The need to eliminate the pandemic of cruelty

Psychological factors in the case of male abusers could include repressions that go back to childhood where gender based stereotyping expects small male children to restrain themselves from showing emotion, such as crying – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara 

By Suryamithra Vishwa

Wearing masks and returning to work has now become the norm for us. Even if we did any contemplation on whether the life we lived before COVID-19 was balanced and harmonious, and if we considered if many of the things we indulged in are actually necessary, such as rampant consumerism, it is still easy to go back to the old ‘normal’. Now that we are once again in what they call the ‘rat race…’ Rats race.. They don’t think.

We had two months to introspect both as individuals, communities and as a country as a whole.  As a nation, some very disturbing things happened when families were forced to spend extensive time together during the pandemic preventive lockdown. Let’s cite two of these things here. Husbands began abusing wives. Child abuse rose. Yet, have we taken these seriously as a country? 

We have many psychologists in this nation. If they pondered on the above phenomena deeply it may disturb them to the extent of giving them sleepless nights; the fact that husbands and fathers were so unused to staying within their own families without ‘escaping’ for much of the day to their workplaces, that they resorted to abuse. 

In the area I live in, I witnessed two such cases from neighbouring households where I heard husbands blaming the wives for food shortage (at a time when it was norm around the country) and destroying kitchen utensils. A brief look at the news showed that domestic violence, both against women and children, had risen. However we know that the actual cases maybe higher as many of these cases do not get reported to the police.

Such abuse are serious mental aberrations that should not occur in a country where Buddhism is a key national philosophy, alongside other great religions. These are abominations. They are mental diseases. Are we addressing them genuinely and seriously enough, individually, within the family, through the police, through non-governmental organisations and through our national systems meant for preventing such abuse? Are those who are officially assigned to prevent such crimes, emotionally and mentally attuned and committed to their tasks?

It is also probably time that international agencies stop wasting their money on campaigns that despite the outward show does nothing for inner change. It may be a great and enlightening endeavour if some follow up study was done on the actual impact of some of the global mass scale advocacy initiatives that had been unleashed at great financial cost, by international agencies to prevent domestic violence and abuse of women and children. Advocacy can only work if they are linked with actual action to trigger deep inner change and to look at the many reasons for abuse to occur. 

One of these steps, especially within the Buddhist culture, that greatly values empathy and understanding, may be to look at the perpetrator as a victim as well. Any perpetrator of any kind of abuse, is a sick person; a victim trapped in a kind of web that is made of many factors.  Psychological factors in the case of male abusers could include repressions that go back to childhood where gender based stereotyping expects small male children to restrain themselves from showing emotion, such as crying. 

To look at the vicious cycle of abuse we have to have a sense of gender equality and not consider all men as naturally abusive by nature. We have to recognise that there is acute pressure on the male child from family and even educators to be ‘tough’. A lifetime of such repression can become deadly in real life. Such pressure becomes more as an adult. 

Preventing gender stereotyping is something we have to take very seriously. If we take one example; a man who allows a career oriented woman to be the bread winner and chooses to stay at home attending to the children is often ridiculed by society.  There are actual cases like this and where over time the man changes his personality drastically and in a very negative manner.

Our clergy; both male and female clergy members, can play a key role in family counselling. There is certainly scope to increase the role of the clergy in helping families to deal with their inner world that they may not reveal even to relatives.

Link between education and mental wellbeing

The link between education and mental wellbeing is something this country needs desperately to focus on urgently, given that we have the horrendous crime of ragging, carried out by youth ‘leaders’ who have been ‘educated’ and are about to start their lifetime journey as Lankan professionals. Have we ever stopped to think what kind of demons we are breeding within our education structures when we have youth who are around 22 or 23 years old using jealousy and other diverse abnormal mental conditions to physically abuse freshers to the point that they seek refuge in suicide? This writer knows enough examples of such cases told by many young friends in various universities of this country. 

In this pathetic saga it is not the so called English speaking ‘upper class’, seen commonly as the target of the raggers who are affected. Those who are affected are youth from the villages, who have no social clout in high places, whose only precious opportunity in life is their university entrance. Those affected are youth who want to rise up in life, learn their subjects well and who like to mix with different social classes and maybe learn some English, a language that can connect one with the world.

J.S. Tissanayagam’s short story, Misunderstanding (which is not about ragging per say, but about the mentalities that when festered for long can trigger such acts) speaks beautifully of class difference in universities. The story is about the interaction between two young people and the possibility of surmounting such differences and the mental obstacles to it.

Class differences will always exist, fluctuate and change, but it is the beauty of the human spirit that we must salvage; the great beauty of love and kindness that can exist among children and youth within schools and in universities. If indeed we practice kindness, using the great religions of this country and their spiritual paths from school to university, we will not have such traumas assailing both the ragger and the ragged. Unfortunately we have isolated religion and confined it to rituals alone.

We have been so perturbed about the COVID-19 pandemic that we have been totally blind to the pandemics that rage within the human hearts and minds waging havoc in our homes, education institutes and in society at large.

In this backdrop there is great potential to use art, spirituality, nature, sports and intellectual discourse to address such issues, not in a tamasha like meaningless fashion, but in small steps that we can all start, at whatever sphere.

This writer recalls that one senior architect (who reads widely especially on psychology based research) telling me that the way we live, in these concrete structures, without communion with nature is one (of the many) reasons why we may increase our stress levels to a point where we may not even realise our veering to cruelty.

It is time that we connect all the many factors that can cause humans to be aggressive or cruel to other humans, whatever their social standing or role, and work towards steps that contribute to the elimination of such behaviour. 

We have been so perturbed about the COVID-19 pandemic that we have been totally blind to the pandemics that rage within the human hearts and minds waging havoc in our homes, education institutes and in society at large