I start off this week’s piece with a little checklist—tangential reference in the title that makes sense to only a select few, check; intro ramble, check; quota completed for the week, check; no diddling kids, check.
If only everyone could have that super basic and easy task on their daily checklist, I wouldn’t have had to make this commentary this week; but alas, Fun Land is still operating even if it may be at a decreased capacity.
For those who do not recognize Fun Land at the Cereal Convention, this week, we have reports that child abuse rates in the Cordillera region have gone down (good news) but remain at a triple-digit count at 284 (bad news).
And the most blood-boiling part of these statistics other than the mere fact that there’s still 284 of these incidents (that we know of; child abuse is up there alongside sexual violence in the categories of crimes that go woefully underreported), is that one of them even involved a two-year-old. A [redacted] two-year old! What sick and twisted cruelty is in the head of someone who would do such a thing?
It isn’t often that I advocate for harsher punishment but this feels appropriate; there are some crimes that can be justified even if they are still to be punished—e.g. theft as a symptom of socioeconomic inequality and desperation, as a matter of survival. But there is not a single justification, not a single moment of desperation, of life and death, that requires you to abuse a child!
I doubt it is a hot take, a controversial opinion to say that we should protect and raise our children properly as a community. How does the saying go? It takes a village to raise a child?
So, my extremely cold, frigid take is that we should redouble our efforts to protect and raise our children well. No diddling the kids should be a rule so basic that it shouldn’t even be said; but clearly there are at least 284 cases where this super basic rule wasn’t followed.
Moreso than harsh punishments, the systems need to be in place for the protection of children to ensure that there need not be punishment in the first place.
This requires effort on the community’s part more than it does the law enforcement; they cannot move until there is valid reason, until there is casus belli, and when they do manage to do their job, it is too late—the child has been harmed, and healing will take years, if not a lifetime.
No, more important is that we do not allow the situations to go there in the first place. This means establishing a safe space for our children, and very importantly, listening to them—how many children have been hurt, only to run to people they thought they could trust, who then let them down and allowed the abuse to happen?
The tale of hidden abuse is as old as time; people hiding their skeletons in their closets to save face, to preserve their reputation, to not tear apart their family unit. But a family whose cohesion is founded on the pardoning of abuse is not a family that should stay together.
