Family Violence

Violence, like charity, often begins at home. The roots and the causes of violent activity in

people 's lives frequently lie in their earliest experiences. It is well known that acts of aggression and

assault go from generation to generation, and that dealing with the problems that arise from violent

activities among members of families really means dealing with the familites themselves and

understanding them from generation to generation.

This paper deals wih the violent confrontations that occur in otherwise ordinary appearing

families. Everyone is potentially a victim of someone else 's anger, rage, confusion, and fear. It can

start in the earliest days of infancy with mothers who are afraid of children, don 't know how to raise

them, feel inadequate to the task and overwhelmed. It continues with parents who don 't know how

to control young children, because the children are too active, too energetic, too precocious, or

because the parents allow them to get out of control. Later, violent activities can occur among

children in the same family. Sometimes psychiatrists refer to this as sibling rivalry. Often it is the

kind of violent action that occurs when an argument gets out of hand and one brother hits another,

or one sister destroys another 's property. Ultimately, the violence can extend to the children

themselves, who begin to attak their own parents. All of these kinds of violent activities have

causes and, of course, terrible effects. If we can begin to understand the causes, we can begin to

deal with preventing them. There are ways to change people who engage in attacks on other people.

There are sources of help, understanding, and shelter.

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Help is available for people who either find themselves in this situation or see friends or

relatives involved in it. Mental health clinics and family guidance clinics exist all over the country,

with trained social workers, mental health workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who have a great

deal of experience with this kind of problem. Many of them are available either free or at minimal

cost because they are sponsored by the United Way or some other agency. The important thing is

to find out where this help is available and to reach out for it. A person who suspects something

owes a responsibility to the child involved as well as to friends or family to take action which, in

the long run, can be the most positive thing he or she ever done.

Many times violence in families is treated by the family as normal. Sometimes it is even

justified as necessary to "control" the behavior of children. This can continue even when children

are adolescents and young adults. The constant assaultiveness of parents eventually is reflected in

more ways than one in the behavior of the battered children.

Teenagers are frequently embarrassed to discuss their difficulties at home and feel "weird"

when they have to reveal things that have happened to them that they know to be out of the ordinary.

One of the big problems is that meny adolescents fear that the battering they receive from their

parents, especially their fathers, is in some way their own fault. They have grown up constantly

being told by their parents that they are bad, "worthless," "selfish," "thoughtless," and a number of

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negative ideas that are probably not true. Often the terms used against them would better fit their

parents, but the young people are not aware of that. Children grow up surrounded by people who

are two, three, and five times their size. To a child of four or five, parents appear to be giants.

One of the hardest things for young people to realize in dealing with their families is that

their parents are only people after all. Children sometimes see their parents as gaint in a physical

sense and feel at the mercy of these huge creatures. Besides physical size, young people often feel

that their parents are intellectul giants as well. To a small chil, both mother and father have had so

much experience in living that they can do no wrong, that everything they do and think and feel is

not only right, but exactly right. The parents assume an aura of omniscience; that is, they seem to

know everything and understand everything, especially what is going on in their child 's mind.

It is a small wonder, then, that when parents begin to squabble and fight it is hard for young

people to understand that it may be the fault of their mother or father or both. When this kind of

trouble begins, the young people tend to believe it is their fault. Somehow, they believe, they have

done something wrong and that is why their parents are squabbling. They feel that they haven 't been

good enough. They get the impression that if only they ahd done the right thing, the trouble never

would have come up. They look into themselves and try to find ways in which they have behaved

badly. They try to handle things Robinson 4

differently. If the arguments and fights continue, they try even harder to search their souls to

discover how they have gone wrong and caused the difficulty.

When family squabbling reaches the point of physical violence, the child may be

overwhelmed. When the child is an adolescent, he or she sometimes tries to intervene physically

between the parents, feeling guilty and therefore responsible for stopping the trouble. Although

young people are not responsible for their parents ' troubles, they are ultimately responsible for their

own happiness; if they can find a way to get someone else to dampen the fires of their parents ' anger,

they can heko themselves as well.

The biblical injunction "Honor thy father and mother" is frequently disobeyed both

emotionally and mentally. Unfortunately, the same thing occurs when physical violence is directed

against parents. It is relatively unsurprising these das to read stories in the newspaper about parents

who abuse their small children, but it is rare that one reads or hears about young people attacking

their parents. There are cases in which adolescents have assaulted their parents. Such incidents can

be avoided if the situation is understood.

It is essential to understand that problems of family violence are potentially the moost

destructive in our society. They create long-term damage that sometimes goes from one generation

to the next. But most important, they can be avoided. If you are aware of such a problem in your

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involving a friend or relative, it is important for you to deal with it. You are not being squealer or

a stool pigeon when you do so. You are serving the family, the friends, the people you love the most

when you try to help them. It is much the same as if you were the first to see a fire in a theater. To

do nothing would be a crime. To start to deal with the fire before it spreads is the obvious course

of action. That is the same kind of action that must be taken in family violence. Doing the right

thing may seem hard sometimes, but in the long run it is easier than doing nothing. It is easier than

living with a guilty conscience. It is easier than observing the tragic results of inactivity in later

years.

It has been said that evil flourishes when good men sit idly by. Violence is evil, and it will

flourish if the good people among us don 't do anything to counteract it. The reader of this paper

obviously wants to do good, or he or she wouldn 't have picked yo the paper in the first place. If you

can act upon these principles, you will ensure for yourself a sense of well-being and tranquility.

You may also help others now and for generations in the future.

Work Cited

Kurland, Morton L. Coping with Family Violence. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group,

Inc., 1986.

Cited: Kurland, Morton L. Coping with Family Violence. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 1986.