R: Child Discipline & Cultural Controversies

["Oddone Virginio" <oddovir@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was fascinated watching this flaring up of discussion about spanking and,
later on, about whether a good Child Abuse Researcher had to be parent too
or not. The latter was an accusation that had been hurled at me for the
first time in the early months of 1970, when I first came in contact with
child maltreatmen, by enraged mothers and - less frequently - fathers, and
later when I began working as a lay judge at the Turin's (Italy) Juvenile
Court. I always dismissed them as irrilevant, until my second child, my
daughter Gaja, reached 13 and entered a tsunami of adolescential emotional
turmoil. It was like being there, tending to your garden in a peaceful
sunny afternoon, and suddenly the Stukas come out of the sky shrieking with
bombs and fire: both my wife and I were left in shock, reason was shut from
our mind, only emotions - deep emotional turmoil - whirling inside and
between us. I suddenly found myself on the side of many of those parents I
had studied, or enquired as either a judge or a judiciary expert (here in
Italy experts are used, as elsewhere in Continental Europe, during the
enquiries by the Prosecution, or in later phases of the trial; we are not
just "expert witness", but we do also some kind of judicial work directly
on the persons), in the sense that I could not just "feel", but also
directly "see" things from their viewpoint. Things have settled,
fortunately, to a more ordinary teenager level of "uncertain weather"; but
I have started talking with other ordinary people I meet as a doctor, who
are parents with teenagers, or more generally for their experience as
parents; talking to them as an equal, not staring at them from above or -
at any rate - from "outside", and I found that the same things I knew from
a long time assumed a new tone, a new colour.

On a more methodological level, I would say that in the field of child
abuse we are still too strongly biased by our twin original birthmarks: the
"legalistic" and the "moral crusader". After all, we are not really ther in
order to "understand" the phenomenon, but mostly to "fight" it. We ought to
give more room to the anthropological dimension of "being parent". It is
like a doctor who ends as a patient: the experience doesn't mean anything
in terms of better scientific knowledge on, say, viruses; but it may help a
lot in understanding how a ward might better function and in knowing about
doctor-patient relationships.

Virginio Oddone
V. Avogadro 6
10121 - Torino
(Italy)
oddovir@ipsnet.it