No Duh

Happy belated New Year everybody! Before the end of 2012, NBC news did a “sum up” story where they wrote a humorous article on twelve stories that had, well…obvious conclusions. Here’s a link to the article. If you glance at it for a few seconds, you can see such enlightening titles as “People with more experience make better decisions” (No, really?). Scroll down to the bottom. You’ll see another insightful article. It’s called “Screaming at your child is harmful to your child.” This is meant to elicit another chuckle from you. Of course screaming at your child isn’t good for her. Who doesn’t know that? But not so fast. There is one condition where this conclusion is not so obvious. That is when it is a sibling doing the abusing.  

A lot of people are quick to say that a parent should not scream at their child, but not a lot of people rise up in righteous anger when a sibling does the same thing for the same reason. In my previous entry, I shared the statistic that sibling abuse is more common than parent-child abuse. However, parent-child abuse receives a lot more scorn and attention. We care so much about the way a parent treats her child, and turn a blind eye to the way a child treats his sibling. When we overhear a parent mistreating his or her child, we are supposed to be justifiably horrified. When a sibling is similarly abusive, we’re expected to shrug our shoulders.  It’s as if the mistreatment that siblings face is invisible, or worse, acceptable.

Abuse committed by any person, parent or child, is unacceptable and harmful. We don’t need research to tell us that. Actually, my blog’s theme is akin to many of the titles of those articles: no duh it’s harmful for children to be abused. It’s somewhat baffling that this blog should even exist. Why must I declare war on something that any person with a modicum of common sense knows is bad? I’ll also mention that this study was placed last, as a sort of “grand finale” for the list. Of all the obvious-ness explored in these topics, the fact that abuse is harmful should be the most obvious of all. Ironically, this message is not always obvious to people. When it is a sibling doing the abusing, society silences its voice and turns a blind eye. That needs to change. The mentality society should adapt is that any person—including a sibling—who is abusing a child is doing harm to that child. No duh.