Angry Much???

As a prerequesite to this blog, I ask that you watch this video (could be disturbing):

Although I was late in learning about this incident, it did not change how shocked and bothered I was by the situation.

First, a father comes to the daycare and hits a child, and then a child becomes the one doing the hitting.  And then, as it turns out, the father came to the daycare and hit the child who up until that point he THOUGHT had been injuring his daughter (because she had been coming home with busted lips and bite marks).  The 9 year old child in this video was actually the one doing the damage to the father's daughter and to several other children at the daycare.

In the video you can see how he punches, chokes, and kicks the little girls, and even goes as far as trying to soothe/console the girl he had been choking once she started crying. 

Then, when a reporter spoke to someone who deals with this little boy on a daily basis she said "he bad" and kind of in a way tried to justify his behavior by saying he takes medicine everyday and he only fights the bigger kids (which according to the video is not true; the girl he choked was in a walker--I am pretty sure that qualifies her as a "little kid").

To go even further, I took a look at some of the comments under the video. I wanted to see what people who had seen the video before me thought. People said the kid is definitely not normal, if they were the parents of the children they would beat his @$$, if they were his parents they would beat him, give him a little of what he is giving, and from the comments I read, maybe 1 or 2 people actually said in response to other people that treating his violence with violence is not the way to go. They could have a point. Of course, as a human being, my first thought was OMG this boy is crazy, and why is he doing this to these babies that aren't doing, and aren't even capable, or doing anything to him? But then, I just thought "what in the world is going on with this boy at home?" I mean think about it. This type of behavior is learned, it does not just come from nowhere.

That got me to thinking about My Sister's House (MSH). There is a strict rule about violence in the shelter. It just is not allowed. PERIOD. Not toward the staff, not between residents, and not between a mother and her children. Mothers are showed other ways to discipline children, and expected to comply, or they will get kicked out with a red dot.  The children have already been exposed to some kind of abuse, they are already statistically more likely to engage in these behaviors, so why would people think it's ok to "punish" this boy with a beating? Does that really make sense? It bears the potential of making things worse.

So, let's look at the bigger picture:

*There's this boy
*This boy takes some unknown medication everyday
*This boy lives in an unknown environment
*This boy comes to daycare and hits babies...only the girls..and then he even tries to soothe her afterwards and then he's back at it again

This looks like the cycle of abuse.

Yes, the boy was wrong. He inflicted pain on innocent kids. But maybe he's the innocent kid when he gets home. Or maybe mom is the innocent one and he has to watch. We don't know.  I have a thing for untold histories..you know the pink triangles of the world. Sometimes, you have to delve deeper, and think about what the underlying issues are. No, I'm not saying that they boy's behavior should be advocated for; I'm just saying that we simply DO NOT KNOW the whole story.