Janet CollinsAbuse and Power
May 21st 2009 21:26
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The story that dominated the news last week was the football scandal, a seven year old event that happened in Christchurch, New Zealand with a group of Aussie footballers and a woman who was treated really badly when they visited there in 2002.
The report today coming out from Ireland, that has made headline news has been the systematic abuse of children over decades who had been put in the care of respected people in positions of trust.
These two issues bring to the table some of the most ugly of human traits. They also raise a whole lot of other issues about power and the human being.
I know that some of the incidents in Ireland date well back into the last century and the footballers issue wasn’t yesterday but it was only seven years ago.
We must remember that over the last few decades we have been continually told by so many social scientists how sophisticated we have become.
Have we?
The issue concerning the footballers continues to embarrass the NRL but are they the ones who should be really copping the flack? After all, these men were not teenagers on summer camp. They were adults who behaved like kids with a barbaric attitude. How much can the NRL do as far as supervision for adult men? Are they in any position to say ‘be in bed by 8:00”?
What the whole thing boils down to is about perception of fun. Fun to many is the degridation of another human being which goes back to the dark ages. It was not so much sex as the humiliation that seemed to be the impetus for fun here.
The old saying “what happens on tour stays on tour” had its comuppance last week when the outing of what went on during this particular tour got big headlines and has ruined more than a few lives.
The headlines today about the continual abuse of the most vulnerable and marginalised young people in Ireland is yet another example of the humans unable to honour the trust that has been given them. It is a very sad story but it is not the first and will certainly not be the last.
Isn’t it well and truly time for all societies to take a stand against the abuse and disrespect of other human beings. We have all spent years hearing about the injustices done to Jews in World War II.
We have all watched in horror at the torture of people from what we regard as being renegade regimes throughout the world. We have publicly criticised this behaviour and called it appalling. We hear of all the torture that happened in Guantanamo Bay and applaud President Obama for putting an end to it. We all join associations that condemn this sort of behaviour such as Amnesty but what can we do to stop it?
There have also been a lot of cases of child abuse over the last few decades here in Australia so it's not as though Ireland is alone here. There a quite a number of arrests recently of teachers allegedly abusing students a few decades ago and these are yet to go to trial and Australia has had some of its own awful history of child abuse.
It is about time we all looked at ourselves in the mirror. People at all times should be treated with decency and compassion, no excuses. It doesn’t matter what their race, skin colour, sexual orientation or social circumstances. Why do we tend to value one person's value more than another?
What is the answer? Can we instill in a young boy an attitude of respect to women that will not get tainted when he becomes a adult? Can we educate and train people to assume positions of power and use that power appropriately?
Everyone has the gossip and the scandal but little is said about how we can rectify an ongoing problem that is, in reality, a human rights issue. The media attention that the footballer issue had was far more than any other human rights issue I can remember. If we had been under some belief that our society were above this behaviour, the media last week would have totally changed our minds.
The fact that this abuse of power is so prevalent today would have to reflect on the progress, or lack of it, that has been made over many decades. Does it go to the core of our upbringing or our teaching principles or is it just so embedded in human nature that any attempts to rectify the problem are futile?
It is well clear that education of human rights should be embedded into our early educational curriculum. It comes down to parenting and upbringing. It also comes down to the responsibility of all of us to actually condemn these attitudes and not just be disgusted about it for the week that it is in the media. I
Issues like this are all too easy to forget it once they are out of the headlines. The rest of the time we just pretend it isn't happening. Authorities would do well to not shy away from this as ugly as it is. Doing so will only encourage a lot more of the same in the future.
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Comment by Wilson Pon
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Funny about that. Thanks for dropping in and commentingl
Janet
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Comment by Janet Collins
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I often keep thinking that things are going backwards and that people - or women - are just accepting these things as a part of life.
These scandals happen and they make big headlines for a day, a week and then nothing. Then a few years on it happens again. Why?