February 9, 2013
While we have a way to go, we as a culture understand that it is important to protect the rights of women, racial minorities, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and others who have historically suffered discrimination. Unfair discrimination based on race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation is now prohibited under a number of federal laws. We even staunchly stand behind the rights of animals, and rightly so.
However, what is incredible and incongruous, is the fact that we leave our most vulnerable unprotected, often protecting the rights of the powerful to do as they please to them including the use of legally sanctioned physical violence.
Yes, I am referring to our children. We in the United States have fought for the rights of parents to do as they please with their children, despite our awareness of very high statistical numbers on abuse and neglect in the home (including for instance the fact that one in four females and one in six males is a victim of sexual abuse in his/her own home by age 18).
Parental autonomy is written into our system, and many parents will fight hard for their right to hit children, which is protected throughout the United States. That in itself is shocking. If a grown man hits another grown man, that act is a crime. If that same grown man hits his own helpless tiny one-year-old baby, the one he was entrusted by nature to protect, we legally, morally, and generally as a nation sanction and protect that behavior as a parental right.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a parent’s right to raise his or her child is a fundamental right protected under the 14th Amendment (as if you recall it has in the past ruled that racial discrimination should be protected). Attempts to pass laws that limit parental rights to physically discipline their children, even in a limited way, are often met with stern resistance and even ridicule.
Not only are our laws and social values on this issue immoral, they are pragmatically incorrect. Recent studies, including MRI-based brain scans, have shown that corporal punishment in childhood fundamentally damages the forming brain of a developing baby and child leading potentially to a host of cognitive, psychological, and physical disorders.
Despite these studies, we are not changing. The Virginia Senate passed a bill last week to amend the Virginia Code to state, “A parent has a fundamental right to direct the upbringing, education and care of the parent’s child.”
While this sounds benign, child welfare advocates are concerned that this provision will further support court decision makers in placing the rights of parents before those of abused and neglected children who may be in danger.
Consider this article describing the situation in Virginia.
The question I have is – where is the provision in the Constitution that protects the rights our children, our very future, to be free from violence and abuse?