Old Things That Are Tough To Explain: Child Abuse in Public Was Okay
When I was growing up in the 1970s, it was considered okay to beat your kids in public. I’m not sure it was ‘okay.’ It might have been frowned upon, but bystanders rarely intervened. To me, it looked like it was okay because nobody ever did anything about parents who beat their children in front of a bunch of people. Everybody would just stand and watch.
When kids get smacked around in public now, it gets recorded and police seem to get involved (I have no statistics to back this up). In fact, I haven’t seen a good child beating in years. By ‘good,’ I don’t actually mean that it’s good. I guess I should choose my words more carefully.
In the mid to late 1970s, I saw a bunch of public child beatings that made an impression on me.
I saw a young mom beat the tar out of her son in a movie theater lobby. This was probably 1978 (I wasn’t keeping a diary of this stuff). After a minute or two of slapping, screaming, and punching, she dragged the kid out to the parking lot and beat him some more. My best friend was more entertained by the beating than he would be by the movie later on. He just munched on his popcorn, kept his eyes glued to the spectacle with a grin, and wondered out loud what the kid had done. After the movie, the beating was all he could talk about. He was almost proud of having been a witness.
I saw a kid get beat down by his dad in a restaurant parking lot. The dad finished his beating by slamming the kid’s head against his car passenger window four or five times. At least, I think it was his dad. And I think it was his dad’s car. Maybe it was a random guy abusing a random kid and a random car. I don’t know. Nobody intervened. We just watched. I was just a kid and couldn’t have done anything, but my parents and a bunch of other adults just watched too. And then we went into the restaurant and ate. And nobody talked about it.
I saw parents beat their kids when I was a visitor in their homes. Thankfully, that didn’t happen often. That was always awkward, watching your friend get pelted by a mom or dad’s belt/strap while you’re trying to read a comic book or play a board game. What are you supposed to say to a friend after that?
“Wow! Your mom packs a mean swing!”
“I guess you just f***ed around and found out.”
“Your mom messed up the board. You want to start over?”
“You’d better put some ice on that.”
My own parents could get carried away with impulsive punishments, but I always knew I was safe when we had visitors. In fact, sometimes I invited friends over just to keep my parents on good behavior. At least my parents knew that some of their occasional impulse punishments were wrong. Public shame is an effective deterrent to some people. But a couple of my friends weren’t so fortunate.
A lot of what I saw would be considered child abuse today. Some of the stuff that happened to me would be considered child abuse today, but I don’t talk about it because I don’t want people looking at me like that. If you start talking about it, people look at you funny. I made that mistake once, so it’s better when you mention that you witnessed stuff rather than experiencing it. What I witnessed was worse anyway.
Nowadays, people seem more willing to talk about trauma than they were a few decades ago. Of course, when I was a kid, I couldn’t have cried in the car and then posted it on Tik-Tok. Social media didn’t exist. And if my dad had caught me crying in the car, he would have told me to stop or he’d give me a reason to cry. In fact, whenever I see a video of an adult crying about something in a car, my first impulse is to think, ‘What a lose….’ Aw, never mind. That’s just my upbringing. Maybe I should be more tolerant. Maybe I’m just jealous.
I’m glad people are more open about trauma than we were when I was growing up. A lot of adults stood around and watched (that still happens, but at least they record it, and the public/police reacts later), and people kept it to themselves (not so much anymore). I’m glad some aspects of abuse seem to be changing because a lot of the stuff that I witnessed when I was growing up is really tough to explain to people who weren’t there.
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And for more Old Things That Are Tough To Explain, see…
Dysfunctional Literacy 