From Pasture to Plate: Child Abuse in Ireland

"I see so many little boys I want to marry."

Devandra Barnhart 

In the same newspaper that recently gave voice to the  universal anger at the abuse of children in certain crèches in Dublin,  I came across the following advertisement for an upmarket city restaurant. The advertisement featured a juicy fillet steak, sizzling away on a flaming grill, above which the caption declares:

“Our organic beef isn't so much supplied. Its caressed and loved from pasture to plate.”

 The ad makes perfect sense as long as we entirely exclude the sentiments of the animal who is to enjoy these fond caresses, at the abattoir and ultimately upon the grill of this most loving establishment. This advertisement is interesting on several levels firstly in how the concept of love is treated. This is the type of love that does not extend further than the lover, for the animal, if aware of its motive and objective would be unlikely to appreciate or reciprocate it. 

Perhaps our contemporary ideal of love is undergoing a type of evolution, one that reaches its climax when consummated at the slaughter house?  In respect of this evolution, one hears an echo of Slavov Zizek's famous assertion that "Love is evil."  http://youtu.be/hg7qdowoemo .

 In real terms the materialization of love, it's utilitarian conversion into a self-serving commodity, is nothing new and nothing short of it's destruction.  Love (at least in this instance) is being used to promote its inverse. What does it say of our society, that we should transform love into its opposite, without the bat of an eye?  In the context of suicide and self or social destruction, it makes it easier perhaps, to loathe this world, to wish to destroy it, or depart from it, when love is so frequently and so grotesquely transformed. 

It is not so much that the advertisement bastardises the truth of what a genuine 'love' for the animal might entail. It is rather the  fact the advertisers should (rightly or wrongly) assume that most of us would not find this assertion to be offensive if not entirely questionable.

What makes this type of love interesting in the context of abuse, is that a similar psychological process is invariably applied when our children are abused by their teacher, their parent or by society at large. When a child  is objectified, or like the cow materialized into a form that is of benefit solely to the observer the lover, the parent, the school,  step into the shoes of the abuser.

There is a very powerful scene in the 1998 Film Festen. Christian's Speech (http://youtu.be/_7N-x9TGCuw).  The family of Helge a successful Danish businessman, return home for a reunion on the occasion of their father's 60th birthday. After dinner, the eldest son Christian, gives his father the option of two prepared speeches; '...a green one, or a yellow one'. The scene is immediately reminiscent of that pivotal moment in The Matrix when the protagonist must choose between the 'blue pill' of blissful ignorance or the 'red pill' of conflict, and reality. 

When Christian reads out the contents of his yellow speech, he begins with what sounds like a humorous childhood anecdote pertaining to; 'Fathers bath-time'.  However the story ends with a vivid and disturbing description of how their father would sexually abuse Christian and his sister as part of his regular bathing ritual.

The reaction of the well dressed gathering amid the formal setting of a silver-service dinner party is perhaps one of the most classic moments in the history of contemporary film. It  calls to mind the initial response to abuse scandals that emerged when the swamp of Irish politics was partially drained in the early nineties.

 Later in the film when Helge must ultimately confront the truth of his abusing past, when he is compelled to answer the question that his son puts to him, (the question that many victims of abuse struggle with for an eternity), namely: why a father would defile his children in the most brutal and horrific manner imaginable? Helge shares with the gathering what are probably the sentiments of most abusers of children; "I did it because it was all that you were good for.”

The cow in our advertisement can be loved, as long as it is only good for eating, and in the same respect our Children are abused when they are materialized, objectified, and  good for nothing else.

Capitalism as a modern cultural ideal is integral to the progressive materialization of our world view. Our horizon becomes ever narrowed, and we see the world in an increasingly utilitarian light; one where all things are good, relative to their material value.  The distinction between the piece of carbon we wear upon our finger, and that which we toss into the fire, is made entirely upon this horizon.  

Within the capitalist social model we must remain intellectually poor. We no longer see the inherent beauty of a thing but rather consider firstly if it is of any material value. Shopping Malls have become the new cathedrals, literature art and philosophy have a paltry material value and have been annexed from the currency of our daily lives.  Philosophy, the highest form of intellectual function has the lowest social value.  As a course of study it is in least demand, requiring the lowest points, and is disappearing from the curriculum of many universities.  Indeed, when Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone was released in the United States, the Producers changed the name to: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, as it was felt that the word Philosophy would be a turn-off for American audiences.  Emerson and Thoreau would surely turn in their graves.   

So too with literature and the arts, indeed the very act of independent thought is under siege. This is the tragedy of capitalism. It is a tragedy that is acute among post colonial cultures, who have themselves been comodified for centuries, and are most familiar with tipping their caps to the master of the day. It is for this reason that Mr Kenny should have a panic-attack in the Dail when Clare Daly recently had the audacity to speak ill of the visiting American President. 

The transition is near complete, we have turned ourselves into our own Punch Magazine, we are the Quiet Man and Darby O'Gill's little people. The self styled playthings of our cultural and capital masters.  We have turned ourselves into slaves and it should come as no surprise that we should insist that our children learn to be good slaves also.

Last September a friend of mine started work as a teacher at  Secondary school in North Dublin. As he walked down the corridor, one of his older more senior colleagues asked him, how he was getting on; “Fine” he replied, “we don’t really have too many discipline problems at the school” he added. The older teacher corrected him and said; “that might be true for the younger boys, but so far I have had to send two of the sixth years home in order to shave themselves.”

My family returned from New Zealand in 2009 . There my children enjoyed an education system where they called their teacher by his first name, Where they sat about him in a circle, and were encouraged to speak out, and to think independently.  

Each morning my daughter struggles down the road with ten tonnes of paper blocks strapped to her back like an Egyptian pyramid builder. We laughed together when she brought home strict instructions that she was to have a 'fountain-pen' as part of her accouterments. I recall having to have one myself some thirty years ago.  In 2013 in Ireland we are insisting that children must bring fountain-pens to school, whilst learning to type upon the near ubiquitous keyboard is about as common as learning to speak Yiddish?

My daughter tells me each week of the classmate who is disciplined for wearing nail polish, or the wrong coloured trainers to PE.

Abuse in Ireland is often an accumulation of these little twists of the knife into the spine of common sense. We don't see children, we see 'pupils' or little advertisements for the success of our petty regimes.  Its all about control. In America or New Zealand teachers generally do not exercise autonomy over the bodies of children in the same way that they do here. Perhaps it is for this reason that there is little innovation here, that we remain incapable of thinking about new politics, a new social order or a new type of washing machine.  

Independence of thought is an anathema, to be stamped out as soon as it appears. It is for this reason that Pearse referred to our largely unchanged education system as The Murder Machine.  It is this same system that has brought us RTE, and the same paralysis that caused Joyce and Beckett to flee.  

When did we assume the right to tell our teenagers what they must wear, how they must dress, when they must shave? What do these modalities of personal expression and freedom have to do with education?  

For his Junior cert my son took honours maths, his parents have been to University and yet we struggled to help him comprehend this mathematical mess of social irrelevance. What of a kid from the ghettos of Ballymun or Balbriggan? Who will help them with their maths and their physics?

Irish education is where we begin to abuse our children.  It is where we begin to crush their spirits and their capacity for self expression and independent thought. It is where we teach them to accumulate points so they might purchase a career. It is where we turn them into commodities of greater or lesser value, where we love them and caress them from pasture to plate.