Mahesh Paudyal
When I was the academic coordinator at a school a few years back, the grade teacher of grade one came to my office fuming, as two kids—a boy and a girl—hung on her two sides. She thrashed the kids on the floor and bellowed, “Sir, they are spoilt beyond repair! Ooph! They need rustication.”
I asked her to cool down and looked at the kids. They were austere as ever, and innocence was a permanent aspect on their countenance, as is always true for children. I asked the teacher to explain the case. She blushed, hesitated and said, “Sir, the lout kissed the girl in the class.”
That was the case. I asked the teacher to get back to the class, and took the hearing in my own hands. She left.
I knew well, the first thing I needed to do in order to get to the epicenter of this ‘violence’ was to repel fear from the minds of the kids. Often, violence—mistaken, apparent or real—get temporarily resolved if the episode is addressed. However, violence perpetuates and takes newer forms of manifestations, if its epicenter is not identified, and it is not properly addressed or transformed. I knew that most often, in case of children, the episodes were addressed, and epicenters left untouched. I wanted to dive into the epicenter of the case, which had so much of socio-cultural bearing.
As it had been almost half a decade I had started working for children’s rights through literary activism, I summoned resources from my experience, and took the kids under the aegis of my love and guardianship for them. We sang and danced in the hearing, cracked jokes and shared stories. Then I asked the boy, “Why did you do it, honey?”
“Sir, because, she looks so beautiful to me.” I looked at the girl. There was no remorse, no guilt, no resentment, no despair, and nothing negative. She was gleeful, happy and innocent as ever.
I thought it absurd to announce any sentence for the ‘crime’. I too thought it worthless to withhold the kids any more. I told them to go, and sat down on think deep into the matter. It was food for thought for adults, and not for the children.
If fact, we the adults encourage kids to grant a ‘chappi’ on our cheeks day in and day out. We blackmail them emotionally, and for reasons as worthless as anything, we demand kisses from them. Secondly, the thing we most often do to kids–ever since they are born—is plant kisses on their juvenile cheeks, and announce that they are lovely. This implies that, we teach them the doctrine that whatever is lovely can be, or should be kissed. The boy in my court was faithfully enacting the same indoctrination. Only that, when it happens when we don’t want, it qualifies to the rank of crime. Fie to our hypocrisy!
This is just a case in point. There are several other ways through which we encourage children to take up crimes as ordinary, or else, the ordinary as crimes. Most often, our normative judgments that are monolithic and non-empathetic, tend to victimize the children. Often, we the adults tend to oversee the culturing we affect, and tend to see effect divorced from the cause. We need a more holistic treatment of cases, and a revisionary approach towards things, before we embark on taking actions. This is to say, children showcase and enact the ideological traits we impart and implant, and it is wrong to penalize them in haste.
One of the possible reasons why the boy in my court behaved that way in the class is because, he had not been receiving adequate attention from the teacher. In fact, he was an average child, who was seldom taken seriously. When a child feels he is neglected, what he most often does is take up an initiative of mischief that most apparently makes him look adult-like. Kissing, children know, involves adults as one of the compulsory stake-holders, and children, exposed to a lot of media, know that it also has some degree of sexual connotation.
This issue, namely the mischief associated with children has been analyzed seriously by experts and psychologists. Dr. Rudolph Dreikurs the author of Children the Challenge opines that there are four reasons why children misbehave. Children misbehave to get (a) attention, (b) power, (c) revenge, or (d) to make their parents feel inadequate. In that case, the question worth contemplating is to what a child hopes to gain from his or her mischief conducted publicly. My own experiences with children over the last two decades roughly confirms that lack of encouragement and attention is the main thing that propels children to mischief, and the archive of mischief wherefrom they pick up their resources are none but the ways we adults teach them.
One of the primary questions concerning such ‘crimes’ is the very question whether they are crimes per se. The normative definitions of crimes, inspired by moralistic conservatism often tend to influence our outlook, attitude and treatment of a case. What we need is an attitude of reaching to the epicenter of cases, and analyze if we the adults ourselves have inspired the actions. It is universally accepted idea that children’s mind is not inventive, and often, a deliberate crime never occurs in their playful and imaginative mind.
[Paudyal teaches at the Central Department of English, and writes for children.]