Abuse again

I never imagined that my first two blog entries would soon dovetail as neatly as they have in the past week.

A 54 year old mother of twelve from Ramat Bet Shemesh, presumably the leader of the Burqa cult, has been arrested and indicted for abusing and neglecting her children and for failing to intervene in their incestuous conduct. Once again, poor children have allegedly suffered at the hands of a strictly religious, observant mother who also happens to be a sadist. It boggles the mind.

And since then, more tales of child abuse have surfaced in Israel nearly every other day, most involving chareidi parents. There are so many aspects to this story it's hard to decide where to begin.

Perhaps, for starters, the refusal of the chareidi leaders and rabbis to condemn physical punishment of children deserves a few lines of attention. When, in 2000, Israel's High Court issued a decision declaring any capital punishment by parents, including spanking, to be a crime, we had a high-profile chareidi apologist screaming foul. He devoted an entire column in the Jerusalem Post to the defense of parental hitting of children on moral and halachic grounds.

His rant was so riddled with illogic it would take too long to pick it apart point by point. I'll just bring a couple of salient quotes:

"No one ever became an alcoholic without taking one drink but that hardly mandates Prohibition."

Then he gets all religious on us, as if spanking is next to G-dliness. So he offers the classic drivel with which spanking is defended:

"The Torah view is that the parent-child relationship is the model for our relationship with G-d... Children learn from their parents that they are subject to rule, and some authority commands respect... the sole justification for punishing a child is the desire to help him grow to become the best possible person he can..."

And on and on.

These lovers of spankings can't seem to comprehend that eliminating physical punishment from our parenting tool-box does not mean an end to discipline or boundaries. There are myriad ways of achieving precisely what that apologist spoke of without violating our children's bodies. The sole reason that hitting children is so accepted is that it is easy (we are after all bigger and stronger than them), gets immediate - though temporary - results and boy does it release the anger effectively.

In January, 2007, we heard Rabbi Halperin declare at a conference in Jerusalem that "a light tap" of a child by a parent is permitted "if followed up with a hug." Parents clearly didn't need his encouragement to lay hands on their children, not to mention thoroughly confuse them with a follow-up hug. They seem to be "tapping" (that was a new euphemism for me) just fine all on their own, thank you very much.

Now I know that if figures of authority would discourage the practice it wouldn't disappear. But at least many would start to think twice from time to time before hitting. And it along with outright abuse - a corollary of spanking - might finally diminish as well.

Another dim-witted defender of parental hitting is some rabbi with a video on the Aish site who triumphantly cites a poll that found most CEO's of top US corporations were spanked as children. Well, with such scientifically sound data against me, I'd better just rest my case. I could go on railing, and fully intend to in my next entry.