R: Unusual first or given names of children whohavebeenphysically abused or neglected. -Reply

["Oddone Virginio" <oddovir@xxxxxxxxx>]

I ask permission to quote the "Esanda" and the other funny names I've read
in some of the postings on this subject. Here in Italy we have a somewhat
similar phenomenon, with a difference: the "unusual first name" is here
usually interpreted by social workers as a marker not so much of abuse, as
instead of the risk of the whole family of becoming a "service client"
("utente"), thus a multiproblem one. This "strangeness" of the names in
Italy can be evaluated statistically, since there are many researches -
both at local and national level - on the evolution of italian "first
names" by Emidio De Felice (last book: "Nomi e Cultura", Marsilio, 1987), a
glottologist of the University of Genoa. He showed that italian names, from
about 10,000 until 1960, then shrank, with only about 300 having high or
average frequency; those actually used are about 1,000 in all; he gives the
statistical frequency of each, so that the "deviation" from the "average"
of each name can be objectively evaluated, without fear of ethnocentrism
and other dangerous "-isms". I don't know of researches about che naming
choices of "marginal" and multiproblem italian families, but checking in
the book I found that choices I knew about fell generally in the least
frequent names (besides, italian law forbids using trivial names, such
those of a beer etc.), those from which the majority of parents, of any
social class, would refrain. This appears, however, to be a relatively
recent phenomenon, since until the late Sixties, children were christened
in Italy according to local and family traditions, which varied enormously
from one area to another.

I think that this strangeness, in all our countries, has to do more with
the evolution of local variations of what Oscar Lewis once called the
"Culture of Poverty", than with child abuse in itself. I would also say, on
experience, that the names of the severely abused (physically) or killed
children, here in Turin, tend to be relatively "normal"; the unusual ones
being instead linked to neglect.

Virginio


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



----------
> Da: Michael Ryan <MichaeR2@nch.edu.au>
> A: Child Maltreatment Researchers  
<CHILD-MALTREATMENT-RESEARCH-L@cornell.edu>
> Oggetto: Re: Unusual first or given names of children
whohavebeenphysically abused or neglected. -Reply
> Data: gioved“ 6 maggio 1999 0.12
> 
> Tom,  How about Esanda. When I asked mother
> how she came to give this name to her child , she
> replied  "It was the ES&A Bank [English Scottish
> and Australian Bank] that gave the family it's first
> home loan.
> 
> Michael Ryan.
> 
> -------------------------------
>