It's just not OK to beat people....but you knew that right?

DISCLAIMER: I don’t watch anything on World Star Hip Hop[WSHH] ever...because many of the video descriptions i see from there I don’t agree with, nor can I support. Most often what I see come up are violent portrayals of one incident or another...either someone getting beat up or children being beat... you know things of that nature.

As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I just tend to stay away from things like that. I don’t share the links for " awareness" and I tend to try not to speak on them in my personal life....because I spend my whole work life doing so if you catch my drift. And i encourage you all to do the same. Sharing and watching the link does no good to help the victims in those situations unless you tell someone who can help...

Recently, there has been a video circulating that depicts a father beating his children with an extension cord for uploading a twerking video onto facebook. As always, i ignored the links on my timeline and refused to share. However, i feel compelled to speak out on this subject because one thing I’ve seen entirely too much of is people SUPPORTING the PERSON who BEAT another PERSON.

Now I have no children, but I do work with children and I’m the eldest of seven children...my youngest sibling just turned 5...I am 26...

Last time I checked, beating people is not OK. Pretty much anywhere you go, Beating a person can land you in jail or in some sort of trouble. If my co worker does something incorrectly, it is not considered acceptable for me to beat said coworker.  So in a society where we are expected not to beat people, why do some feel its OK to beat children when they do something incorrect?

Oh I know why!

Its because children as a whole are NOT respected in our society. Its because we somehow think that by birthing children we OWN them. Its because we believe that as adults, children are inherently supposed to listen to everything that we have to say, that they must respect us regardless of whether WE show THEM respect or not.

To be honest, corporal punishment is the lazy way out. If often instills a sense of fear, rather than respect and teaches children to obey the rules to avoid punishment as opposed to obeying the rules to help society run smoothly. Yes I’m aware that I have no children...

I’ve seen many a parent get frustrated with a child and label it bad simply because they don’t want to do what YOU want them to do. I’m not talking about harmful stuff of course, I’m referring to simple things like eating when THEY feel they are hungry or going to sleep when they are tired. Then to physically beat a child simply because they are their own person to me ridiculous.

Not to mention the fact that beating in and of itself is just not an appropriate way to solve most problems. Are there some instances where physical force is necessary? Yes especially in cases of self defense, but to use it as a form of punishment is just plain lazy.

I can think of several different ways that that situation could have been handled differently. But in order to enact those alternatives, it will take TIME, which people "don’t have enough of". I know for a fact that ignoring a child's temper tantrum will eventually cause them to stop...but parents give in because THEY don’t want to hear the child screaming, or they are embarrassed or whatever excuse is underlying their actions of giving in to the child's requests

If we respected children and people as the HUMANS they are, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion, because violence would hardly be an issue. Because people who value and respect another person will not bring harm to them...logically it makes no sense.

But respect is a word that is often thrown around yet seldom explicitly explained and even less rarely freely given...yet somehow it is one of the greatest expectations that we have of others.

Bottom line, its not OK to beat people, let alone our most vulnerable members of society. And encouraging that type of behavior simply because a "Father" was "punishing" his child reflects a serious problem in today's society.