Natural Child, Natural Society: Search results for sexual abuse

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Zionism, Indoctrination, Alice Miller's warnings and bigotry as a curated weapon of societal division

The Roots of Violence in child rearing : for your own good

Alice Miller in her book 'The Roots of Violence in child rearing : for your own good' laid out a clear warning that the kinds of misogynistic, racist, xenophobic politics we are seeing emerge would be inevitable, if society did not confront the way trauma impacts parenting.

Alice Miller
"Child Maltreatment and Abuse"

What is it? (Alice Miller Interview)

Humiliations, blows, slaps, deception, sexual exploitation, mockery, neglect, etc. are forms of abuse because they harm a child’s integrity and dignity, even if the effects are not immediately visible. It is in adulthood that the child who was once abused will begin to suffer from it and make others suffer. This is not just a family problem, but a problem for all of society because the victims of this dynamic of violence, transformed into perpetrators, take revenge on entire nations, as shown by the increasingly frequent genocides under atrocious dictatorships like that of Hitler. Beaten children learn violence very early on, which they will use as adults while believing what they were told: that they deserved the punishments and were beaten “out of love.” They don’t know that, in reality, the only reason for the punishments they endured was due to the fact that their parents suffered and learned violence very early on without questioning it. In their turn, they hit their children without thinking they are doing them harm.

This is how society’s ignorance remains so strong and how parents, in good faith, continue to produce harm in each generation for millennia. Almost all children are hit when they start walking and touching objects that shouldn’t be touched. This happens exactly at the age when the human brain is structuring itself (between 0 and 3 years). At that point, the child should learn kindness and love from their role models, but never, under any circumstances, violence and lies (such as: “I hit you for your own good and out of love”). Fortunately, there are some abused children who receive love and protection from “caring witnesses” in their surroundings.

https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/alice_miller/roots_violence.html - Alice Miller review

"I describe pictures of people, use histories of them as mirrors. And then many come and say, `This is exactly what I felt all my life but couldn't say.' I don't want to be a guru. I don't want people to believe me. I only encourage them to take their own experience seriously."

Alice Miller's stories portray abused and silenced children who later become destructive to themselves and to others. Adolf Hitler, says Miller, was such a child. Constantly mistreated by his father, emotionally abandoned by his mother, he learned only cruelty; he learned to be obedient and to accept daily punishments with unquestioning compliance. After years, he took revenge. As an adult he once said, "It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware people are of what is really happening to them."

Miller, famed throughout Europe, wrote of Hitler's childhood in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and The Roots of Violence. In the same work she lets Christiane F. tell her own story: "I had trouble telling the letters H and Kapart One evening my mother was taking great pains to explain the difference to me. I could scarcely pay attention to what she was saying because I noticed my father getting more and more furious. I always knew what was going to happen. He went out and got the hand broom and gave me a trouncing. Now I was supposed to tell the difference between H, and K. Of course by that time I didn't know anything anymore, so I got another licking and was sent to bed." Christiane went into the street and became a drug addict.

"We do not need books about psychology in order to learn to respect our children," Miller says. "What we need is a total revision of the methods of child rearing and our traditional view about it.

The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives: with cruelty or with tenderness and protection. We often impose our most agonizing suffering upon ourselves and, later, on our children."

Indoctrination is a weapon

Zionism's secret weapon is indoctrination. The Christian Nationalist secret weapon (Jesus Camps) is indoctrination. The Colonial Project in North America and Canada were fuelled by Calvinist Ideological indoctrination, Manifest Destiny.. The Indian Residential Schools were designed to indoctrinate the young children of the Native population - 'kill the Indian to save the man'.

Cognitive Warfare carried out on-line through micro targeting emotional vulnerability is part of this, it is designed to weaponise targets. Cognitive Warfare includes forms of indoctrination that target people who present symptoms of emotional immaturity and insecurity.

Colonialism is an inherently criminal enterprise.

These are all abusive practices.

Miller called this the instrumentalisation of children’s minds and bodies to become adult weapons of the systems of hierarchy and dominance. Traumatisation is inextricably entwined in this practice in that it always undermines meeting the emotional psychological and moral needs of the children for their healthy development.

Judith Herman in ’Trauma and Recovery’ wrote that ‘the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people.’

https://beyondthetemple.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/herman_trauma-and-recovery-1.pdf

In my analysis the Western Industrial Cult(ure) of Wealth-as-Power I have written about this arena of malign societal influence and I state here, once again, that Wealth-as-Power can only exist and persist if exploitation of entire populations is sustained.

Capitalism /Industrialism is a cult, a belief system that deliberately and consistently deploys layers of violence to maintain its dominance. The core belief is that some are entitled, due to innate superiority, to exploit others.

This is because exploitation is inherently unjust and causes harm. This generates distant and resistance. That resistance has to be controlled, by crushing it or dividing the population, and the curation of bigotry is a key method deployed.

Wealth-as-Power cult(ure)s present the same dynamic psychologies as an abusive family system.

In much the same way as a parent might punish a child with physical violence whilst asserting 'this is for your own good' they seem to believe that they are entitled to do so, that it is the best thing for all concerned.

As a pattern of behaviour such punishment is more about the adults unconscious need to vent their own unresolved rage at their own parents, directed ar the vulnerable child, as a scapegoat, a dynamic that they can never admit without losing their sense of power, because to admit to their vulnerability, their unmet needs is to drop their shield, it is to eschew that sense of entitled power.

Palestine Action are not Terrorists.

So too with the 'terrorism' charges laid at the people who actively oppose and protest the Genocide in Gaza. The Indian residential Schools of Canada and North America resonate with this dynamic, institutionalised.

recent scholarly estimates of fatalities in Gaza +680k

Western liberals do not admit to this insight, and thus they never connect openly the curation of bigotry by the ruling class of Industrialism as a weapon system as a subject of critical analysis and honest discussion and therefore as something to actively counter.

Farage is not just a nasty man.

They speak of bigotry as primarily a personal flaw, a quality of 'nasty people' rather than a weapon deployed by known actors that must be collectively countered. And so they approve of affirmative action and DEI without getting to the root of the problem - its deliberately curation by Wealth-as-Power elites as a weapon of societal division. Farage is a 'nasty' person, not a weapon of the Industrialist Ruling Class.

The indoctrination of children, be it direct or indirect, be it by habituation or acculturation, is a core component of the systems of oppression.

The careful grooming of vulnerable adults is also part of this.

The manosphere of 'Traditional Male Values' are part of this. Andrew Tate targets insecure young boys. Jordan Peterson targets boomer demographic insecure adult men. Russel Brand targets Millenails. All are proven grifters.

Ideological grooming via cognitive warfare is part of this.

Indoctrination is fundamentally an act of psychological abuse, and should be understood as a criminal enterprise.

Zionism

The Palestinians are not radicalised - they are simply put, standing on their own ground, the land they have inhabited for hundreds of generations, thousands of years.

They know this is their home, that the water, soil and air of Palestine is their bodies. They know they have an inherent right to self determination. They knew this under the Ottomans, The Romans and every other Empire that stood upon them.

The European Colonial project of Zionism is the problem.

Sir Ronald Storrs said that the Zionist enclave was to be 'a loyal little Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism'.

His meaning was that as the new Empire dominating the region, having taken over from the hated Ottomans, the threat of Arab speaking peoples seeking self determination through political, social, economic and multi-cultural solidarity posed a threat to the commercial interests of the Empire, and that potential had to be dissolved, dissuaded, crushed and prevented from emerging.

The British and French drew new borders, to split populations across language groups and other affinities, they installed monarchies and dictatorships, who they armed and funded, often training their leadership in Oxford and Sandhurst, as allies or vassals, to keep political power and agency away from the general population.

They created the Plantation of Zionism in the exact same pattern as the Plantation of Ireland under Cromwell, whose calling card was 'to Connaught or to Hell' - the Irish native population and landowners were pushed westwards, or they'd be slaughtered. and slaughter them they did, with religious zeal, a zeal they passed to their children to sustain hundreds of years of colonial oppression and exploitation.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Survivors unmet needs and Irish Society's Health and Welfare of all Our Children.

A chara,

A suggestion for an article from a Survivor. Sent out to various Irish News Papers today.

Mark and David Ryan, and Maura Harmon on the Late Late Show RTE December 2022 source : RTE

Colm O Gorman speaks to the gathering at Mark Ryans Memorial in Dublin November 2022
——

Three years ago, on November 6th 2022, RTE Radio aired the international award winning documentary ‘Blackrock Boys’.

It featured Mark and David Ryan, and others, speaking up about their lived experience as Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse within Irish Boarding Schools run by The Holy Ghost Fathers during the 1960s, 70s, 80s… What they recounted shocked the nation to its core.

The Blackrock Boys documentary opened a floodgate long held back by institutional inertia.

Part of this floodgate opening emerged from a small group of past pupils of Blackrock College and Willow Park who had been sharing their lived experience in private. For the first time in their lives they began to understand that there were many, many more Survivors than anyone had imagined.

Representatives of that group had been approaching The Spiritans (formerly known as The Holy Ghost Fathers) seeking an apology for failures to handle the issue appropriately.

They (now known as Restore Together) and The Spiritans held a press conference on the 16th November 2022 in which The Spiritans issued a formal public apology, indicating that a Restorative Justice pathway was being developed between them.

The Blackrock Boys documentary was followed up by Joe Duffy’s Liveline hosting a 10 day series, where multiple Survivors courageously spoke out in public. 10 days, the most difficult to hear testimony. It became clear that the issue was much larger than previously indicated, that it was about all Irish Schools and that Survivors would have a central role in how Ireland rose to meet this challenge.

Mark Vincent Healy and other Survivor advocates, including Colm O Gorman, William Gorry and many others had long called for a full public inquiry into all Irish Schools, as far back as 2000.

Survivor advocacy has been a deep, intense and active movement since the Ryan Report and Bertie Ahern’s apology and flawed indemnity offer to the Church.

Then, in the first week of December, 2022, the RTE Late Late Show aired an appearance of Mark and David Ryan with their friend Maura Harmon. The trauma, pain and courage of the Ryan brothers was evident to everyone who watched their testimony.

It was a harrowing, moving experience for everyone who viewed it, and the RTE live audience in the studio stood to give them a standing ovation lasting 5 minutes. The shared respect and grief at what was told was ultimately a humane response to the story of their lives, their lived experience.

The combination of these media events and Survivor advocacy led the then Minister for Education, Norma Foley, to initiate a Scoping Enquiry, to survey Survivors of Blackrock, Willow Park and other schools who had also come forwards.

What did they want to see done for their cause?

The Scoping Inquiry was published a year ago this week, and shocked the nation to its core. I participated as one of many survivors in this process. I felt heard and understood for the first time in my life. Others felt the same. We all knew we were the tip of the iceberg. We expressed determination rather than hope. We were and remain determined. Our cause is just. Our needs remain largely unmet.

The Scoping Inquiry recommended that the Government established a Commission of Investigation into the Handling of Child Sexual Allegations in all Irish Schools over the past 70 years. It also urged the State to make redress to all Survivors. There were many other recommendations.

Then on October 30th 2024, RTE screened the documentary ‘Leathered’ which looked at Corporeal Punishment in Irish Schools. The levels of cruelty and violence recounted by Survivors was off the scale. Everyone over the age of 40 knew this was the way it was, back then. We have all been silent on this for decades.

Joe Duffy’s Liveline followed up with two weeks of elderly people, men and women, recounting the violence and abuse they had endured, the impacts of that, the impact of the silence being broken.

Clearly the culture of physical, psychological and sexual violence perpetrated with impunity was extensive, a behavioural characteristic of Irish Schooling, irrespective of who ran those schools.

This year, the Government agreed to the Scoping Inquiry recommendation and launched the Commission of Investigation into the Handling of Historic Child Sexual Allegations in Irish Schools, and it has appointed a judge, Micheal McGrath, to lead it. It is budgeted to run for 5 years, with a review after the first two years, to assess progress and adjust accordingly.

His term in office starts in October this year.

The matter is out of the hands of the politicians, and is now in the hands of the people, via the Civil Service, Legal Advocates, Clinical Advocates and Survivors and the Schools - and the most important people in all of this are the survivors themselves, and their families and communities.

CSA when unaccounted for reverberates well beyond the individuals harmed, and when we are talking of tens of thousands of children harmed, over decades, then the matter is a societal dynamic that has to be confronted and resolved fully by the whole society.

One in Four’s Report on Attitudes towards Child Sexual Abuse in Ireland this June re-iterated this understanding that to address the issue of child sexual abuse by adults is a whole society matter. They pointed out that whilst schools today are notably safer, that cannot be said of other places where adults and children abide. The abuse of children in Ireland remains an endemic cause of harm. It should be exceedingly rare in a healthy society.

Research on previous Inquiries in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and South Africa has shown that repeated failures to include Survivors as ‘lived experience expertise panels’ in the deliberations at the core of those Inquiries has prevented optimal outcomes for Survivors and Society at large. Ask any of the Survivors groups of the past 30 years and they will confirm this.

The Tuam burial site and the story around it was not exceptional.

I urge everyone associated with this Commission to consider urgently now the need for a panel of ‘Lived Experience Expertise’ to be placed within the Inquiry, to inform its understanding of Survivors unmet needs, so that as the Commission of Inquiry proceeds those needs are met in full, as this will help ensure optimal outcomes for Survivors and Society at large.

As a survivor, as an innocent child my needs were not met, not once was I failed, but multiple times. As an adult my needs remained unmet because like so many others, I suffered whilst blaming myself, I suffered in silence and confusion, shame and self hatred. Even so I could imagine much, much worse. And so I coped. It was never about self pity. It is not about revenge.

To think of tens and quite possibly hundreds of thousands of others having lived through such childhood adversity at the hands of adults, as men and women coping with the impact of things that should never have been done to us, coping with the impact of things that should have been done for us but were not done, breaks my heart. Every day.

Accountability is not a blame game, it is the most effective prevention strategy of all.

We need to face this, together, with solidarity and compassion, to ensure accountability is achieved because in doing so we will make Ireland a healthier society for all alive today, and for all who will follow in our footsteps, long into the future.

There is no higher calling, in my view.

The BBC, Kneecap, Genocide and the British Neo-Colonial Establishment

BBC cut the Kneecap Feed.
"we all know why."

Genocide is shameless. The British State is up to its sweaty neck in Genocide. It always has been. Most European Empires are similar, historically and currently. They don't end, they change their branding. They only people who can end their depravity are the home populations united in humane solidarity. You and me, and you neighbours. All of us.

All we are saying is uphold and enforce International Law.

BBC primary political task has ALWAYS been to protect the Ruling Class, the Aristocracy/Crown and the Neo-Imperial Oligarchy from being held accountable by the general population these three groups exploit....  from Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith, Care Homes, Child Sexual Abuse in various institutional care settings, from Hillsborough to Grenfell, from to Iraq to the Genocide of Palestine (which started in 1915), from the General Strike of 2026 the BBC has been, alongside the Judiciary, MI5 and the Police Force tasked with preserving the English Ruling Class as its core political task as a news media provider.

The core task of the British Military is to keep the colonial assets under British Oligarchy control. They were not sent to Iraq right free you and I. They are not engaged in operations over Gaza to liberate you and I.

The Ruling Class greatest fear has always been and remains an awakened 'woke' majority of the people forming a political solidarity movement at pace and assuming a dominant elected position within the Legislature... which tells us what is required for the solution to this problem - we must void the duopoly of lefter/right Government/Opposition, that sordid divisive, corrupt facade of democratic functionality, through unity and solidarity  at every level of democratic engagement - our cause has been clarified by the active participation in the Genocide of the Palestinian civilian population. 

Those of us who have long read history honestly are saddened it has taken the witnessing of a live genocide to arrive at this point. We have been warning people all our lives. 

The question for each and every adult now is when will you start this work?

We ordinary people would never spend our taxes on warfare, so neither should the democratically elected tax collecting Government.

The State could easily look after the disabled and eradicate poverty, enable free education to University level, develop long term social housing, transition away from fossil fuels, convert all industrial processes to cradle to cradle modalities, eradicating pollution and environmental degradation - all of which would be for the sake of our children and their children. All of them, everywhere.

All of this is eminently possible.

Two things impede it.

!. The grasp of Wealth-as-Power as a political dominator ideology.

2. The lack of evidence led empathy based humane Solidarity across the rest of Society.

The problems we face, outlined above, are not technically difficult to resolve.

No new information is required. We have it all right here.

Wealth-as-Power will not cede.

We MUST build the kind of grassroots Solidarity that takes Wealth-as-Power out of our legislatures..... they will still seek to control and deploy Wealth-as-Power, but without the State apparatus as their tool, they can be held accountable.

It is no longer sufficient for any of us to give up, to pretend the task is impossible and leave it at that. We are living witness to a clear as day genocide and all our Governments are fully participating - by refusing to uphold and ENFORE international law at pace and robustly they are breaking the law and are actively participating in the ongoing criminality.

A bit of DrumnBass. .. from djLookwood

Vocal Sample from "I never thought the leopards would eat my face.."

Superb Song by Franchesca Ramsey

Open Letter to Irish Media, the Dail and Seanad Eireann on the Scoping Inquiry and the European Court of Human Rights.

My letter* published in the Irish Independent 6th September 2024`*text of the letter published - edits in italics below.very good editing. thank you Irish Independent!also in the Irish Times (paywalled)also in the Examiner

A Chara,

As a Survivor, I wish to express my personal gratitude to to the Scoping Inquiry Team.

The Scoping Inquiry Report is a solid document.

That the Scoping Inquiry team requested and The Minister for Education granted them the extra time to drill into the data and information they had collected, so that they could subject it to critical analysis, was a sound decision.

Reading through the Report is a sobering experience, an informative and devastating outline of the scale and force of the crimes of sexual, bodily and psychic nature committed upon us as children, and the symptoms of same which we Survivors have been forced to endure, through no fault or flaw in ourselves, all our lives.

The fault and flaws lay with the perpetrators; and with the Church, the Congregations and the State and its organs where they failed to protect our human rights, our dignity and safety.

I am sure the Irish people would wish to correct that unhappy condition.

It struck me today as I was reading the Report, that had such a process been carried out in 2000, when it was clear that there was at the very least a risk of a substantive case to answer within the Irish Schools system, given the numbers of cases already extant at the time, and the knowledge, since the suppressed Kerrigan Report of 1931, of the prevalence of child sexual abuse and of physical and psychological abuse of children in Ireland, how different would the outcomes have been for all the Survivors over the past 24 years - many have not survived, and they will never see justice or accountability for their suffering. Their loss is our Nations loss too.

And they lost so much more than we. Life is precious, a gift not to be squandered by neglect to meet the needs of the people and their children.

I understand that many elements of the current Scoping Inquiry were not in place at the time, and that my thoughts are of possibilities rather than realities, and that time cannot be rolled back.

The work and effort of Survivors to seek justice over the past 30 years has made the present situation possible.

We move forwards in this generation, cautiously. Step by step.

The recent settlement outside the High Court on the issue of redress between Louise O’Keefe et al and The State, The Department of Education, reflects another delay in taking action, an avoidable delay. The issue is not about money, it is about responsibility, it is about duty of care.

The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in that regard ought to have been implemented in 2014, at pace.

That is, of course, a matter of previous Governments, albeit each Government represents the State as well as the electorate.

The State is practically immortal, the Government of the day temporary.

I respectfully urge The Taoiseach, The Minister of Education, The Minister of Justice, and the assemblies of the Dáil and Seanad to now to seize the day, to act upon that ruling, and in accepting the State’s responsibility, on behalf of the Irish People, and our children, that they move the process onwards, as soon as possible, as a way to set the most apt conditions for the forthcoming Commission of Investigation, affording Survivors the help they so desperately need and deserve, ensuring that it is not contingent upon the outcome of that Commission of Investigation.

Kindest Regards

Corneilius Crowley

London

I think of the Johnny Cash cover, originally written and performed by Tom Petty, as a song to be sung by all Survivors and all our advocates, none of us alone, ever again. Our cause is just.

Bears, Women and Men : internalisation of cultural values, development of affective state self-regulation.

A Bear in the Woods.....

Image by Erik Mandre via Shutterstock

Historically, for the major part of the existence of Homo sapiens, the people who lived in forests and woodlands were largely formed of egalitarian cultures.

The peoples that lived in forests knew and understood bears because they had lived together for many tens of thousands of years. The bears knew them. They knew each other well.

In egalitarian cultures rapes are rarer than bear attacks. And bear attacks are exceedingly rare. When they do happen, it is usually due to an accident rather than a deliberate intentional common action, a standard behavioural pattern.

So the issue raised by the bear question is a cultural issue.

No baby is born with a bigotry already in place.

There are no misogyny genes, there are no warrior genes, there are no racism genes, there are no xenophobia genes.

Our behaviour, is this regard, is learned within a cultural context. Hierarchically violent cultures curate bigotries.

We learn to walk, we learn to talk. We are taught to speak. Language is learned. Take an infant born to a mother in one language, and place that infant within another language group, and the child will learn the language of the secondary language group. There is no gene for any specific language.

Our learning of behaviour as we grow up occurs in and is influenced by the culture within which we live.

We internalise the values of the culture in such manner as to feel them as part of our core sense of self, our very identity.

The invisible brain?

I have posted a link to an interesting (quite dense) lecture by Allan Schore on the neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of the development of emotional or affective state self regulation, with regards to the potential impacts of living conditions, environment, cultural practice upon these processes.

What goes one in our brains has been invisible, and is now being revealed as technology improves in examining brain development with empirical science tool kits.

There is the matter too of sex brain development, much of which occurs early in gestation, which is highly vulnerable to environmental influences, coming from and through the mother. we now know that brain sex dimorphism is much more complex with a greater range of variables and outcomes which indicate that the trans experience - of sensing oneself as being of the other biological sex - is indeed a natural part of human variability. For now, though, we are addressing the meaning and implications of The Bear Question.

The Bear Question.

The issue then, with regards the Bear Question, for women, is that within the dominant cultural setting on Earth is it stands today 'our lived experience is that many, many men are dangerous to us, and we cannot reliably predict when meeting men which ones are dangerous and which ones are not, in that the majority of men do seem to operate with a sense of entitlement to our bodies as sexual objects to be used, owned, possessed, exploited and discarded as a medium of the Mens Power in this culture and that there is no way to tell in advance as to which adult males are safe and which are not, and the tension of living with that is intolerable, not to mention the actual harms caused....."

And the only people who can change that are the men who call themselves allies of women.

Specifically the genuinely safe men MUST take a stance of confronting the unsafe attitudes that unsafe men hold, within this culture, and that means confronting them directly, robustly and without equivocation. All the time. Until the problem is no longer a problem. It also means confronting every structure of social power that extolls the values of the hierarchy of power, wealth and phenotype.

It is a problem with and of Men who internalise the patriarchal hierarchy cultural values in ways that are a life threatening and life altering problem for Women. Women are correct to point it out.

As a man, I understand the problem is a cultural problem, and I am part of that culture, to the extent that I have and carry any internalisation of the dominant cultural values and then express them in my thinking and my behaviour.

I have a responsibility to confront that culture. To myself, to all women, to all children. Just by being alive and aware of the problem.

It is not about 'me' and I cannot take it personally, even if my confrontation with other men on this is personal, as in one to one.

It is about us, all of us.

Men, women and children.

I was sexually assaulted, brutalised, psychologically abused and mistreated as a child, on a daily basis, and that abuse was mostly perpetrated by adult men. That is my lived experience.

Nuance required.

All our sons: The neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of boys at risk.

Allan Schore gives a detailed lecture on what was known in 2017 about the neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of boys at risk.
His work on the development of emotional self regulation, on the development of the systems within the brain that handle emotional state self directed management helps us understand that there are dynamics that start in utero, and that continue throughout life, that mediate the ways in which we process and handle our emotional states healthfully or otherwise. The developing brain is extremely sensitive to the environmental condition of the mother.
The nuance here is that each child grows up within a cultural setting, a socio-economic condition, a familial environment where many variables come in to play in the formation of formerly invisible neurobiological processes that underpin our behaviour. When we are looking at behaviour, it is important to take this new information into consideration. This helps avoid stereotyping, categorisation and other dehumanising attitudes so often embedded in discussions of adverse behaviour patterns. We are all human, we were all innocent babies.
In this lecture Allan Schore explores what happens for boys at risk, that is to say boys who for reasons outside their control or responsibility are exposed to trauma, neglect, maternal distress, familial distress in regards the maturation of biological systems undermining emotional development and learned behaviour.
This does not form a basis for absolving adults of accountability for harm causation, and it does offer a way to respond that is more concerned with prevention, health and safety than punishment.
For my purposes I have included this here as an indicator of preventative measures that can be taken, informed by current and developing knowledge of neurobiology and neuroendocrinology, to reduce the incidence of male distress, male psychopathology and male violence as part of the overall work to meet the challenges of the bear question.
A friend responds.
I asked a friend of mine to read over this, and she made these comments, which I publish here with her permission.

“some excellent points and thoughts there.

Reading it reminded me of my other experience yesterday in a charity shop…..found a beautiful Italian leather evening style handbag in a stunning shade of turquoise…

was checking out its suitability for my needs in terms of pockets etc. it looked like it had never been used….I felt something in a pocket and thought it might be a lighter but couldn’t find which pocket it was in and the shape was a bit different so I excitedly thought it might be a small roll of cash

NOPE it was a penknife

I then took it up to the ladies at the till who were shocked and apologetic, I made a comment along the lines of whoever previously owned the bag was like me because that’s the sort of thing I’d feel the need to carry on a night out - the shop assistants and other shoppers then had a open conversation about women having such items in their bags for protection…..age range was about 20-75 years old - we all admitted to having done this, we all also agreed knife crime and carrying knives was bad.”

This anecdote, as I wrote previously was provided by a good friend of mine, a woman I respect and admire every much as a friend and fellow humane being, who describes herself as a “handbag granny : as I am a fine example of how strong and determined women become after a life time of having to be tough….yeah it would be lovely to have become old and still be floating around without a care in the world having experienced no trauma or hardship but reality isn’t like that and life makes women tough”.

She also wrote this : “I’d say between the ages of 18 and about 45 I’d regularly carry something in my bag that could easily double up as a weapon if needed when I was going somewhere that I didn’t know was 100% safe, so 99% of the time I had a weapon in my bag and at times that would be in my hand if I was walking somewhere dark etc even if that was just a rolled up umbrella or a large set of keys. For women I think this is just instincts now, it’s not even something we think about - we just do it. Even a heavy overloaded handbag swung in the right way can knock a man off his feet, I think a granny recently took out a jewellery store thief in this way…

She posted this link... https://youtu.be/ySBxMMidbEg?si=6czEfjh5Xd9A4FM_

Culture

Have you ever looked back on a moment and wondered if you made the right choice? Professor Robert Sapolsky has, but he believes that there was no actual choice at that moment.

Professor Sapolsky has staked out an extreme stance in the field: we are nothing more than the sum of our biology, over which we had no control, and its interactions with the environment, over which we also had no control. Explore what it looks like to reject the notion of free will and how doing so can be liberating rather than paralyzing and despairing.

However , he points out that the kind of culture into which we are born, and the kind of culture our mothers were born into, which sets the conditions of their lived experience, has profound impacts upon us in utero, impacts that remain largely invisible yet present as behavioural patterns and dynamics. Because culture is the setting that is created by human interaction, there is room for the possibility of change. And that is exactly what this blog is all about.