courts stay busy and the prisons fill up.

Violence against children should be stopped.

Our laws and cultural values are clear regarding adults who physically attack or threaten other adults. We hold the perpetrators accountable for such behavior. When so much is at stake for society, do we accept the excuses of child batterers? We become interested in the needs of children only after they have been victims of crime or become delinquents.

The answer is simple. We will not feel sympathy for any child who has been abused as we were because we have not been able to honestly acknowledge the abuse we have experienced in our own childhood. We will do the same for others if we feel compelled to defend our parents. We will look in a different direction. We are trying to divert our attention from unpleasant memories by telling ourselves that we turned out OK.

When someone says thatspanking is abuse, many of us react as though a door that has been locked since infancy is about to be flung open, a door that has prevented us from committing the most dangerous, most unpardonable act of disloyalty imaginable. We fear that if we open that door, we will fall through into an abandoned place, cut off from any chance of reconciliation with the parents we love.

That fear is irrational. Dishonesty about what was done to our generation and what we are doing, and allowing to be done, to the next generation is the real danger.

Reconciliation and healing can only begin with an acknowledgment of the truth, for it is futile to hope that lies, evasions and excuses can somehow erase the memory and the pain of past injuries.

There are three steps to reach a solution.

Bad laws should be repealed.

Legislation regarding children’s status should be withdrawn because of the mythical distinction between spanking and battery. Every state in the U.S. has such laws.

Children have less protection against battery than adults. The United States does not have a better legal protection against cruel treatment of children than it did before slaves were freed. The same constitutional guarantees that are taken for granted by every other class of citizen should be extended to children.

Educate for parents.

The person who was raised by incompetents, never witnessed competent parenting and has been taught nothing about the needs and nurturing of infants is seriously educationally deprived. The person who has not learned to read or calculate poses a bigger problem than the person who has. The responsibility for preparing young people for their most important role in life is finally going to be assumed by Enlightened educators.

New parents should be counseled.

Sound advice should be given to all new parents.

Hawaii has implemented programs for counseling, monitoring and early intervention with high-risk parents. High-risk families should enroll in counseling and home monitoring. Where needed, skilled counselors should help convince mothers and fathers, grandparents and other caretakers that the traditional examples they have been shown and the advice they have been given about disciplining children are bad examples and bad advice.

In cases where babies need to be saved, it should be done quickly. When we fail to protect them early, we pay a lot later.

Conclusion

We are confident that our society will find the moral courage to admit that violent criminals are made. We make them at home.

The solution doesn’t lie in more prisons, harsher punishments or heroic efforts to rehabilitate profoundly damaged, dangerous adults. We should have stopped having these high-cost, low-yield remedies by now. Honest answers can be found in understanding the disease at its source, active prevention and compassionate early intervention.