The First Cornerstone: Childhood Relations
Critical behavioral developments such as empathy or insensitivity, creativity or conformity, and aggression or nonviolence are not predetermined characteristics at birth. They are largely determined during the childhood years through cultural socialization. This was confirmed by the Seville Statement, an international co-created document put together by leading scientists of the world and is strongly confirmed by findings from neuroscience.
The physical structure of the brain - including the neural pathways that will determine not only intelligence, but creativity, predisposition to violent or nonviolent behaviors, empathy or insensitivity, venturesomeness or overconformity, as well as other critical behavioral developments - are not set at birth. They are largely determined during the childhood years. Coercive, inequitable, and violent childrearing - dominator childrearing - is foundational to the imposition and maintenance of a coercive, inequitable, and chronically violent social and cultural organization.
Through our intimate relations we learn habits of feeling, thinking, and behavior in all human relations, be they personal or political. If these relations are violent, children learn early on that violence from those who are more powerful toward those who are less powerful is acceptable as a means of dealing with conflicts and/or problems.
If relations based on chronic violations of human rights are considered normal and desirable in these formative intimate relations, they provide mental models for condoning such violations in other relations.
A global campaign against violence and abuse in childhood relations is needed has a number of core elements:
- Education: raising awareness of the consequences - personal and global - of either dominator or partnership childhood relations, as well as education providing both women and men the knowledge and skills necessary for empathic, sensitive, nonviolent, authoritative rather than authoritarian childrearing.
- Legal: the enactment and enforcement of laws criminalizing child abuse as well as legislation funding education for nonviolent, empathic, and equitable childrearing.
- Changing the mass media: raising consciousness of the constant representation of violence as a means of resolving conflicts and of the presentation in so-called comedies of situations in which family members abuse and humiliates each other.
- Intimate Violence: engaging spiritual and religious leaders to take a moral stand on this pivotal issue of intimate violence – the violence that every year blights, and all too often takes the lives of millions of children and women, and perpetuates cycles of violence in all relations. This is the mission of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV), www.saiv.net, a program of the Center for Partnership Studies.
