N
nomadologist
Guest
Sure, violence and crime are bad, but the statistics about violence and crime in single parent families with sufficient INCOME and where the parent is EDUCATED don't reflect the same sort of problems you see in the statistics on single parent families whose parents are also unemployed, IMPOVERISHED, and UNEDUCATED. Thus, it is obvious that it is not the lack of nuclear/traditional family unit that causes violence and crime, it's POVERTY and IGNORANCE. It actually IS the case that third world countries have loads more crime and violence per capita than the U.K. does. Loads and loads more.
Which countries have the most violence and crime? The ones that are the poorest and the least educated. Which countries are absolutely desolate war zones where women are killed for being raped and "dishonouring the family" and people are executed at the discretion of local authorities without bothering to do so much as rig a staged trial to give the illusion of human decency? The ones that ostensibly believe the most in the role of women in the home as primary caregivers and men as providers for the traditional family unit.
Your notion that single parent families have violent criminal children because there are not two parents at home just doesn't hold up, even though I think most people want to "commonsensically" believe you. Most people think (this is at the heart of the conservative impulse) that there was once a time (rose-colored glasses in place) when people all had roles to play, values were absolute, and social problems were just non-existent because these black and white, surefire moral values were inherently foolproof.
The most hilarious part of this view, to me, is how ignorant it is of the actual circumstances of our recent past. Christians would believe the Victorian era was morally superior to ours because men and women were mothers and fathers, with women laboring happily at the hearth, fulfilled by her husband's success in the workplace, and by having children without the aid of birthcontrol to guide her reproductive (lack of) choices. In reality, men in Victorian societies often frequented prostitutes and brought home syphilis to unsuspecting wives who, if they survived childbirth as it happened at least once a calendar year (if you were lucky--otherwise you were an "old maid" or "barren" and worthless because women have no value outside their ability to carry pregnancies and give birth, of course), went ahead and passed that on to their offspring.
Promiscuous women were ostracised, divorce was not allowed even under the most heinous of circumstances, lest a woman dishonour her family and bring intense shame on herself. So women and children had no escape from abusive husbands, about whom it was considered impolite to speak so the only reason it may seem in recorded history that domestic violence was rare was because it was highly stigmatized. Women were not the mother-goddesses people imagine, either: women rarely breastfed their own children, and any family who could afford it had children raised completely by nannies, with little or even no contact until they became young adults. Children were seen as little adults who were unruly and alien and needed to be forced to behave even if that meant hitting them or manipulating them emotionally in all sorts of gruesome ways.
And I don't think I need to mention the horrors the first world was perpetrating on the world through colonization. Marriage and the family unit were never the utopia conservatives try to tell us we've "lost."
The only thing we've lost (I would say it's just evolved)--the traditional family unit-- is something that was never in and of itself a success. There was never a "fully functional" society in the way you're imagining. Even those that were *relatively* more successful can't chalk their success up to a double-parent family structure...
Which countries have the most violence and crime? The ones that are the poorest and the least educated. Which countries are absolutely desolate war zones where women are killed for being raped and "dishonouring the family" and people are executed at the discretion of local authorities without bothering to do so much as rig a staged trial to give the illusion of human decency? The ones that ostensibly believe the most in the role of women in the home as primary caregivers and men as providers for the traditional family unit.
Your notion that single parent families have violent criminal children because there are not two parents at home just doesn't hold up, even though I think most people want to "commonsensically" believe you. Most people think (this is at the heart of the conservative impulse) that there was once a time (rose-colored glasses in place) when people all had roles to play, values were absolute, and social problems were just non-existent because these black and white, surefire moral values were inherently foolproof.
The most hilarious part of this view, to me, is how ignorant it is of the actual circumstances of our recent past. Christians would believe the Victorian era was morally superior to ours because men and women were mothers and fathers, with women laboring happily at the hearth, fulfilled by her husband's success in the workplace, and by having children without the aid of birthcontrol to guide her reproductive (lack of) choices. In reality, men in Victorian societies often frequented prostitutes and brought home syphilis to unsuspecting wives who, if they survived childbirth as it happened at least once a calendar year (if you were lucky--otherwise you were an "old maid" or "barren" and worthless because women have no value outside their ability to carry pregnancies and give birth, of course), went ahead and passed that on to their offspring.
Promiscuous women were ostracised, divorce was not allowed even under the most heinous of circumstances, lest a woman dishonour her family and bring intense shame on herself. So women and children had no escape from abusive husbands, about whom it was considered impolite to speak so the only reason it may seem in recorded history that domestic violence was rare was because it was highly stigmatized. Women were not the mother-goddesses people imagine, either: women rarely breastfed their own children, and any family who could afford it had children raised completely by nannies, with little or even no contact until they became young adults. Children were seen as little adults who were unruly and alien and needed to be forced to behave even if that meant hitting them or manipulating them emotionally in all sorts of gruesome ways.
And I don't think I need to mention the horrors the first world was perpetrating on the world through colonization. Marriage and the family unit were never the utopia conservatives try to tell us we've "lost."
The only thing we've lost (I would say it's just evolved)--the traditional family unit-- is something that was never in and of itself a success. There was never a "fully functional" society in the way you're imagining. Even those that were *relatively* more successful can't chalk their success up to a double-parent family structure...
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