Blows as an educational tool
Sparing the rod, apparently, is not a policy in the Caribbean as UN studies find rampant child abuse.
Disturbing new data released by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reveal that Caribbean children and teenagers under 18 suffer daily physical or psychological abuse, mainly from their parents. To compound the problem, a high percentage of Caribbean adults believe that the abuse they dish out to their children is a normal means of education and socialisation.
Surveys in several Caribbean countries conclude that a high percentage of adults – as high as 80% or more in some territories – consider it natural to resort to maltreatment, including physical punishment, to impose discipline on their children.
The unsettling data is included in the article ‘Child Abuse: A Painful Reality Behind Closed Doors,’ published in the ECLAC and UNICEF bulletin Challenges No. 9, which examines the progress made in attaining the Millennium Development Goals with regard to children and adolescents.
According to the authors of the study, psychologist Soledad Larrain and sociologist Carolina Bascunan, both of UNICEF, the main risk factor that perpetuates domestic violence against children is the fact that the mothers or fathers also suffered similar experience during childhood. “This is called the phenomenon of inter-generational transmission of violence,” the article said.
Larrain and Bascunan further explained that violence is understood as the intentional use of force or physical power, real or threatened, causing, or having high probabilities of causing injury, death, psychological damage, development disorders or deprivation.
Despite efforts made by Governments and NGOs in almost all Caribbean territories, the region has yet to develop an effective response against child abuse. The article lists the main difficulty in doing so as “the lack of information on its real dimension and nature, especially when it occurs within the home, because it is not usually reported, and when it is, only a fraction of the cases are actually punished by law.”
Experts recommend giving priority to prevention and early intervention with the assistance of all institutions dealing with minors, and the collection of precise and reliable data as important first steps to effectively combat child abuse.
In Trinidad and Tobago, there has been focus on setting up a children’s authority to deal with abuse.
Many NGOs have been calling for this as they set up homes to deal with disadvantaged children.
Corporal punishment has been outlawed in schools since the early 1960s: ironically, this policy has been partly blamed for the indiscipline among secondary school students.