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Pastor Response
Every child witness of abuse carries profound wounds into their adult years and this is enough of a tragedy in itself. But studies have also shown that approximately 32% of children who have witnessed abuse also exhibit particularly high levels of aggressive behaviour. Other studies have shown that between 40% and 50% of men who act abusively have witnessed abuse in their home during their childhood. Another study found that over 50% of young offenders charged with violent crimes had been exposed to domestic violence as children.
Early victimization, including physical, sexual and emotional abuse, plays a primary role in sending them through the door of the juvenile justice system and from there into the adult penal system.
These are circumstances, which form the memories and models that fill the empty space of their lost childhood, and these are the same circumstances that will shape their adult life.
In The Brothers Karamazov Alyosha says:
“My dear children, you must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood or home. People talk to you a great deal about education, but some good sacred memory, preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education. If one carries many such memories into life, one is safe to the end of one’s days and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may be the means of saving us.”
The Very Rev. Robert Pynn Dean Emeritus Anglican Diocese of Calgary Calgary, Alberta
Pastor Response
The answer to this question lies in the poem. “Children Learn What They Live.”
What a child sees and hears becomes ingrained in them at an early age. As a former teacher, I have witnessed the effects violence plays on children. Little boys as young as five come to school with the mindset that all women are to be treated as they have seen their mothers, sisters and grandmothers treated. If they live in abusive households they carry that scene with them wherever they go and they pattern their own behavior by what they have seen at home.
As mothers, we not only teach our daughters how females should be treated but we also teach our sons. We have a responsibility to all children to live our lives in ways that promote wholesome relationships that edify one another and not tear each other down. The picture we paint for them will the one they carry with them and imitate in their own relationships.
Marguerite Lee
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