The long history of child abuse


". . . ghosts, monsters, god and the devil are out to get them, torture them, cook them and eat them alive. . . "

Included in the following are a few highlights from the introduction to The History of Child Abuse (first pbd 1974) edited by Lloyd de Mause. "The history of childhood" de Mause begins, "is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused".

Of over 2000 references to children in the Bible, gentle images are missing. "You find lots on child sacrifice, on stoning children, on beating them on their strict obedience, on their love for their parents, on their role as carriers of the family name, but not a single one that reveals any empathy with children." The Christian myth of 'original sin' makes children guilty of evil simply for being born and deserving of cruel punishments.

Infanticide has been a regular practice of antiquity and continues right up to the present in some countries. Infants were sacrificed in prehistoric and historic times for religious purposes. Infants have been thrown into rivers, flung onto dung heaps, exposed on every hill and roadside. Girls, of course, have been murdered and abandoned in far greater numbers than boys. Girls in most cultures are considered a burden rather than a blessing to their parents. The first foundling hospital was founded in 1741 because Thomas Coram couldn't bear the sight of children dead and dying in heaps on London's roadsides. Sealing children in walls and foundations of buildings was "common from the building of Jericho to as late as 1843 in Germany." In the 1890s dead babies were still a common sight in London streets. Parents were not prosecuted.

Children have been sold into slavery for millennia, sent to wet-nurse where many of them died, beaten very severely and frequently by parents, teachers, priests and bosses who used leather thongs, whips, belts, switches and canes. Children have been routinely swaddled tightly, rendered unable to move and develop their motor skills and explore their environment. Children were frequently tortured by mutilation, freezing, burning, shaking, throwing, branding, hot wax, and by dipping in cold water. Children, most often little girls, have been intentionally and systematically malnourished. Children were and still are left unsupervised. The daughter of Cotton Mather fell into a fire when she was left alone. An 18th century physician said that "almost one half of the human species perish in infancy by improper management and neglect".

Children have been used as household servants and slaves from the age of four or five, doing much of the work of the world long before child labor was even considered as an issue. Children worked 14 hour days for a pittance under dangerous conditions in industry well into the 19th century.

Jews, Egyptians, Arabs and many tribes cut off the foreskin of boys. Young girls in Africa to this day may be victims of genital mutilation in the forms of clitorectomy, excision and infibulation: their genitals are mutilated, cut off, sewn shut, both in their towns and in modern urban hospitals.

"Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men. Boy brothels flourished in every city." (This is still true in many countries today for both boys and girls, who are made to serve in the sex-industry as prostitutes and lap-dancers for the tourists and who are forced into pornography and addiction to drugs.) Playing with a child's private parts was a widespread tradition in Renaissance Europe. Louis the XIII (1601-1643) from infancy to age seven was put into bed with the King and Queen who played with his penis, as did other people at court. In the 18th century a German doctor said that "nursemaids and servants carried out 'all sorts of sexual acts' on children 'for fun'. Even Freud said he was seduced by his nursemaid when he was two".

One of the methods used to terrorise children and force obedience is through the horror stories told to them, which include threats that ghosts, monsters, god and the devil are out to GET them, torture them, cook and eat them alive. Bogie men lurk in every closet and under every little bed. The tales by the Brothers Grimm as well as the words to most songs and rhymes told to children often include plague, torture, rape and the capture and murder of children. To this day adults seem to take great pleasure in terrifying kids with masks and stories and monster sounds. The real Bogie Men are the adults who harm children. In the past children were taken to hangings and to see corpses to frighten them into obedience. During The Burning Times, the children of accused witches were made to watch their parents being burned at the stake, and were often severely whipped while they witnessed these brutal murders.

Of course, today children are not exempt from the horrors and torture techniques of this war-loving society. Domestic violence and child abuse is rampant in the western world and elsewhere. I've heard that one out of three kids in the U.S. are abused. Sexual abuse and incest are serious, pandemic problems only now being dragged out of the secrecy which protects the perpetrators. Children born with indeterminate gender, hermaphrodites, are routinely operated upon by surgeons in this country to "correct" this state and wrench the body and person to one or the other polar opposite, of course without the consent of the child. The marketing of both legal and illegal drugs to children is being fought with some success but cigarette and booze ads still direct their messages to the fresh stock of new potential addicts as the older addicts regularly die in droves of diseases caused by the addictive substances. Children and teenagers have no legal rights when the adults around them decide they need psychiatric attention; young people have no say in their incarceration in mental institutions and "corrective" facilities or in their being drugged up with ritalin, prozac, zoloft, etc.. The public educational system in the U.S. is an institution meant to delibrately "dumb down" the population while people are still young, to indoctrinate young minds with blatent lies of all kinds, and to prepare young people for a life of obedient wage-slavery or prison.

Check out SCAR, a zine on the subject of scars and self-harm.
The content of these pages may contain "triggering" material.
To RUSHMORE
Monumental Blunders. The institutional role of national monuments.
to CUTTERS, a page on the subject of people who self-harm.
The content of these pages may contain "triggering" material.
to The History of Child Abuse.
Contents Under Pressure. Razor's writing about experiences she had during a 13 year bout with DSH and five times she was institutionalized.
to Leap Frogge. Leap was locked up in mental institutions when she was a kid. Leap refers to them as "the Institutes."

To CUTTERS.

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