Violence against children

Emile Durkheim's social order paradigm would look at family violence from the perspective of lack of solidarity within the family unit. The ideal family is one which has common goals. For nurturing parents, the goal is to raise healthy, emotionally well-adjusted children. In contrast, the typical family pattern in the abusive household pits one parent against the other. For example, the father might be abusive while the mother tries to shield the children from paternal violence. This is a familial background that is common in survivors of child abuse: "despite the abuse they had grown up with, they had at least one parent or foster parent who provided some love and support" (Gelles and Straus, 1994, p. 327). The presence of a nurturing parent partially offsets the trauma created by the abusive parent. These two parents have competing interests because only one has the child's best interests in mind: "For others, including Durkheim, competition without a prior commitment to common interests was a basic source of disorder" (Unit 2, 2-3). Parents locked

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erless to leave a violent family because young children do not control the means of their own production. For this reason, children wait until they are older to run away from abusive home because they then have some means of subsistence: "An estimated 75% of the 'hard core' street youth engage in some type of criminal activity, and nearly half engage in prostitution or 'survival sex' (i.e., the exchange of a sexual favor for food, a place to stay, clothes, money, or drugs) to financially support themselves" (Kipke et al., 1997, p. 415). As long as an abused child depends on its parents for economic survival, the child will be powerless to escape family violence. According to Marx, the solution to social conflict is the overthrow of the exploitative class, and this suggestion would apply to family violence as well. The first step is awareness. The exploited class cannot benefit from violent revolution until it realizes the extent to which it is being exploited: "Those who would change a society also must be able to see through the common beliefs and values that justify the existing order and shape one's own capacity to criticize the order" (Unit 3, 3-2). Once the abused child understands the nature of the exploitative rela
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Approximate Word count = 1700
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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