Having children is a privilege

After a life of frequent beatings, four-year old Stephen Vaccaro was finally beaten to death. One can imagine his small body quivering with fear at the sight of his abuser or the sound of his abuser’s voice. That was over 30 years ago - and the horror is still stuck in my memory.

It was a finding of the Vaccaro inquiry that at some stage or other, a total of 19 individuals (both officials and laypersons) had the opportunity to intervene on the defenseless boy’s behalf, but failed to do so.

And there lies the sad truth - those 19 people were enmeshed in a culture which did not accept that regardless of any worthy attribute, a society which fails its children is an unequivocal failure.

In the more than 30 years since Vaccaro’s death, several children have been killed, and tens of thousands have been left with lifelong physical and psychological health problems due to having unfit parents.

We have been talking about child abuse for over two centuries. Dorothy Scott in 2007 advised that if we do not attack the child abuse problem at its sources, we will still be talking about it two centuries from now. However, she described a background to the abuse which is beyond our capacity to change:

As long as we tolerate poverty, poor housing, the marginalisation of indigenous people, family violence, alcohol and drug abuse, problem gambling and the sexualisation of children, increasing numbers of children will suffer.

So if child abuse is inexcusable under any circumstance; and we have environments in which children are at a high risk of being abused; and we cannot do anything effective about those environments - then why allow people to bring children into them in the first place?

As the explanation of the abuser is invariably; “I just snapped”, should a newborn ever be permitted to enter a domestic environment which is exceptionally vulnerable to being stressed? If the bottom line is that no battering of small children is tolerable under any circumstances, then society can act in two ways:

• we could directly move the newborn at a high risk, from the maternity unit to a safe home; or
• we could interfere with the biological ability of a high-risk person to be a parent.

The first possibility has been identified as a real option and already has a history. During the years of the Stolen Generation, probably an equal number of unmarried, young, white mothers were not permitted to take their babies home from the hospital. Some were placed with foster parents - and had good lives - while others were left to face the experience of being a ward of the state. As wards of the state, many were not safe.

Should the second possibility also be identified as an option? We cannot answer this question if we cannot even begin to talk about it. After receiving the Wood Report into child abuse on November 24, 2008, the New South Wales government promised early intervention. But, no one in government or the law dares to mention the earliest of possible interventions - sterilisation.

Popular opinion does not concur. When I have suggested to my friends and relatives that some people should be sterilised, everyone has agreed - and yet it is a timid agreement - as if someone may be listening. The establishment (parliament and the media) has deemed that all discussion on sterilisation to be off limits.

Science supports the opinion of the silent majority

How many of us have idiosyncrasies we cannot get on top of because our mothers were highly stressed while pregnant? Science is only starting to move into this study. However, we do know that a fetus exposed to low oxygen or toxic substances due to irresponsible pre-natal care can have a life ahead of it which will be at a physical or mental disadvantage in a competitive society.

We also know with almost certainty that subconscious memories begin to be laid down from birth. Signals coming up from that hidden stratum will influence an individual’s behaviour for life. (Even not being picked up enough in the first year of life can create life-long problems.)

There is a critical stage in the growth of a child when the brain is very plastic. An area called the nucleus basalis is permanently switched on enabling effortless learning (due to extraordinarily enhanced powers of attention). That critical first decade is the most important period of our lives.

Mandatory sterilisation recognises that the abuse can begin from conception. Even if not battered to death, the mental and physical damage to a surviving child can be permanent.

The plastic brain molded within a chaotic environment

We have citizens who are balancing on the dividing line between civilisation and the jungle. They are males with self-control problems who are almost permanently living on welfare. The mothers of their children are women who are stuck at a low socio-economic level and who go from one hopeless relationship to another in a fruitless search for commitment and support.

Our culture permits people who cannot manage their own lives the freedom to take on the greatest responsibility any person can undertake; the bringing of another human being into the world. It is a freedom to take the plastic mind of an infant and hard-wire into it neural networks which will generate life-long emotional dysfunction. It is a freedom to release one’s fury in not being able to cope with life’s stresses by battering a defenseless human body as if it was an inanimate object.

While “our leaders” spend decades intellectualising social problems in some academic stratosphere, the misery continues to occur unabated at ground level. Then our courts finally pass down sanctimonious judgments “in the best interests of the child” after the damage has become irreparable.

Behavioural scientists tell us that the great majority of long-term inmates in our multi-billion dollar prison system would not be there if they had not been abused as children. In other words; the inmates committed crimes against society because society had previously allowed crimes to be committed against them.

Implementing the radical move to mandatory sterilisation may not be as difficult as it may first appear. Men who tend to live from day to day typically have no concept of long-term consequences of actions. Consequently, a monetary compensation for a mandatory vasectomy may result in little resistance to it. Mandatory tubule ligation of women (such as drug-addicts) who clearly cannot provide a secure environment for a child would not be necessary as it is the high-risk man who almost invariably cause such women to become pregnant.

Summary

We are living with uncontrollable child abuse, as we have not set a bottom line. Once a genuine bottom line is set, then, by the definition of “bottom line”, whatever means it takes to keep from stepping over that line must be taken.

Footnote: Responses to the two most likely objections to sterilisation

(1) Any practice which changes the structure of human tissue in unwilling people must be totally unacceptable in a civilised society.

There are occasions when the public at large in “civilised society” could not care less.

The Vietnam War was a useless, dishonourable, and destructive war in which the state conscripted unwilling young Australians to place their bodily tissue in a position where it could be restructured by bullets and shrapnel. The political party responsible for that conscription continued to be re-elected

Under the Mental Health Act, you can be held down while a drug is injected into you which, when done on a regular basis, can permanently affect your brain structure. In this country, we are partially destroying minds so that we can control them. We are doing this simply because we do not have the resources for psychotherapy.

Abortion is a surgical procedure, and there are shades of grey in what is supposed to be free choice. Pregnant women are now tested for Down ’s syndrome. If the result is positive, the woman almost invariably undergoes the necessary surgery. But how would her husband, family and friends treat her if she changed her mind?

(2) Children are abused at all socio-economic levels. There would be a tendency to focus on the lowest which would be discriminatory. There could even be the sterilisation of Indigenous men on a mass scale.

Simply being devalued can have devastating emotional affects on a child. This occurs at all socio-economic levels. Sexual abuse can also occur at every socio-economic level. But, it is on the lowest socio-economic level where there is the greatest domestic stress and where the most brutal violence is almost exclusively occurring. In this situation, discrimination is the lesser evil.

While there is now debate over what is fact, the establishment’s fear that the close supervision of Indigenous communities would appear discriminatory, may have left Indigenous children open to being sexually abused on an almost incomprehensible scale.

Those who raise the possibility of mass sterilisation of a particular class of people are the types who feel wise when they point to worst-case scenarios which in reality have a near-zero probability of occurring. The introduction of limited and highly selective mandatory sterilisation would likely be enough to set other wheels of change into motion - which have been in need of a kick-start.