There is much emotive propaganda against assisted dying and I want to expose here just exactly what the objections really are and the reasons for them.
We have seen recently various individuals talking on television on both sides of the debate. The opposition lobby seem, though, to be much more forceful and appear to have no scruples about the way they represent their argument. Terry Pratchett`s Dimbleby Lecture was incisive, well considered and persuasive, though when up against the thrust of our opponents, I feel the imperatives must be represented with equal strength, even if necessary statements are difficult to deliver.
I find myself wondering why the argument against assisted dying should be more ruthless than the argument for it? I have a sense that with a gathering momentum of public opinion supporting the plight of the terminally ill, the opponents feel considerable threat to their position and react as viciously as possible. After all, they are not only defending their point of view, but their egos and their unconscious guilt.
In this dynamic between the two sides, there is also an element of " parent- child" in the posture of one camp to the other. I have noticed in the last months how those against assisted dying assume the role of "parent" whilst those in favour of the argument are rendered "child" and I think that this reflects the power imbalance of the terminally ill against the healthy (we`ll come back to this in my next blog on this subject).
If you have been following my blogs thus far, you will know that I have discussed the compartmental conscience as a servant of guilt avoidance. I believe that those against assisted dying are in fact deploying their compartmental conscience both to defend themselves personally from guilt and against societies collective guilt in regard to the terminally ill. This guilt arises both because of the guilt associated with the inability to cure the terminally ill and restore their lives, but also because of the very driving argument that disallows the patient the right to determine their own lives.
It is indeed immoral to deprive the terminally ill of rights that are available to the rest of us .... and guilt is incurred serially for societies insistence upon treating weakened people like children who are incompetent to make their own decisions.
Guilt builds upon guilt, though, and personal and societal guilt at not being able to reverse terminal illness leads to disrespect. Somehow, depriving the dying of the right to choose how and when to die is a way of gaining control in a situation where individuals and society have no control at all. This small gain of control palliates the guilt people feel when confronted with the issues of dying. Unfortunately, it is a stance that serves the carer, doctor or health professional against the interests of the patient, whilst masquerading as true concern for the patient.The fittest "animal" dominates the weakest.
How many times have we heard recently that assisted dying must not be allowed because people may wish to die out of a misguided sense that it would make life easier for their friends and families? This is a ruse indeed. What is actually happening here is that the guilt that health professionals feel in regard to the terminally ill, is assuaged a little by being in control of their patient ..in deciding that they cannot choose when to die; their compartmental conscience then kicks in to legitimise that control by persuading everyone that they are not depriving patients of rights, but protecting them. It is, sadly, a reverse of the truth. "Caring for people" as a disguise for not being able to care about them, is not only a sad state of affairs but truly selfish. Undoubtedly, this quasi-caring that we hear repeatedly in the media, does make those health professionals feel better, but this should not be the focus of their attempts at reason!
When we present our argument for the autonomy of the terminally ill and our basis for the ultimate compassion of assisted dying, we need to have an awareness for the lack of psychological awareness displayed by it`s opponents. For, although they are subject to their own inadequacies, and fight their cause based upon them, they think they are motivated by caring, just as parents feel that they need to decide things for their children in order to care for them. We, generally, tend to want to use what we think is our better judgement when we deal with children, and we instinctively see the same situation with adults who face the end of their lives and parallel the vulnerability of children. The crucial thing here, though, is that we are talking about adults and, demonstrably, treating adults like children is not acceptable whatever our own inadequacies may be.
With me so far? I am going to return to this topic very soon.
www.dignityindying.org.uk/
Showing posts with label human rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human rights. Show all posts
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Who will be a Victim?
Who is more likely to become a victim?
Well, there are many examples of people in particular categories who are more likely to become victims.. Let`s just look at those first: Children, of course, the mentally ill, old people, the sick, and of course anyone with diminished faculties, for whatever reason. Why? The answer is that it is easier to abuse, in any way, someone who is weaker in some way, who has less awareness, principally because they may not understand, may not be able to represent themselves adequately, or may not be believed when they tell someone else.
Let`s take sexual abuse of a child: Someone with greater power can use threats and manipulation to prevent a child from disclosing the truth and also a child is less believable than adults in anycase. Children are also suggestible, they will likely take on guilt that is ascribed to them and not be able to reason through the justifications fed to them.
Someone mentally ill may realise they are being abused, in whatever form that may take, yet if they tell someone what is happening, they are less likely to be believed because they are deemed to be lacking capacity.
A person who is ill, perhaps elderly, may not have awareness to know what is happening and may not have the wherewithal or stamina to tell someone in a position of authority.
For all of these vulnerable people, the main reason for the perpetrator bullying or abusing them in particular, is that their lack of social power tends to make them invalid as witnesses to their own situation. In short....and this is not just a little like Darwin`s survival of the fittest, the stronger amongst us human animals can victimise the weaker and those that feed off victims tend to abuse where they wont get caught.
So what of children who get bullied in school, or women who fall victim to men, or the employee who gets bullied at work? Are they identifiable as being weak? Well, they don`t necessarily have a weakness that renders them vulnerable, but folks who become prey to ongoing bullying often have a vulnerability. Take a child who is a little shy, perhaps under-confident, perhaps unhappy, as soon as they walk into a school their body-language gives off a signal to children who have learned to want to hurt other children that this child can be their victim.
As we examined before, a bully may have been bullied, or he/she may have learned how to bully by watching it done to others. Some children copy the bullying mode of relationship and inflict it upon other children. Some children who are bullied discharge their own pain by hurting other kids. But some children bullied or undermined or unloved at home become burdened with low self-esteem, and, without an adequate core-self, they become easy targets for victim seekers in school and beyond. And victim seekers have a major talent for sniffing-out vulnerability.
We can apply this to adults also: If an adult has low confidence, maybe has some life problems, feels inadequate, they can become targets for abuse. Some people just find it difficult to stand up for themselves and end up being made fun of by the people around them. Referring back to medical misogyny: A strong woman with lots of confidence would be less likely to become victim to a doctor, as indeed anyone with strong family support will be safer in these terms. Confidence and being part of a group is always a protecting factor. The bully will always sense that someone is under-confident or that they wont have support from the people around them. It`s all part of the animal instinct that is able to assess, almost instantly, any person encountered.
This is a sad state of affairs indeed...Some people just like to have a victim, it is second nature to them, and although, of course, there are many good people who wouldn`t take part in such insidious behaviour, we should not forget that our social world functions around the survival of the fittest.
Well, there are many examples of people in particular categories who are more likely to become victims.. Let`s just look at those first: Children, of course, the mentally ill, old people, the sick, and of course anyone with diminished faculties, for whatever reason. Why? The answer is that it is easier to abuse, in any way, someone who is weaker in some way, who has less awareness, principally because they may not understand, may not be able to represent themselves adequately, or may not be believed when they tell someone else.
Let`s take sexual abuse of a child: Someone with greater power can use threats and manipulation to prevent a child from disclosing the truth and also a child is less believable than adults in anycase. Children are also suggestible, they will likely take on guilt that is ascribed to them and not be able to reason through the justifications fed to them.
Someone mentally ill may realise they are being abused, in whatever form that may take, yet if they tell someone what is happening, they are less likely to be believed because they are deemed to be lacking capacity.
A person who is ill, perhaps elderly, may not have awareness to know what is happening and may not have the wherewithal or stamina to tell someone in a position of authority.
For all of these vulnerable people, the main reason for the perpetrator bullying or abusing them in particular, is that their lack of social power tends to make them invalid as witnesses to their own situation. In short....and this is not just a little like Darwin`s survival of the fittest, the stronger amongst us human animals can victimise the weaker and those that feed off victims tend to abuse where they wont get caught.
So what of children who get bullied in school, or women who fall victim to men, or the employee who gets bullied at work? Are they identifiable as being weak? Well, they don`t necessarily have a weakness that renders them vulnerable, but folks who become prey to ongoing bullying often have a vulnerability. Take a child who is a little shy, perhaps under-confident, perhaps unhappy, as soon as they walk into a school their body-language gives off a signal to children who have learned to want to hurt other children that this child can be their victim.
As we examined before, a bully may have been bullied, or he/she may have learned how to bully by watching it done to others. Some children copy the bullying mode of relationship and inflict it upon other children. Some children who are bullied discharge their own pain by hurting other kids. But some children bullied or undermined or unloved at home become burdened with low self-esteem, and, without an adequate core-self, they become easy targets for victim seekers in school and beyond. And victim seekers have a major talent for sniffing-out vulnerability.
We can apply this to adults also: If an adult has low confidence, maybe has some life problems, feels inadequate, they can become targets for abuse. Some people just find it difficult to stand up for themselves and end up being made fun of by the people around them. Referring back to medical misogyny: A strong woman with lots of confidence would be less likely to become victim to a doctor, as indeed anyone with strong family support will be safer in these terms. Confidence and being part of a group is always a protecting factor. The bully will always sense that someone is under-confident or that they wont have support from the people around them. It`s all part of the animal instinct that is able to assess, almost instantly, any person encountered.
This is a sad state of affairs indeed...Some people just like to have a victim, it is second nature to them, and although, of course, there are many good people who wouldn`t take part in such insidious behaviour, we should not forget that our social world functions around the survival of the fittest.
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Covert Misogyny 2.
Right, now back to this huge subject.... Let`s see if we can shed some more light on it:
We have looked at some reasons why some doctors practice covert misogyny and now I want to think about why such a profession permits this to happen. You might say "permits it by default", since the profession as a whole would be loath to admit that it occurs at all. I think that this denial has parallels with any individual or group that pretends that abuse isn`t really happening. For example, where there was abuse of children in the Catholic Church, denial was the biggest factor in the whole saga.
When we talk about an individual denying their guilt we see that they do so to protect themselves from punishment. Somehow "denial", they hope, protects their innocence. But why do members of a group protect each other? After all, why protect someone who might be guilty? The person protecting someone else isn`t guilty, so why trouble to shelter someone who is? How do they square this with their conscience?
Well, part of this may be to do with feeling that they cannot be sure that the person is guilty, maybe they want to believe that they are not guilty, and part of it this has to do with the connection and loyalty they feel for their colleagues.
Let`s look at this in regard to a priest: The priest may be a nice man, long serving in the church, he has many close friends...he may have done kindnesses for other clergy... This creates a loyalty and a feeling in others that they do not want to believe that he is guilty. In anycase, if they report him for suspected abuse, they may be impugning him by mistake and turn his life into a nightmare, not forgetting that to report him to the police will bring trouble for themselves: they may not be believed, their colleagues may turn against them, etc. In short, keeping shtum is the preferable option. The most important dynamic here though, is reciprocal loyalty within the group: If you protect a colleague, they will certainly protect you! Because of this,cases are rare where someone is brave enough to betray a colleague in the name of right.
This is broadly what happens in groups, it is all about group cohesion and group function and group survival. This very same mechanism will be in play in the medical profession when a doctor medically abuses a patient. Doctors simply don`t want to believe that some of their colleagues are misogynists and if they half see it, they turn a blind eye.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, where someone is guilty in regard to someone else, the compartmental conscience kicks in and there is activated a demonisation of the wounded party.(In cases of sexual abuse, this would involve making the child look guilty). The function of demonisation is to shift guilt from the abuser/ perpetrator onto the victim. This facilitates a concealment of guilt. When we observe this in regard to one-to -one relationships, the power of the guilt-shift is played out depending upon the power of the individuals concerned. That is, which one is weak, which one is strong; which one has endurance and which one doesn`t; which one is more forgiving,etc. The game-play ratchets up when one uses their own social or family group as an endorsement of their demonisation strategy. The person in this one-to-one battle, who has greater social skills, greater prowess at manipulating, will doubtless win the war when they recruit a group around them to support their position. It`s simple:a group has more power.
The same is true of doctors who medically abuse women: The surest way to hide what has happened is to demonise the woman, find concrete ways of showing that she is "mad" or "bad" and that therefore the doctor hasn`t done anything wrong at all!!! The simplest way to do this is with psychiatric diagnosis. When there is a psychiatric diagnosis attached to a female patient it becomes almost impossible for the medical abuse to be revealed. Of course, this is gross misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, but who would ever find out?
You might wonder how doctors manage their consciences, both to themselves and in regard to their colleagues.. Well, it`s our old friend the compartmental conscience !!! When a woman is medically abused and she is then demonised in order to hide what has occurred, the demonisation is the salve to the conscience. The doctor thinks, "well, this woman is an attention-seeker, or at least neurotic, and my colleague certainly has, therefore, done nothing wrong. It`s the woman`s fault." This way he shuts out the truth and carries on ethically with his other patients, with this woman-victim safely shut away in a bad box in his mind.
We have looked at some reasons why some doctors practice covert misogyny and now I want to think about why such a profession permits this to happen. You might say "permits it by default", since the profession as a whole would be loath to admit that it occurs at all. I think that this denial has parallels with any individual or group that pretends that abuse isn`t really happening. For example, where there was abuse of children in the Catholic Church, denial was the biggest factor in the whole saga.
When we talk about an individual denying their guilt we see that they do so to protect themselves from punishment. Somehow "denial", they hope, protects their innocence. But why do members of a group protect each other? After all, why protect someone who might be guilty? The person protecting someone else isn`t guilty, so why trouble to shelter someone who is? How do they square this with their conscience?
Well, part of this may be to do with feeling that they cannot be sure that the person is guilty, maybe they want to believe that they are not guilty, and part of it this has to do with the connection and loyalty they feel for their colleagues.
Let`s look at this in regard to a priest: The priest may be a nice man, long serving in the church, he has many close friends...he may have done kindnesses for other clergy... This creates a loyalty and a feeling in others that they do not want to believe that he is guilty. In anycase, if they report him for suspected abuse, they may be impugning him by mistake and turn his life into a nightmare, not forgetting that to report him to the police will bring trouble for themselves: they may not be believed, their colleagues may turn against them, etc. In short, keeping shtum is the preferable option. The most important dynamic here though, is reciprocal loyalty within the group: If you protect a colleague, they will certainly protect you! Because of this,cases are rare where someone is brave enough to betray a colleague in the name of right.
This is broadly what happens in groups, it is all about group cohesion and group function and group survival. This very same mechanism will be in play in the medical profession when a doctor medically abuses a patient. Doctors simply don`t want to believe that some of their colleagues are misogynists and if they half see it, they turn a blind eye.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, where someone is guilty in regard to someone else, the compartmental conscience kicks in and there is activated a demonisation of the wounded party.(In cases of sexual abuse, this would involve making the child look guilty). The function of demonisation is to shift guilt from the abuser/ perpetrator onto the victim. This facilitates a concealment of guilt. When we observe this in regard to one-to -one relationships, the power of the guilt-shift is played out depending upon the power of the individuals concerned. That is, which one is weak, which one is strong; which one has endurance and which one doesn`t; which one is more forgiving,etc. The game-play ratchets up when one uses their own social or family group as an endorsement of their demonisation strategy. The person in this one-to-one battle, who has greater social skills, greater prowess at manipulating, will doubtless win the war when they recruit a group around them to support their position. It`s simple:a group has more power.
The same is true of doctors who medically abuse women: The surest way to hide what has happened is to demonise the woman, find concrete ways of showing that she is "mad" or "bad" and that therefore the doctor hasn`t done anything wrong at all!!! The simplest way to do this is with psychiatric diagnosis. When there is a psychiatric diagnosis attached to a female patient it becomes almost impossible for the medical abuse to be revealed. Of course, this is gross misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, but who would ever find out?
You might wonder how doctors manage their consciences, both to themselves and in regard to their colleagues.. Well, it`s our old friend the compartmental conscience !!! When a woman is medically abused and she is then demonised in order to hide what has occurred, the demonisation is the salve to the conscience. The doctor thinks, "well, this woman is an attention-seeker, or at least neurotic, and my colleague certainly has, therefore, done nothing wrong. It`s the woman`s fault." This way he shuts out the truth and carries on ethically with his other patients, with this woman-victim safely shut away in a bad box in his mind.
Monday, 18 January 2010
Covert Misogyny.
Now let`s go back to less conspicuous abuse of women, one instance of which I relayed to you in my blog entitled "Misogyny in the Medical Profession".
We learn how to hurt people when we are small children, just as we learn every mode of behaviour, as we watch the adults around us in their relationships. Some children exposed to these kinds of interaction will copy them in later life, some will not. The knowledge is there, the behaviour assimilated, however, and we can see, even in the most stable and equitable of people, the mechanisms of hurt that manifest when they are stressed or angry. For vast numbers of people who slip into hurt mode for a while and come out of it, it does not become a pervasive trait, just a transitory one. Some people, with this acquired behaviour ready to jump into action, hurt some people and not others (this is something I thought about when I discussed "Compartmental Conscience" in an earlier blog).Others keep a very tight rein on this assimilated ability to hurt others, not wishing to vent it and only letting go when they are under extreme stress.
We are talking here, though, specifically about women, but the basis for needing or wanting to hurt is the same.
I think, firstly, that hostility to or resentment of women in particular, can be caused by adverse experience of a woman, the pain of which becomes ingrained and later is discharged against someone who has nothing to do with these earlier experiences. Somehow, the pain of past experience does not allow analysis of where and when upset first occurred, it just is triggered generally by women, or women with particular characteristics, and just finds outlet. Indeed, any woman can be a trigger for reflexed hatred just because something about her hooks into something in the past for the man concerned.
Another cause, as I discussed in my last blog, is that a man can have witnessed someone close to him with a bad attitude to a woman/women. Some men learn the idea that women are out to cheat them, or are after their money, or women try to get attention for disingenuous reasons,feign illness when they are not really ill, or whatever the case may be, from someone else, a father maybe, who projects these ideas onto a boy`s mother. A boy will see his mother accused of such falsehood on a day to day basis and he will believe what she is accused of, even though his father`s notions are in themselves untrue, based as they are upon his own psychopathology.
I would like to touch on another trigger for misogyny related to the phenomenon of learned behaviour: When someone learns to view someone else, anyone else, negatively, based upon false perceptions, there are factors within that interaction that are part of the package. It`s like this: a person cannot deal out a negative regard for someone without incurring some guilt, even if it is guilt on an unconscious level. I tend to think of this as like expending energy always having a consequence, we go jogging and we get tired, we get angry and we get more and more upset, nothing happens without consequence. So, when we put upon others our negative attributions, we pay a price....unless we counteract this in some way. This is why in situations where we incur guilt, our compartmental conscience kicks in to try to lift the guilt we might otherwise feel.
Finally, when someone reflexes negative regard for women, they can simply be reacting against their own sense of guilt, acquired by them when a young child, as if their father`s guilt were their own..The woman`s behaviour, or triggers, can, point-blank, make the man feel very guilty and he reacts to that with agression.
So now we come to why some doctors see women as disingenuous: I believe that in their early childhood they have acquired negative ideas about women, from whom or for what reason they have no conscious knowledge, and they simply issue this negativity upon hapless women as if it were real. It is one big delusion. Believing badly of someone without due cause expresses itself in other situations too,for example racism.
The doctor who destroyed my mother`s life would not realise that he was acting out of deep-rooted irrational motivations and probably was convinced that this was indeed a neurotic woman in need of psychiatric medication. What is a crime though, is that a doctor should be able to come to this "professional diagnosis", subjectively, and based upon his own paranoia, without any tests to make sure that his opinion is correct. The fact that this abuse of women is covert makes this phenomenon all the more difficult to prevent.
In my next blog I hope to get onto why it is that this type of misogyny is tolerated within professional groups and why the group itself has responsibility in allowing it to happen.
We learn how to hurt people when we are small children, just as we learn every mode of behaviour, as we watch the adults around us in their relationships. Some children exposed to these kinds of interaction will copy them in later life, some will not. The knowledge is there, the behaviour assimilated, however, and we can see, even in the most stable and equitable of people, the mechanisms of hurt that manifest when they are stressed or angry. For vast numbers of people who slip into hurt mode for a while and come out of it, it does not become a pervasive trait, just a transitory one. Some people, with this acquired behaviour ready to jump into action, hurt some people and not others (this is something I thought about when I discussed "Compartmental Conscience" in an earlier blog).Others keep a very tight rein on this assimilated ability to hurt others, not wishing to vent it and only letting go when they are under extreme stress.
We are talking here, though, specifically about women, but the basis for needing or wanting to hurt is the same.
I think, firstly, that hostility to or resentment of women in particular, can be caused by adverse experience of a woman, the pain of which becomes ingrained and later is discharged against someone who has nothing to do with these earlier experiences. Somehow, the pain of past experience does not allow analysis of where and when upset first occurred, it just is triggered generally by women, or women with particular characteristics, and just finds outlet. Indeed, any woman can be a trigger for reflexed hatred just because something about her hooks into something in the past for the man concerned.
Another cause, as I discussed in my last blog, is that a man can have witnessed someone close to him with a bad attitude to a woman/women. Some men learn the idea that women are out to cheat them, or are after their money, or women try to get attention for disingenuous reasons,feign illness when they are not really ill, or whatever the case may be, from someone else, a father maybe, who projects these ideas onto a boy`s mother. A boy will see his mother accused of such falsehood on a day to day basis and he will believe what she is accused of, even though his father`s notions are in themselves untrue, based as they are upon his own psychopathology.
I would like to touch on another trigger for misogyny related to the phenomenon of learned behaviour: When someone learns to view someone else, anyone else, negatively, based upon false perceptions, there are factors within that interaction that are part of the package. It`s like this: a person cannot deal out a negative regard for someone without incurring some guilt, even if it is guilt on an unconscious level. I tend to think of this as like expending energy always having a consequence, we go jogging and we get tired, we get angry and we get more and more upset, nothing happens without consequence. So, when we put upon others our negative attributions, we pay a price....unless we counteract this in some way. This is why in situations where we incur guilt, our compartmental conscience kicks in to try to lift the guilt we might otherwise feel.
Finally, when someone reflexes negative regard for women, they can simply be reacting against their own sense of guilt, acquired by them when a young child, as if their father`s guilt were their own..The woman`s behaviour, or triggers, can, point-blank, make the man feel very guilty and he reacts to that with agression.
So now we come to why some doctors see women as disingenuous: I believe that in their early childhood they have acquired negative ideas about women, from whom or for what reason they have no conscious knowledge, and they simply issue this negativity upon hapless women as if it were real. It is one big delusion. Believing badly of someone without due cause expresses itself in other situations too,for example racism.
The doctor who destroyed my mother`s life would not realise that he was acting out of deep-rooted irrational motivations and probably was convinced that this was indeed a neurotic woman in need of psychiatric medication. What is a crime though, is that a doctor should be able to come to this "professional diagnosis", subjectively, and based upon his own paranoia, without any tests to make sure that his opinion is correct. The fact that this abuse of women is covert makes this phenomenon all the more difficult to prevent.
In my next blog I hope to get onto why it is that this type of misogyny is tolerated within professional groups and why the group itself has responsibility in allowing it to happen.
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Overt abuse of women.
We see abuse of women in all sorts of ways in society, often violent or sexual in nature. We also see repression and disrespect of women associated with some religions and cultures. Women are sometimes trapped by domestic violence, both physically and psychologically. These cases are in the public consciousness so as examples of typical, overt abuse, let`s try to think about why this happens..
I think that it`s worth having a look at some of the factors that enable domestic violence. Of course not all causes apply and there will be a variety of factors involved, but the obvious one to look at first is the difference in physical size and strength between a man and a woman. Some men actually look for someone they can bully because of their own acquired behaviour: The bullied will often bully simply because that is how they have learned to behave from those around them.It is not always the case, though, that a man who bullies has been bullied in his earlier life, it can be that he has witnessed bullying, maybe his father bullied his mother, or even vice versa, and that this can become the mode of relationship that he knows best. It is also often the case that women can be drawn to men who are bullies, either having been bullied themselves, or they too having witnessed bullying at close hand. Many women, unwittingly, assume the role of the bullied one in a relationship.
Why should this happen? Well, just as children learn love or cooperation or compromise from the people around them in their early years, so, if they are exposed to hatred or disrespect or bullying, they can learn these instead. These traits can become the only expression of "love" that they know and children can confuse them as such. A man who assimilates the role of bully can still feel this role as an expression of "love", just as a woman who mistakes the pain and violence of abuse as part of the environment for a "loving" relationship, can experience a lovelessness without the presence of abuse. It is simply a matter of what we learn and what we experience in our adult lives. Some people, though, have exposure to bullying in their early life and adopt the passive persons role, rejecting the bullies position. Women too often have low self esteem, learned sometimes from their mother, a role-model victim, and reinforced through life.
Now of course, women are not "asking for it" when this scenario occurs, they just often get into abusive relationships because they mistake what is on offer for love. They are not conscious of what they are doing, neither, often, are the men who bully them. It is all hidden in their pasts and enacted without so very much control.
I really wonder whether women would ever get into an abusive relationship if it weren`t for one or other of the above reasons. Having witnessed, though, a friend being verbally disrespected and systematically undermined over a long period of time, maybe with no background of inflicted abuse and no witness of it, I still noted that this woman had low self esteem, and this coupled with a desire to exculpate her husband at every turn, prevented her from taking action to reclaim herself and her self-respect. The trouble is, where there is weakness anywhere in society there are people who want to take advantage.
Why should it serve men to undermine women? Well, a woman who is weakened will comply with sex or do what they are told to do. The psychology is simple, weaken her and you can dominate her. In this sense we can see that the inadequacies of the man will diminish in his own eyes if he can dominate his woman...but also, I think, that abusing someone kicks into gear the compartmental conscience (please see my previous blog about this devise) as the man struggles to off-load his guilt at treating a woman so badly. The compartmental conscience here will get him off the hook because it will see blameworthy characteristics in the woman that CAUSE him to HAVE to be abusive. The more he abuses her, the more the compartmentalising has to work ever harder to escape guilt and the more violent the man becomes. Because of this, the situation is almost beyond repair for the bully because the compartment in his mind that says the bullying is justifiable, because the woman is guilty/bad/unloving or whatever, is dependant upon the violence and abuse to justify itself. The compartmental tool isn`t without needs itself and wants a return for helping the man do his dirty work.(This happens in any such similar situation, of course.)The more the guilt incurred, the higher the stakes.)
I will need to think aloud about this some more in the near future as well as talking about covert abuse of women, so please tune into me next time.
I think that it`s worth having a look at some of the factors that enable domestic violence. Of course not all causes apply and there will be a variety of factors involved, but the obvious one to look at first is the difference in physical size and strength between a man and a woman. Some men actually look for someone they can bully because of their own acquired behaviour: The bullied will often bully simply because that is how they have learned to behave from those around them.It is not always the case, though, that a man who bullies has been bullied in his earlier life, it can be that he has witnessed bullying, maybe his father bullied his mother, or even vice versa, and that this can become the mode of relationship that he knows best. It is also often the case that women can be drawn to men who are bullies, either having been bullied themselves, or they too having witnessed bullying at close hand. Many women, unwittingly, assume the role of the bullied one in a relationship.
Why should this happen? Well, just as children learn love or cooperation or compromise from the people around them in their early years, so, if they are exposed to hatred or disrespect or bullying, they can learn these instead. These traits can become the only expression of "love" that they know and children can confuse them as such. A man who assimilates the role of bully can still feel this role as an expression of "love", just as a woman who mistakes the pain and violence of abuse as part of the environment for a "loving" relationship, can experience a lovelessness without the presence of abuse. It is simply a matter of what we learn and what we experience in our adult lives. Some people, though, have exposure to bullying in their early life and adopt the passive persons role, rejecting the bullies position. Women too often have low self esteem, learned sometimes from their mother, a role-model victim, and reinforced through life.
Now of course, women are not "asking for it" when this scenario occurs, they just often get into abusive relationships because they mistake what is on offer for love. They are not conscious of what they are doing, neither, often, are the men who bully them. It is all hidden in their pasts and enacted without so very much control.
I really wonder whether women would ever get into an abusive relationship if it weren`t for one or other of the above reasons. Having witnessed, though, a friend being verbally disrespected and systematically undermined over a long period of time, maybe with no background of inflicted abuse and no witness of it, I still noted that this woman had low self esteem, and this coupled with a desire to exculpate her husband at every turn, prevented her from taking action to reclaim herself and her self-respect. The trouble is, where there is weakness anywhere in society there are people who want to take advantage.
Why should it serve men to undermine women? Well, a woman who is weakened will comply with sex or do what they are told to do. The psychology is simple, weaken her and you can dominate her. In this sense we can see that the inadequacies of the man will diminish in his own eyes if he can dominate his woman...but also, I think, that abusing someone kicks into gear the compartmental conscience (please see my previous blog about this devise) as the man struggles to off-load his guilt at treating a woman so badly. The compartmental conscience here will get him off the hook because it will see blameworthy characteristics in the woman that CAUSE him to HAVE to be abusive. The more he abuses her, the more the compartmentalising has to work ever harder to escape guilt and the more violent the man becomes. Because of this, the situation is almost beyond repair for the bully because the compartment in his mind that says the bullying is justifiable, because the woman is guilty/bad/unloving or whatever, is dependant upon the violence and abuse to justify itself. The compartmental tool isn`t without needs itself and wants a return for helping the man do his dirty work.(This happens in any such similar situation, of course.)The more the guilt incurred, the higher the stakes.)
I will need to think aloud about this some more in the near future as well as talking about covert abuse of women, so please tune into me next time.
Misogyny in the Medical Profession.
Through the course of my blogs I want to look at why, where and how, different people and different groups become victim to others. It is important for me to understand the reasons for this victimisation as well as drawing the eye to instances of abuse that are concealed from our day to day knowledge. Today I am going to go straight into a case of out-and-out misogyny, many instances of which can be found in medical practice today and where the affects of medical malpractice are largely concealed.
My mother went to her G.P. in the mid 1970s, when she was in her middle forties, with abdominal symptoms. The doctor prescribed something for it and she came away and started taking the drug as prescribed. She did not question what the drug was, nor did she seek a diagnosis.In those days you just trusted your doctor and did what you were told to do. My mum was a happy, active person with a nice job,she had had no previous history of psychological problems at all, not even a squeak, but the drug that this doctor gave her was Valium. She went to him with physical health symptoms, no anxiety, no depression, and yet she was given a psychiatric drug without her knowledge. Well, of course, some doctors are misogynists, it`s a fact of life: They see a middle aged women complaining of abdominal problems and they think, "this is just a neurotic female", but as to why they do this and how they are able to pursue these beliefs within their profession as doctors, we shall come back to examine in a subsequent blog.
This abuse of my mother by this G.P. caused a catastrophe of desperate and tragic proportions. My mother began to suffer a devastating reaction to valium ..and remember she did not even know that she was taking a psychiatric drug.....and she became a terrified, almost catatonic wreck. When it was obvious that valium had made her very ill, the G.P became nasty, the only way that he could off-load his guilt was to be nasty to us. My mother`s life, now destroyed, was horrendous. My sister and I had no mother, in fact, and the medics really didn`t know what to do. The best that they could come up with was ECT. So a lovely, happy mum, duped into taking a psychiatric drug by an abusive doctor, ended up having repeated ECT. She came out of this a virtual zombie with huge areas of memory loss and really hardly a person at all. The suffering caused to her and to us was fantastic. Days of endless agony with no hope and a sort of grief for a mother that had gone away somewhere into mental illness, never wholly to return. And the pain of knowing that she had been the victim of a male doctor in this way was unbearable.
There was never an apology. Years later when she developed heart failure, it even came to light that she probably had a heart attack when having the ECT, but nobody noticed. They didn`t even notice.
So we have to understand WHY this kind of thing happens....Let`s think of it as our mission to find out, so that we can know why some people hurt others and how they come to square it with their own conscience and with the people around them. In my next blog I want to try to examine why women become victims and why there can be professional abuse of women that is largely unchecked.
My mother went to her G.P. in the mid 1970s, when she was in her middle forties, with abdominal symptoms. The doctor prescribed something for it and she came away and started taking the drug as prescribed. She did not question what the drug was, nor did she seek a diagnosis.In those days you just trusted your doctor and did what you were told to do. My mum was a happy, active person with a nice job,she had had no previous history of psychological problems at all, not even a squeak, but the drug that this doctor gave her was Valium. She went to him with physical health symptoms, no anxiety, no depression, and yet she was given a psychiatric drug without her knowledge. Well, of course, some doctors are misogynists, it`s a fact of life: They see a middle aged women complaining of abdominal problems and they think, "this is just a neurotic female", but as to why they do this and how they are able to pursue these beliefs within their profession as doctors, we shall come back to examine in a subsequent blog.
This abuse of my mother by this G.P. caused a catastrophe of desperate and tragic proportions. My mother began to suffer a devastating reaction to valium ..and remember she did not even know that she was taking a psychiatric drug.....and she became a terrified, almost catatonic wreck. When it was obvious that valium had made her very ill, the G.P became nasty, the only way that he could off-load his guilt was to be nasty to us. My mother`s life, now destroyed, was horrendous. My sister and I had no mother, in fact, and the medics really didn`t know what to do. The best that they could come up with was ECT. So a lovely, happy mum, duped into taking a psychiatric drug by an abusive doctor, ended up having repeated ECT. She came out of this a virtual zombie with huge areas of memory loss and really hardly a person at all. The suffering caused to her and to us was fantastic. Days of endless agony with no hope and a sort of grief for a mother that had gone away somewhere into mental illness, never wholly to return. And the pain of knowing that she had been the victim of a male doctor in this way was unbearable.
There was never an apology. Years later when she developed heart failure, it even came to light that she probably had a heart attack when having the ECT, but nobody noticed. They didn`t even notice.
So we have to understand WHY this kind of thing happens....Let`s think of it as our mission to find out, so that we can know why some people hurt others and how they come to square it with their own conscience and with the people around them. In my next blog I want to try to examine why women become victims and why there can be professional abuse of women that is largely unchecked.
Sunday, 20 December 2009
Your Kids Belong to the State.
The present government is hell-bent upon inspecting families where children are being home educated. This crusade gathered momentum after the failings of social workers led to mistakes where children who were being abused at home died. None of these children were home educated in fact, but out of a drive to be seen to make sure the system protectes all children, the government decided to aim their cosmetic rightfulness at home educating families. Later, way down the line, they shifted their professed aims by claiming that they wanted to inspect children educated at home to make sure that they were receiving a proper education.
So what? you might say. Why should this be of any concern to me? Many people who send their kids to school, state or private, have said that they are all in favour of children who don`t go to school being properly assessed and monitored. Somehow it looks okay doesn`t it? You know, government protecting children, concerns about child welfare and suitable education. Whatever could be wrong with that?
But parents who educate their kids at home have opted out of mainstream education for good reason.They have concerns about educational methods in schools and the ever-present culture of bullying.They are concerned that schools absolutely fail a huge number of children, not least because children are demotivated by a "sit down and learn what you are told to learn" mentality. Having opted to imbue their childrens lives with a nurturing educational ethos based upon harnessing a child`s natural instinct to learn,the government then decides that it doesn`t trust them to do this: It wants to inspect them, invade the family, direct what should be taught, how and when and for how many hours. The government wants CONTROL and it wants it`s eyes all over the private life of a family..just because the parents are opting out of a standard education for their kids.
Why?
Human rights alarm-bells ring out a cry of suppression as we become aware of very basic group psychology playing out it`s desire to punish people who do not conform to the wider group: in this case there is a larger group unease at some parents rejecting the school system. The fact is that with children being withdrawn in ever greater numbers from schools, the state has to try to protect itself by shifting the onus of suspicion away from a failing educational system onto the educational heretics, "home edors". People in home ed. who simply want to educate their children in a non-coercive way, inadvertently end up reflecting guilt back at the "powers that be" as they try to avoid looking in their own mirrors.
To avoid guilt/responsibility the state ...as is common practice in guilt avoidance... tries to shift guilt onto home ed. It wants to control it because it needs to deflect it`s own guilt away from itself. In the most simplistic terms the phenomenon of guilt-shifting is no better played out than by sending the authorities to the door of innocent people: it makes them LOOK guilty of something. The game-play of any authority casting suspicion, publicly, upon a person or group, has the affect of cohering the masses against a common "enemy". It is precisely the same process as all forms of bullying, racism, etc.
The reason why this should concern everyone is because the state is pushing it`s way into all of our private lives, we are all under suspicion, civil liberties are under assault. Home educating families have become part of a slippery slope that will, if the government get their way, invade us all.
If you look you can see the signs everywhere: The state thinks it has the right to dictate what you do in your own home and it`s moral high ground is getting bigger all that time. We have seen how fat people cannot adopt, black children must be adopted only by black families, etc. Parents who eat the wrong fatty food have more recently become in danger of having their kids taken away. The most recent imposition has been that everyone must be CRB checked if they are involved in looking after children. The drive against home educating families and the self-righteous invasion of their human rights is all part of the wider picture of a moralising state that damages its ordinary citizens in the name of protecting children!!
So let`s have a look at those instances I mentioned above, measures supposedly to protect children and look after their best interests:
1/ Fat people cannot adopt because they might die all the sooner due to being overweight, not to mention that they would be a bad example to any children they adopt!!! So who suffers most as a result of this policy? Children. Children in children's homes or children shunted from one foster family to another and who are desperate to be adopted.
2/Black children must be adopted into black families because it is deemed "better for them" to be brought up by their own people, so to speak. Who suffers? Black children who spend endless years in children's homes because there is no black family to adopt them.
3/Parents who eat the wrong kind of food and feed their children the wrong kind of food are guilty of a form of child abuse and should have their children taken away. And who would suffer if children were to be removed from their parents? Children yet again. Children who would be traumatised by the powerlessness and incomprehensible cruelty of being pulled away from their parents.
4/ And the CRB checking of adults who help out with looking after kids? The kids will suffer... because people do not want to be impugned by a CRB check and children will miss out on activities if adults do not volunteer their time.
Now you can see the pattern.... So when we get to the issue of forcing a misguided and backfiring morality on home educating parents by wanting them inspected and forcing them to follow the government`s narrow and regime-based educational models, we can clearly see exactly who is going to suffer. Children. Children in families where they are loved and nurtured, where education is not a regime but a joy, who will be forced to accept that the state has the right to override their parents, invade their family, dictate how their parents should educate them ... and the frightening lesson that the home is violable by the Local Authority.
With the government`s proposed violation of the home, the precedent has been set that children belong to the state, not to parents.
We will come back to these, and related issues, in later blogs.
So what? you might say. Why should this be of any concern to me? Many people who send their kids to school, state or private, have said that they are all in favour of children who don`t go to school being properly assessed and monitored. Somehow it looks okay doesn`t it? You know, government protecting children, concerns about child welfare and suitable education. Whatever could be wrong with that?
But parents who educate their kids at home have opted out of mainstream education for good reason.They have concerns about educational methods in schools and the ever-present culture of bullying.They are concerned that schools absolutely fail a huge number of children, not least because children are demotivated by a "sit down and learn what you are told to learn" mentality. Having opted to imbue their childrens lives with a nurturing educational ethos based upon harnessing a child`s natural instinct to learn,the government then decides that it doesn`t trust them to do this: It wants to inspect them, invade the family, direct what should be taught, how and when and for how many hours. The government wants CONTROL and it wants it`s eyes all over the private life of a family..just because the parents are opting out of a standard education for their kids.
Why?
Human rights alarm-bells ring out a cry of suppression as we become aware of very basic group psychology playing out it`s desire to punish people who do not conform to the wider group: in this case there is a larger group unease at some parents rejecting the school system. The fact is that with children being withdrawn in ever greater numbers from schools, the state has to try to protect itself by shifting the onus of suspicion away from a failing educational system onto the educational heretics, "home edors". People in home ed. who simply want to educate their children in a non-coercive way, inadvertently end up reflecting guilt back at the "powers that be" as they try to avoid looking in their own mirrors.
To avoid guilt/responsibility the state ...as is common practice in guilt avoidance... tries to shift guilt onto home ed. It wants to control it because it needs to deflect it`s own guilt away from itself. In the most simplistic terms the phenomenon of guilt-shifting is no better played out than by sending the authorities to the door of innocent people: it makes them LOOK guilty of something. The game-play of any authority casting suspicion, publicly, upon a person or group, has the affect of cohering the masses against a common "enemy". It is precisely the same process as all forms of bullying, racism, etc.
The reason why this should concern everyone is because the state is pushing it`s way into all of our private lives, we are all under suspicion, civil liberties are under assault. Home educating families have become part of a slippery slope that will, if the government get their way, invade us all.
If you look you can see the signs everywhere: The state thinks it has the right to dictate what you do in your own home and it`s moral high ground is getting bigger all that time. We have seen how fat people cannot adopt, black children must be adopted only by black families, etc. Parents who eat the wrong fatty food have more recently become in danger of having their kids taken away. The most recent imposition has been that everyone must be CRB checked if they are involved in looking after children. The drive against home educating families and the self-righteous invasion of their human rights is all part of the wider picture of a moralising state that damages its ordinary citizens in the name of protecting children!!
So let`s have a look at those instances I mentioned above, measures supposedly to protect children and look after their best interests:
1/ Fat people cannot adopt because they might die all the sooner due to being overweight, not to mention that they would be a bad example to any children they adopt!!! So who suffers most as a result of this policy? Children. Children in children's homes or children shunted from one foster family to another and who are desperate to be adopted.
2/Black children must be adopted into black families because it is deemed "better for them" to be brought up by their own people, so to speak. Who suffers? Black children who spend endless years in children's homes because there is no black family to adopt them.
3/Parents who eat the wrong kind of food and feed their children the wrong kind of food are guilty of a form of child abuse and should have their children taken away. And who would suffer if children were to be removed from their parents? Children yet again. Children who would be traumatised by the powerlessness and incomprehensible cruelty of being pulled away from their parents.
4/ And the CRB checking of adults who help out with looking after kids? The kids will suffer... because people do not want to be impugned by a CRB check and children will miss out on activities if adults do not volunteer their time.
Now you can see the pattern.... So when we get to the issue of forcing a misguided and backfiring morality on home educating parents by wanting them inspected and forcing them to follow the government`s narrow and regime-based educational models, we can clearly see exactly who is going to suffer. Children. Children in families where they are loved and nurtured, where education is not a regime but a joy, who will be forced to accept that the state has the right to override their parents, invade their family, dictate how their parents should educate them ... and the frightening lesson that the home is violable by the Local Authority.
With the government`s proposed violation of the home, the precedent has been set that children belong to the state, not to parents.
We will come back to these, and related issues, in later blogs.
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Errors of Perception.
We look out from our position of "self" and take what we see as concrete knowledge of our surroundings and our relationships. Indeed, without assumptions about our environment and the cues we receive from the people around us, it would be very difficult to function at all. We live by core perceptions that hold us together and we modify and change elements around these constants, as necessary.
But sometimes these perceptions are incorrect, we make mistakes, and there are consequences for us and for those around us.I am particularly interested in how and why we make assumptions in regard to the society we experience and our inter-personal relationships and how this impacts on our lives and on society too.
My blogs are an attempt to think about these issues and to try to understand the hidden forces at work in our everyday lives with an eye to fairness and right and justice.
We can understand why there is prejudice or injustice, violence or immorality, but these are not just the "dark side" of our better selves, they emanate from the same source,our human nature.I hope that trying to understand these elements of our functioning self will help us to mitigate the affects of destructive impulses in a constructive sense, but, if only to calm our frustrations and our feelings of defencelessness, thinking this through is eminently worthwhile. In common parlance this is termed "self help" !!!!!
Let`s take an example:
We have seen via the media that social workers have made mistakes when assessing
cases involving children. Some cases of child abuse have been missed, but conversely we know that some cases have been imagined where no abuse is present. How can this happen?
There are two main influences here, the personal, where our personal psychological baggage influences the things we think we perceive, and the group, the part we play in a group dynamic with the people around us.
Now, we might assume that professionals are trained to be objective and have certain criteria by which to ascertain whether there is child abuse or not. We can see here how we immediately follow our acquired assumption that "professionalism" is a safeguard towards correct, unbiased and non-subjective discernment. But the professional process is only dictated by the people who contrive these methods, and the processes and those people are subject to their own personal baggage and their own group position as well!
Let`s take a very ordinary experience: We walk down the street and as we go we assess, as part of an unconscious process, who is a threat and who is not. This assessment is almost instantaneous , we have little control over it and yet it informs us as if it were knowledge and not just a response to all our cues. We certainly do not feel we are hijacked by irrational baggage !!!
So what are these cues and where do they come from?
Well, we carry reflex responses old and new, autonomic fears coming from our development as a species, biological drives, inherited cues from our parents and family and of course cues arising from our own experiences. We also acquire new cues all the time, from people around us and from the media.
Personal Cues:
When a social worker goes to assess a family, they may be trained to be objective, but they are unaware of the part played by their own personal issues and the wider group drive. No amount of training can change this, mitigate it maybe, but not eliminate it. Why? Because, on a personal level, we are not always able to cognise our own cues: If I have been upset by a particular person with particular physical characteristics when I am four years old, I may not recall this, and yet if it is triggered when I interview a parent who happens to carry this characteristic, my objective judgement will be swayed, I will have a negative perception of them and my intellect will try to rationalise my feelings. What can happen here is that the observer, the social worker in this case, will align their subjectivity with their objectivity, that is, they will find a rational, observable reason to doubt the parent, not realising that they are doing this. This then can be passed to colleagues as observable according to their "possible child abuse" criteria, and will assume the power of "proof" against the parent. Thus, the idea that a particular parent is guilty begins upon a cue that is not conscious and takes on all the colours of objective truth as it grows from one professional to another.
This, of course, can work in reverse, a social worker may have a positive cue related to a certain characteristic in a person they are assessing, yet this person is abusing a child. The positive cue will mask the objective judgement and once again the intellect will justify this perception.
Group Dynamics:
In the U.K. there have been such huge mistakes in overlooking cases of child abuse, such that cases of mistaken abuse will inevitably rise as social workers desperately try to avert error. Many families have been victim to this and their children have been removed.
There is serious contradiction in pursuing child abuse if innocent parents and their children are persecuted, just as in the name of justice, it is not acceptable for innocent people to be jailed for crimes they did not commit. Yet social workers are making mistakes out of fear that they will overlook a case of abuse, a death will occur, and they will be held responsible for it. Individual social workers are trying to protect themselves by rigorously pursuing the group drive to find child abuse, and because they are afraid of the wider group, society,if they should not notice a real case of abuse, they can make mistakes.
So a social worker mindful of "not making a mistake" will view a family differently from a person observing without a personal fear; the fear they have directly plays upon what they "see". We can observe this mechanism too, if we consider the phenomenon of looking for abusers as part of a group need to outcast misfits,deviants and unacceptables in society: Good guys and bad guys. People who have a "crusade" to find deviants of any sort are not able to be rational at the outset. Here, they are part of a group with a crusade to stamp out child abuse and by their position cannot be balanced or objective. If we set out to find something negative in someone we are apt to perceive it, just like any paranoia-induced perception, still more so if we are in a group intoxication, a group with a mission, all of whose members are primed to seek out abuse. In such a group we can lose much of ourselves, we can abdicate perceptions that we would have if not directed by others, and we can ignore our better judgment in the pursuance of our group-induced personal needs..
But what is it about a group that implants ideas and propels group loyalties? Well, we get approval, protection, a comfortable familiarity from being in a group. We are persuaded by group ideas because we need as human beings to belong and feel accepted and needed; if we don`t conform, we lose this. Being an insider gives us a sense of well-being and fulfilment. Leaders within groups use strategies to make the group stick together, they promote ideas of "us and them", draw us in close and reward us when we gratify them. Being in a group with a mission to stamp out child abuse is a worthy position, but as such it necessarily creates delusions of superiority and grandeur and it is the very "we are saving children against abusers" that causes an inability to think about whether there is really child abuse or not. The group desires results.. and the workers in the group want to gain approval for finding it. Because we crave this approval we are seduced by it and this distorts our perceptions.
So with just a preliminary look at the forces at play behind the scenes in such a situation as requires professional judgement, we see just how unsafe our perceptions are. With influences from our own psychological makeup and the imposition of group demands, it is almost impossible to be professionally objective.
I do believe, however, that awareness can change things and achieve a better society for us all.
www.parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk/
But sometimes these perceptions are incorrect, we make mistakes, and there are consequences for us and for those around us.I am particularly interested in how and why we make assumptions in regard to the society we experience and our inter-personal relationships and how this impacts on our lives and on society too.
My blogs are an attempt to think about these issues and to try to understand the hidden forces at work in our everyday lives with an eye to fairness and right and justice.
We can understand why there is prejudice or injustice, violence or immorality, but these are not just the "dark side" of our better selves, they emanate from the same source,our human nature.I hope that trying to understand these elements of our functioning self will help us to mitigate the affects of destructive impulses in a constructive sense, but, if only to calm our frustrations and our feelings of defencelessness, thinking this through is eminently worthwhile. In common parlance this is termed "self help" !!!!!
Let`s take an example:
We have seen via the media that social workers have made mistakes when assessing
cases involving children. Some cases of child abuse have been missed, but conversely we know that some cases have been imagined where no abuse is present. How can this happen?
There are two main influences here, the personal, where our personal psychological baggage influences the things we think we perceive, and the group, the part we play in a group dynamic with the people around us.
Now, we might assume that professionals are trained to be objective and have certain criteria by which to ascertain whether there is child abuse or not. We can see here how we immediately follow our acquired assumption that "professionalism" is a safeguard towards correct, unbiased and non-subjective discernment. But the professional process is only dictated by the people who contrive these methods, and the processes and those people are subject to their own personal baggage and their own group position as well!
Let`s take a very ordinary experience: We walk down the street and as we go we assess, as part of an unconscious process, who is a threat and who is not. This assessment is almost instantaneous , we have little control over it and yet it informs us as if it were knowledge and not just a response to all our cues. We certainly do not feel we are hijacked by irrational baggage !!!
So what are these cues and where do they come from?
Well, we carry reflex responses old and new, autonomic fears coming from our development as a species, biological drives, inherited cues from our parents and family and of course cues arising from our own experiences. We also acquire new cues all the time, from people around us and from the media.
Personal Cues:
When a social worker goes to assess a family, they may be trained to be objective, but they are unaware of the part played by their own personal issues and the wider group drive. No amount of training can change this, mitigate it maybe, but not eliminate it. Why? Because, on a personal level, we are not always able to cognise our own cues: If I have been upset by a particular person with particular physical characteristics when I am four years old, I may not recall this, and yet if it is triggered when I interview a parent who happens to carry this characteristic, my objective judgement will be swayed, I will have a negative perception of them and my intellect will try to rationalise my feelings. What can happen here is that the observer, the social worker in this case, will align their subjectivity with their objectivity, that is, they will find a rational, observable reason to doubt the parent, not realising that they are doing this. This then can be passed to colleagues as observable according to their "possible child abuse" criteria, and will assume the power of "proof" against the parent. Thus, the idea that a particular parent is guilty begins upon a cue that is not conscious and takes on all the colours of objective truth as it grows from one professional to another.
This, of course, can work in reverse, a social worker may have a positive cue related to a certain characteristic in a person they are assessing, yet this person is abusing a child. The positive cue will mask the objective judgement and once again the intellect will justify this perception.
Group Dynamics:
In the U.K. there have been such huge mistakes in overlooking cases of child abuse, such that cases of mistaken abuse will inevitably rise as social workers desperately try to avert error. Many families have been victim to this and their children have been removed.
There is serious contradiction in pursuing child abuse if innocent parents and their children are persecuted, just as in the name of justice, it is not acceptable for innocent people to be jailed for crimes they did not commit. Yet social workers are making mistakes out of fear that they will overlook a case of abuse, a death will occur, and they will be held responsible for it. Individual social workers are trying to protect themselves by rigorously pursuing the group drive to find child abuse, and because they are afraid of the wider group, society,if they should not notice a real case of abuse, they can make mistakes.
So a social worker mindful of "not making a mistake" will view a family differently from a person observing without a personal fear; the fear they have directly plays upon what they "see". We can observe this mechanism too, if we consider the phenomenon of looking for abusers as part of a group need to outcast misfits,deviants and unacceptables in society: Good guys and bad guys. People who have a "crusade" to find deviants of any sort are not able to be rational at the outset. Here, they are part of a group with a crusade to stamp out child abuse and by their position cannot be balanced or objective. If we set out to find something negative in someone we are apt to perceive it, just like any paranoia-induced perception, still more so if we are in a group intoxication, a group with a mission, all of whose members are primed to seek out abuse. In such a group we can lose much of ourselves, we can abdicate perceptions that we would have if not directed by others, and we can ignore our better judgment in the pursuance of our group-induced personal needs..
But what is it about a group that implants ideas and propels group loyalties? Well, we get approval, protection, a comfortable familiarity from being in a group. We are persuaded by group ideas because we need as human beings to belong and feel accepted and needed; if we don`t conform, we lose this. Being an insider gives us a sense of well-being and fulfilment. Leaders within groups use strategies to make the group stick together, they promote ideas of "us and them", draw us in close and reward us when we gratify them. Being in a group with a mission to stamp out child abuse is a worthy position, but as such it necessarily creates delusions of superiority and grandeur and it is the very "we are saving children against abusers" that causes an inability to think about whether there is really child abuse or not. The group desires results.. and the workers in the group want to gain approval for finding it. Because we crave this approval we are seduced by it and this distorts our perceptions.
So with just a preliminary look at the forces at play behind the scenes in such a situation as requires professional judgement, we see just how unsafe our perceptions are. With influences from our own psychological makeup and the imposition of group demands, it is almost impossible to be professionally objective.
I do believe, however, that awareness can change things and achieve a better society for us all.
www.parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk/
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