There are two things that I want to convey to the world more than anything. One is that the initiation of force is always wrong. Second is that violence (spanking, hitting, beating, smacking) against children is the worst form of the initiation of force.
Lost Liberty Cafe published a great article about how children are the only class that is still unprotected.
“A hundred years ago it was considered a novel idea for the law to say you couldn’t hit your wife. Today, we can’t hit slaves, wives or military personnel. Children are the only class that is unprotected.” …read the rest here.
I really recommend this article to anyone who agrees that the initiation of violence is wrong. There is no better way to practice what you preach than to protect children from violence.
Tags: children, PhilosophyRSS, violence
September 3rd, 2009 at 6:42 am
I definitely agree. I can imagine myself (wrongly) hitting a peer if they made me angry enough, but I don’t think anything could conceivabley make me hit a child, even at my all-time psychological lowest. Children have absolutely no recourse to defend themselves or retaliate. I would put hitting a child significantly lower morally than hitting a woman. You hear the “it’s my child, I’ll raise it my way” defense a lot. If anything hitting your own child is even worse, as someone else’s child could complain to their own parents and have them deal with you! You’re really putting your own children in an impossibly helpless situation by physically abusing them.
I’ve noticed the improportional amount of concern parents in Western society have for the physical protection of children from outsiders, compared to how careless they seem to be in regards to the damage that *they* can do to them, either physically or emotionally/psychologically (and of course the first would be included in the second).
It’s a little known fact that the suicide rate is significantly higher than the murder rate. My amateur educated guess is that the influence of their parents had a lot to do with many of those suicides. The threats to your child’s life are broader than they seem.