Greg Correll believes that Kansas proposed new law on corporal punishment will sanction and increase child abuse. Here’s why.
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Dear Kansas
You are trying to legalize the systematic, unmonitored beating of children.
I grew up in Kansas. It was the fifties and early sixties. My parents had permission to do as they saw fit. They saw fit to inflict pain. I felt hopeless growing up. No one would or could help us.
The abuse was excessive and incessant. My father used a belt and his fists, and not a month of my childhood passed without him using them on me, on all of us. No one could or would stop them.
What is excessive? Incessant? too hard, too many, too often—delimited how? defined how? Without oversight, and no fear of condemnation or risk of discovery, you would turn beautiful Kansas into a house of pain.
Where is the science behind the “positive effects” of beating children?
No one will be able to control them, the people you permit to hit. Many will not stop themselves, or want to. All will do it wrong sometimes, and go too far.
For every parent who beats his child to death, another hundred kids wish it would all be over. The graveyard is full of little boys and girls who found a way to finish the job, later, with drugs and alcohol, with anything they could devise. Most never knew why. Hard luck cases.
Here’s what being beaten and punished with impunity for eleven years did to me.
- I feel worthless, dead, and empty. I feel numb. When I feel anything I feel dread. I am fifty-eight and I wasn’t always like this. I had good years, back when my self-deception and fog were still operational, back when I had a noble duty to perform: do right by my children.
- Now I am dead already, most days. No pills or therapy ever reach this. I am in touch with my feelings, not in denial, able to cope, know who the president is and the date. I have keen insight and articulate understandings. It’s all for shit. Hopeless is hardwired in me. I fear everyone. I fear being touched. I trust almost no one, and no one completely.
- It’s back, and it never goes away. It has made me hypervigilant about my dystonias and movement disorders, making them much worse. As I get older my defenses crumble. I lose every kindness I thought was in me toward my parents, all my generosity and understanding, what had cost so much to admit and allow them. It’s broken shards and dry dust. I used bad materials.
- All forgiveness from afar fails, even the heartfelt and necessary forgiveness that makes you a mensch. You end up old, looking for a large rock to throw. You make plans to expose them, or kill yourself. This becomes routine.
- A motto is burned into my heart, and that of my brother: it will always go bad. Always.
- Sooner or later Dad comes home and the list is given to him. Sooner or later he takes off the belt or slaps or pinches or punches or ridicules or forces us, his hands tight on our skinny arms.
- Sooner or later my happy home, my job, my marriage, my health, my happiness, my good name, will smithereen, be stripped from me. Sooner or later what I deserve comes. Sooner or later is always today. But if it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow.
- Everyone seems happy. I hate everyone.
- I want to shock my beloved children, wake them from the dream life I made for them. I don’t understand why they are not swooning with joy, every single minute of every day, with the lives they have. Each year that voice inside becomes more shrill, more urgent, and the stories I want to tell them get closer to the bone.
- I want them to understand. I want them to have happy, brilliant, joyous lives. I worked doubles for twenty years to guarantee it. Now, as it all comes to pass, I want to roar in their ears like a hurricane, lift them to the heights, show them what it was, what fear is, what it means to need and pity and hate, to live in terror of Mommy and Daddy, every day.
- I was supposed to fail, to die, to abuse my own kids, to keep it going. The reward for not doing so is my three grown daughters, the ordinary beauty of their fearless lives, the hope and energy they have every day.
- It’s not enough.
- What the fuck? Not enough? Rage and grief are all I feel now, as I finally try to sort this out. I look at them and hate their happiness. My greatest joy, the accomplishment of my life, is them. I want them to understand it was all a dream, to me. Now that they are safely grown, real life is back. I want what they have. I want to be them, for just five minutes.
- I live on fumes, momentum, the effort I made after I buried that sad boy, and became constructive and loving for my children. They don’t need me now. And that deep burial turns out to be a shallow grave, and empty. He wasn’t gone, just biding his time.
- I used to benefit from Klonepin, when all this went off the rails last year. Now I cannot stand to be alive without it.
What was the worst physical pain you ever felt as a child? Now imagine your mom does that to you. Your dad. And they say they are helping you. More pain, more help.
Some days when they’re irritated or angry or too hot they will indulge themselves and find the satisfaction that comes from overpowering another. No human is immune to it, once we hand over the belt.
Permission to punish creates the politics of pain. Pain is your currency. Everyone is in your debt. They owe you suffering. It ruins everyone.
I don’t deserve this, to be possessed by it all over again, to feel afresh the full measures of loss and neglect and assault. But it’s the way it works. The pain of knowing it never gets fixed, knowing they got away with it. never goes away.
I deserve this, to be possessed by it all over again, to feel afresh the full measures of loss and neglect and assault, knowing it will never get fixed. Because I am useless, stupid, a moron, a waste of space, retarded, hopeless, absent-minded, not listening, disobedient. Because I spilled his soda. Because I stood next to my brother when he laughed at my Dad. Because I have two good legs and Dad has one. Because I disappoint.
♦◊♦
I call him every few years. My father calmly told me over the phone, a year ago, that “you kids got exactly what you deserved.” He shoved brussel sprouts down my throat with a fork when I was seven. He played a game called pin Mom against the garage with the car. He broke my finger with his cane, in cold blood. He added to every belting if we cried. We got a belting for anything, for leaving the dandelion pile on the side of the driveway. It was relentless.
We deserved this? A runaway at fourteen in 1969, he left me in jail for six weeks. Week four I was put in a room with three boys and raped for five nights, forced to go along. I deserved this? He could have taken me out at any time prior to the hearing. I told him several years ago it was bad in jail. “I was attacked”. He said “well you make your bed, you have to lie in it.”
I need therapy. I need to be held for a week. I need to be committed for my own safety.
To die and not be in pain anymore.
No. I need a large rock. And a bus ticket to his little seaside palace in Florida.
That’s what your law permitting punishment produces, the genie whose bottle you would smash. Hatred. Pain. Revenge. Suicide. Decent men and women who cannot escape what was done to them and spend their whole lives suffering. That’s the legacy.
You are not passing a law to permit a single wise and prudent smack on the rear end when a kid sticks a pen in a power outlet. We don’t need a law for that. We don’t need special protection for Christians or anyone else who want to get their kids attention once or twice in a decade, to keep them safe. If that’s what this is about.
You are passing a law to turn constrained men and women into monsters.
You approve of beatings with this bill. Regular and sustained assault. That’s what it becomes. Overnight. Inflicting pain is an addiction. 100% of those who do it succumb. You are telling them to hit small children and feel good about it.
I saw his face. He liked it. I saw her face. She liked it.
You are about to ruin tens of thousands of lives, sentence children to a lifetime of pain and illness. You can’t do this.
I need to find a big rock.
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Originally published on Open Salon
Image: Greg Correll, rvoegtli/flickr
Thank you KatyD for you r kind words and honesty. I am sorry you have the doubt about your own parenting. That feeling stuck w two of my siblings, who didn’t marry either. We might not know ourselves quite as well as non-abused people. We might be wrong about our parent worthiness or unworthiness—but so many who were beaten or neglected or ridiculed know this is a healthy concern, if the rest is confused, so they opt out. One of my siblings shouldn’t have, one should, another never will and last one was redeemed by being a splendid parent. But… Read more »
Holy shit this is powerful. Thank you. My parents believed in spanking, usually with an open hand, but one episode that is still burned into my brain 40 years later occurred when I was five, and I jumped on my bed until the frame broke. Yeah, a stupid (and expensive) thing to do, but little kids do stupid things. When my dad got home from work and saw what happened, he yelled for me to come to my room, where he proceeded to hit my bare bottom five times with a belt, hard enough to leave bruises. It hurt to… Read more »
Thank you KatyD for you r kind words and honesty. I am sorry you have the doubt about your own parenting. That feeling stuck w two of my siblings, who didn’t marry either. We might not know ourselves quite as well as non-abused people. We might be wrong about our parent worthiness or unworthiness—but so many who were beaten or neglected or ridiculed know this is a healthy concern, if the rest is confused, so they opt out. One of my siblings shouldn’t have, one should, another never will and last one was redeemed by being a splendid parent. But… Read more »