At Eight Years Old We Learned to Torture

万得福

Sometimes their faces pop  up in my mind and I shudder. I don’t want to recall their suffering but I also  can’t pretend it never happened. They were tormented, day after day, and for  extended periods. I can only hope and pray that they recovered.
I am torn over using their  names; I wouldn’t want to drag them back to their sufferings, but at the same  time, their suffering mattered, and I don’t want to devalue them by blotting  out their identities.
We were children torturing  other children. And it’s still going on.

• Carly was tortured mostly  by other girls. They would surround her, laugh at her, point at her, and mock  her… over years. She was told, loudly and publicly, that she had an ugly face,  ugly hair, ugly clothes, and that she was stupid. This happened five days per  week, nine months per year.
• Ron was tortured by the  boys. I still have images in my mind of him being forced to play baseball,  surrounded by at least twenty boys who laughed at his every move. They laughed  so loudly that you could hear them from the far side of the field. This torture  was not limited to sports humiliation, and forced his entire family to move to  a distant location.
• Debra was humiliated with  purpose and malice. Both boys and girls called her “dog” to her face. This went  on for years, until her family moved.
• Martin was surrounded by  other boys and slapped around by them, one after another.
• Deirdre was chased down by  a group of boys who held her down, pulled off her underwear, and examined her  genitals.
• Stanley had his physical  appearance ridiculed on a daily basis for many years. He was occasionally  slapped around and was criticized continually.
  

All of this, if you  haven’t guessed, happened at or around school. I made a quick count of ten schoolmates  of mine (at small schools) who were tortured this way in my early years. In  rough numbers, that means that for 5% of my schoolmates, being forced to walk  into a school meant walking into a torture chamber. The rest of us had  momentary torments, but nothing like what these kids experienced.
  And I want you to  understand something about this:
  I went to the very best  public schools in the city of Chicago, with some of the best children in the  city of Chicago. Our neighborhood approached being a Pleasantville. Nearly all of us had stable homes and families, plenty to eat,  family vacations, and so on. Nearly all of us went on to have stable and  productive adult lives.
  Yet, everything recorded  above is true, and these tortures were applied hundreds of times per year, and  in some cases thousands… to children.
What  It Did to Them In cursory searches, I’ve  found very little information on these victims. (I didn’t want to violate them  by digging.) So, I can’t really say what happened to them, but I have done  research on the subject.
  On the left are the  effects of Abu Ghraib style torture, courtesy of Wikipedia. And on the right  are the effects of “school bullying,” also courtesy of Wikipedia:

Post-traumatic stress disorder	Post-traumatic stress disorder
Anxiety	Anxiety
Depression	Depression
Insomnia	Suicide
Nightmares	Anger
Memory lapses	Excessive stress
Guilt and shame

I can tell you from my  experience that “guilt and shame” should definitely be included in the school  bullying list, as should, almost certainly, nightmares.
So, yes, those kids were  tortured. To call it “teasing” or “bullying” is both to lie and to spit on  these children once again.
To make it even worse,  this is still going on, and probably more so. People just block it out of their  minds because modern society places “school” in a position of worship. They  haven’t the courage to combine the words “torture” and “school” in their minds.
But psychological defenses  be damned, I can tell you one thing that I know all too well:
For millions of children,  walking into a school building is the same as walking into a torture chamber.
Adults block such thoughts  from entering their minds, but in so doing, they are closing their eyes to the  persistent torture of millions of children. If it seems that I’m being harsh,  I’m not – how do you think those children feel?
Shall we continue to  abandon them to torment because facing the truth is uncomfortable?
Why  It Happens  Since the torture of  children angers me, I will be blunt: The proximate cause of this is the forced  grouping of government schooling. Yes, schooling.
This is where people run  away from the subject, calling upon approved models of the world and repeating,  “That can’t be.”
But since I believe that  you, dear reader, are not so inclined, I shall continue.
Forced grouping breeds bad  conduct. When you mix that with hierarchical domination, it gets much worse.  And that is precisely what mass schooling does.
Laws force children to  attend these institutions, where they are forced to submit to authority.  Learning from this example, the children turn around and apply the same  domination on others, putting themselves above them in the all-important order  of hierarchy.
Probably nothing could  make this point better than Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, which  created a very school-like situation… and which had to be disbanded after only  six days, because the dominators became sadistic.
And it is important to  note that the Stanford experiment’s sadistic dominators were all students at an  elite university – from “good families,” just like the ones in my neighborhood.
The lesson is clear and  documented: Forced grouping plus hierarchical dominance breeds torture.
We can either accept this  or close our eyes to it, but the evidence stands. And so long as these systems  continue, 5% of the children (or whatever the actual number is) will be  continually tortured.
Applying additional  hierarchical pressures to this situation (as with anti-bullying laws and  punishments) will never work; it’s just another dose of the same things that  are causing the problem.
The system is the problem, and that problem is  beyond obscene.
A  Final NoteI’m relieved to say that I  had very little to do with torturing my schoolmates and even feebly defended  them a few times. But I was young and frightened myself, and if I could, I’d  love to go back and do things differently.
Still, if any of the  tortured kids from my youth ever read this: I’m sorry. I wish I had done more  to help you. You deserved it.
Paul   Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

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