Passing Laws to Protect Children is the First Step

Passing laws to protect children is the first step, but if they are not steps taken to enforce them, they are only window dressing to help a country look good on paper. I have wonder if society created a program that every time a child is born, would get a visit once a week from an agency looking after the wellbeing of the next generation and help every young mother face her own childhood traumas and consciously help her feel her repressed emotions to prevent the young mother from repeating or reenacting her traumas with her children and unconsciously transferring her repressed emotions into her innocent children; if we did this, we would change the world. These words by Alice Miller come to mind: “…today we know too much about the lingering effects of violence against children to silently tolerate this lack of information. We should know that the whole society will pay the price for our blindness. A government of a civilized country can no longer ignore this knowledge. You can't claim the right to play with nuclear weapons on your territories, only because they belong to you. The society's interests go before your pleasure and your habits. The government must defend these interests. To call it thus "totalitarian" makes so little sense as to insult the fire brigade in a burning house. Look around: When children are small some parents reclaim the sacrosanct "right to them" like to a property. But as soon as they become violent or drug addicted and then emotionally inaccessible these parents are eager to grant their rights to society. The children are no longer "our" children, protected in the sacrosanct family, they become "social cases" and the anonymous taxis-payers will have to pay for the prisons and hospitals these once so eagerly disciplined teenagers will need. The new law must make people aware of a very serious danger we so often oversee because we have learnt so early to oversee it. In Norway and Sweden where this law has been adopted most people already know that beating children teaches them short term obedience but in the long run only violence and anxiety. Children become so as they are treated. The theory that we are born with good or bad genes may be a modern version of the old belief that the devil put his child in our cradle and that we must make it sociable and noble with our vice or birch. We are born with different talents, inclinations and temperaments but our urge to punish others has not a genetical imprint. It is the result of being punished very early and looking for scapegoats to the repressed rage. If it were not so we would need an answer to the question why so many children were born with bad genes 30 - 40 years before Hitler's Reich to make his plans possible. This question shows the limits of a genetical explanation of the Evil. Nobody is born evil, we produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.

Addition of 2004: In the whole discussion concerning the scandalous behaviour US-Soldiers displayed in Iraq nobody ever used the word sexual abuse though it was more than clear that the torturers used the same way of humiliating the victims as they themselves once had experienced as helpless children on the mercy of their perverse”

http://www.alice-miller.com/interviews_en.php?page=3 

This blog was inspired by Steve Thomas Facebook post in the link below:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10204996875991158&set=a.1189422065262.2029352.1519659475&type=1