The emotional abuse of our children
Teachers, schools, and the sanctioned violence of our modern institutions
I want to start this article by doing a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you are in a group of twenty people. In that twenty people there is a defined leader and that leader is responsible for motivating you, teaching you, and otherwise organizing group activities. Things are going along OK, but then at some point the group leader decides that they are not happy with the activities of the group. Some of you are going to the bathroom too much, some of you are too easily distracted, and others are simply not following the rules. You, in particular, are a problem for the group leader and so in an attempt to control your behavior and enforce “the rules,” the group leader singles you out and forces you to sit in the middle of the group on the floor for a week.
Forms of emotional abuse: ISOLATION — Physical confinement; limiting freedom within a person’s environment. The group leader says it is for your own good and that it will teach you life skills, but for you it is an emotional horror show. I mean, can you imagine the emotions that you would feel? Singled out in a group of twenty, publicly labeled as a loser too stupid to follow the rules, the subject of derisive and degrading attention, isolated, even terrorized by the psychological horror, you would be traumatized for a long period, maybe for life. And this would be true even if the group you were in was relatively supportive. Even if they downplayed the social isolation and public shaming, you would still feel it at a deep level. We are social beings after all and as the great Robert Merton said, we get our self-image in part by the way others see us. And if we think others are seeing us as some stupid loser (which is the intent of socially isolating someone in this fashion) then that is how we are going to see ourselves. And that cannot help but have a negative, disturbing, impact on us.
Forms of emotional abuse: DEGRADATION — Of course, chances are the “classroom” you happen to be in is not so supportive. Your illustrious leader has isolated you and degraded you in front of his or her charges, and they are likely to do the same. Human beings, children, adults, learn what is modeled to them. If the authority figure models isolation, degradation, and abuse, chances are that the people watching are going to do it to. Sadly even when you leave the confines of the classroom, even when you leave isolation and re-enter the social fabric, degradation is going to follow you. This means that the deep psychological, emotional, even spiritual trauma of the initial event is going to be revisited on you over, and over, and over again. If this sounds like hell on Earth, you would be right. Even adults buckle and break under the abuse of degradation. And it has just gotten worse. Adults model emotional abuse to children, and children take the hammer and bring it down even harder. New social media like Facebook has made emotional and psychological terror a ubiquitous, and, sadly, inescapable, phenomena.
Forms of emotional abuse: REJECTION — Refusing to acknowledge a person’s presence, value or worth; communicating (by word, deed, or example) to a person that she or he is useless or inferior; devaluing her/his thoughts and feelings. Of course, the sad thing is, it is a lot worse than just your personal feelings about it. The reality is most groups would not be supportive. A lot of psychological research in the sixties (look up Zimbardo’s prison experiments) showed very clearly just how ugly it could get for people who are publicly separated and isolated. People, even close friends and family, turn on you when an authority figure labels, isolates, and rejects. There can be a snowball effect. First, you sit in the middle of the room and feel bad, while the authority figures treats you with derision and disrespect. Then the people around you start to treat you differently. They laugh and point fingers and find other ways to isolate and exclude you. They avoid you at recess/coffee break, talk behind your back, titter and laugh and extend the boundaries created by the initial isolation. Pretty soon you become a bonafide social pariah, avoided by all and excluded by many. From a social control perspective, the whole things works very well because having experienced that kind of trauma once, you will never want to go through it again, and so for sure you will jump into line and tap along with the tune provided (either that or you will conform to the anti-authoritarian stereotype). But of course, once you have been labeled and humiliated, rejected and degraded the long-term emotional damage is done. All that is left to do is find a good therapist.
Talking about it now you can see, it just cannot be a good thing and as an adult experiencing something like that you would probably (hopefully) recognize the abuse for what it was and leave the group. I’d certainly encourage it. Research (see below) shows that people who experience emotional abuse have problems with anger, attachment, bonding, emotional responsiveness, and have problems applying even basic social skills. How damaging would that kind of public isolation and rejection be for you if you put up with it? So if you are experiencing something like that, get up and walk away. And if you see someone else experiencing it, stand up and challenge the behavior.
Forms of emotional abuse: PUBLIC HUMILIATION — Exposing a person to unwanted attention; using social exposure to manipulate and control; encouraging others to exclude and harass. Now of course, saying it like this makes a solution to the problem seem relatively easy, just get up and walk away. But now imagine that the team leader has authority over you. Imagine that your group leader had the power to confine you to that “box” in front of twenty of your friends and colleagues. It would be bad enough to begin with, but it would be even worse under conditions of force and duress. Not only could you not get up and leave no matter how you were feeling, but all the negative emotions would be amplified to that point that even a tough, independent, adult might succumb to the damaging effects of the abuse. It is not even too much to say that a sensitive adult may experience post-traumatic stress. After all, being shamed in a public space is a traumatic event by any standards.
The outcome of emotional abuse: Emotional abuse of children can result in serious emotional and behavioral problems, including depression, lack of attachment or emotional bond to a parent or guardian, low cognitive ability, and educational achievement, and poor social skills. One study which looked at emotionally abused children in infancy and then again during their preschool years consistently found them to be angry, uncooperative and unattached to their primary caregiver. The children also lacked creativity, persistence, and enthusiasm. Indeed, children who experience rejection are more likely than accepted children to exhibit hostility, aggressive or passive-aggressive behavior, to be extremely dependent, to have negative opinions of themselves and their abilities, to be emotionally unstable or unresponsive, and to have a negative perception of the world around them.
So, if you are following along with me now, you probably think that this form of bald-faced abuse of power and authority is something that we, as a civilized modern society, should be able to do without. There are lots of ways to motivate people without resorting to either physical or emotional abuse. In fact, as anybody with a clue will tell you (for a summary of the research that will give you a clue, see this article), physical and emotional abuse are horrible motivators leading to far more problems than they solve.
Imagine now that we take this box thing and do it to children in school. Imagine you have a twelve-year-old daughter and imagine the teacher has threatened that child that if they do not behave and live up to expectations, they are going to have to sit on the floor for a week. You remember what school is like, and how horrible children can be to each other. I imagine that a psychologically and emotionally defenseless child would be TERRORIZED by even the thought of that sort of public display and humiliation. You can imagine the damage done should the child actually be forced, by the teacher, to submit to the public humiliation. Self-esteem would take a hit, their social network would probably crumble, and the effects would no doubt trickle out into the schoolyard in ways too innumerable to enumerate in this short article. Schools have a hard enough time dealing with bullying to begin with without teachers painting a target on a child’s back in this fashion.
Now I know what you are saying, no school would ever do something like this. I mean, we now know that emotional abuse is bad, and we know that isolation, rejection, and public shaming is emotionally abusive, and we would never allow our teachers to engage in it.
Shockingly, however, emotional abuse is a problem in school. As a parent, I have had to go to bat for my kids several times. For example, when my son’s was in grade one, a teacher put his name on a board and publicly humiliated him for not doing his work properly. When I told her that her public humiliation was making him feel bad, all she could say was that if he wanted to avoid the bad feelings, he’d have to perform to her expectations.
I was shocked that she seemed so unconcerned about his feelings, and when I pointed this out to the principal, and when I said that as an adult post-secondary teacher it was against the law for me to even post student ID numbers in a public space because I was not allowed to violate their right to privacy and safety, he said that the classroom was hardly a public space. But of course, it is a public space! Not only does everybody in the school get to see how my son is doing, but parents of the kids that go to the school can have a look as well, so I do not know where he got his “not a public space” comment, ’cause clearly it is.
And that is not even the worst of it you know. When she was in grade five, my daughter came home from school one day and said that her teacher told her that if she didn’t perform as expected, she might lose her desk “privileges” and have to sit on the floor for a week.
I am not kidding.
If my twelve-year-old daughter cannot “make the rent” in her classroom, her teacher is going to identify, isolate, ridicule, and publicly humiliate her by taking away her desk and forcing her to sit on the floor in the midst of thirty of her school-age peers.
And while her teacher says that it probably won’t be a problem for my daughter, I am horrified nonetheless that even the threat has been issued. I mean, this same teacher, and this school principal, would never ever in a million years think they could pull a stunt like this with adults.
Can you imagine how upset the teaching staff of the school would be if I put their names and pictures here, put them in a box in public, and held them up for public shaming and ridicule? Furious they’ll be. I am sure it will be bad enough that I have just pointed at them in this fashion, so why are the feelings of our children so irrelevant that they do not even register on their radar?
Frankly, I feel sorry for the three kids she’s done it to in the past. I mean, I have read the research, I am aware of how profoundly damaging something like this can be and frankly I am shocked that professional teachers seem unaware of basic psychological research. I hate being such a boisterous critic, but this is important. The research shows this kind of thing undermines creativity, damages productivity, and causes all sorts of mental, emotional, social, and behavioral problems (for a summary of the research, see this article).
As a society we are always looking for ways to save money, so if these practices undermine our global competitiveness and cost us in terms of damaged creativity, lower productivity, and the cash dollars it takes to deal with social problems, then on those grounds alone we should be up in arms over this kind of nonsense. If you ask me though, protecting our kids from psychological and emotional harm is reason enough.
Bottom line?
If our education system is turning out teachers and administrators who do not think twice about emotionally abusing our children, and if as parents we cannot see that abuse, and do not stand up to stop it, then we as a society, got a problem.
Further Reading
