Violence

Last week I was interviewed on ABC Radio's morning program as Vice President of the Northern Territory Council of Government School Organisations.
Dopy Dave had jumped on unrest about juvenile crime and organised a 'community forum' with the sole intention of gaining a bit of political capital.
He'd invited the Federal Minister for Justice along and this Minister made the astounding suggestion that we go back to hitting kids at school to help solve the problem.
I couldn't believe it and I said so: was he seriously advocating common assault as an element of our educational philosophy?
The interviewer, playing devil's advocate, asked me if I'd been subjected to corporal punishment at school, and whether it made me behave.
I went to a boarding school on England which, pace the late David Sandison, I will call St Onan's.
I was caned on the backside and on the hand with wooden and bamboo canes, beaten with gym slippers (what we used to call 'Trainers', dear) and was the target of blackboard dusters or viciously thrown pieces of chalk.
Old Thos, the woodwork teacher, would hurl a lump of wood at innocently daydreaming kids and accompany the 'thunk' of it hitting your head with the declamation: 'behold thy fairy godmother', delivered in a South Yorkshire accent.
I was also imprisoned (school detentions on weekends), I was bullied (made to do repetitive and degrading drills) stood over and sexually assaulted. And that was just by teachers.
The conservative response is to say '...and it never did me any harm'.
Bullshit.
Violence begets violence and assaults of this nature are psychologically damaging even if all they engender is a deep-rooted belief that violence is an acceptable solution.
I didn't behave. I was humiliated and resentful of my personal space being invaded so intimately and with such ease.
People who don't think things through particularly well always come back to a violence-based discipline approach (behavior management, they call it these days) as THE answer.
They also tend to blame schools for kids running riot, when it is essentially a social problem.
And if society can't or won't deal with it, there's little point demanding that schools accept the entire responsibility and empowering them to assault into the bargain.
I'm raising this here because I've been thinking about the way Aboriginal people are mystified by our culture's ability to perpetrate an atrocity like the Stolen Generations, a psychic as well as physical wound which reverberates down through succeeding generations.
'How could you do it to children?' they ask.
'After all the stuff you talk about families, how could you take children away from their mothers?'
The asking, I think, carries an implicit assumption that there may be something, some answer, that will explain everything.
There is no logic to it.
But you can gain some insights into how it happened by looking at the way many among us are prepared to treat children from our own culture - particularly the children of the marginalised, who are themselves marginalised educationally and who are likely to carry on what have become family traditions of being economically marginalised.
I was a smart working class boy and my teachers were generally of a middle class educated elite.
Much of what I went through may well be described dispassionately as rites of passage.
But they did it because they could get away with it - and they did.
And, clearly, there are still people in power who think it's OK to advocate violence against children as a panacea for social ills.