Does anyone know WHY people hurt children??? Genuinely interested

[JustFanciedAChange]

Have namechanged because I think this type of thread could be percieved as self serving, but I really am genuinely interested, and I have no understanding of this at all. Does anyone have an insight about why people harm children? is it because they can't cope? Is it because they are mad? Do they vindictively want to hurt a child? Are some people just plain evil?
I'm not trying to sound naive but it just absolutely flummoxes (?) me. How on earth does this happen? How could three people be involved in the same abuse?...
Waffling, I'm sorry.

often if it happens to them as children they re-enact it. it makes them feel safe.
shocking.

Don't know why either - they must be pure evil - there is no excuse

I have to argue with that Slarty, some people abused as children continue it, but not often.
I don't know why people do these things, but that just perpetuates a myth that means people aren't honest about their pasts for fear of judgement about their own parenting skills

This explains motives for child abuse but does not make for easy reading:

WARNING: LINK CONTAINS UPSETTING CASE STUDY INFO

www.caiuk.org/publications/downloads/motive-degree.pdf

oh, i didnt know that chirpy

Various reasons. Same as there's no one reason why people murder strangers (or their partners).

Of course, you can always find some or other moron to offer a simple explanation like 'They're eeeeeeeevillll!' but that doesn;t really get anyone very far.

Because they can? No-one stops them? They're lacking a moral gene?

I'd like to know when all these 'lesssons' that have been learnt will be put into practice though.

Poor poor children .

It's ok, it's a personal bugbear, because I was physically abused as a child I am so anti smacking because I know how it feels ot be on the receiving end so for me it had the opposite effect.
I sort of know why my dad did it, but it doesn't help TBH

It seems like the because the child is an inconvenience or a burden to them in somes cases

I was wondering the exact same thing after turning off the news several times this evenign because it was causing me too much distress (did Ch5 really have to keep showing the blood-spattered clothes of that poor little boy? I have half a mind to complain about that, and the fact that they felt it necessary to go into grisly detail of what had happened to the poor little soul)

just found out about some shocking neglect in a previous neighbour so am avoiding the latest NEWs story

I always imagine it is because they can. They can have power over something that can't fight back. Disgusting lack of self control and disregard for or empathy for someone else. As in Paedophilia. And rape. Power over someone. God I can't inderstand why anyone would do it.

christ - who would want to be a social worker.

It makes me so mad and sad and brings on all sorts of weltschmertz for me, I can't bear it - I think the newspeople could at least warn that they are going to give so much detail in a report.
I look at my precious DS and think how could anyone hurt something so small and vulnerable? But then some people like torturing kittens etc. too, and I never understood that either.

Is it a lack of any empathy, any engagement with the child? They treat the child like a punch bag because the endow it with no human characteristics - the child is an object at their mercy?

What I really can't understand is the mother who allows her child to suffer. I know there are all sorts of factors here - education, violence towards the mother, fear of every sort - but really, even with all that, how the hell do you stand by and let your child be all but ripped apart? And then cover up and lie and lie? I don't think it's in me to understand that.

To answer the OP,

drug addiction

previous experience of abuse as a child

poor coping mechanisms to deal with difficult situations, ie drug addicts caring for babies who are withdrawing from maternal drugs taken during pregnancy.

new partner jealous of an ex's child

I don't think any of us can understand how a mother can allow her child to be treated like that.

She obviously cared more for her new partner than her child, I read a comment that she had made in court and in it she stated she would even be prepared to lie for her partner.

I dread to think of how that poor baby felt, when he was being tortured by the very people who were his supposed carers.

anothernameforme - you must go to the police with this information. You can't let it be.

Thanks for the link Saggy, I couldn't get beyond the second page I'm afraid but from the first paragraph, abusers are split into 4 categories:

A. abuse: premeditated ill treatment undertaken for gain by disturbed, dangerous, and manipulative individuals;

B. active ill treatment: impulsively undertaken because of socioeconomic pressures, lack of education, resources,
and support, or mental illnesses;

C. universal mild ill treatment: behaviour undertaken by all normal caring parents in all societies;

D. neglect: defined here as an unintentional failure to supply the child?s needs.

i think that the 'evil' explanation is actually a valid one and not moronic.

i say this after seven years of children protection and numerous discussions with senior social workers with vast experience.

there is a point where explaining and analysing is done and no one is any closer to understanding.

does understanding the background, economic factors, etc. make any difference to the crime or provide any way of pridicting for the future?

in my mind, the answer is no.

"does understanding the background, economic factors, etc. make any difference to the crime or provide any way of pridicting for the future?"

yes it does actually.

There's a hell of a lot of research to show that children who are not given love and reassurance don't have various bits in their brain developing at the right rate, particularly the bits which govern empathy. Which is a good predictor of how they are going to respond to other people's pain - if they can't feel empathy, they're not going to respond in a normal human way. I'm explaining it badly because I've got a poor grasp of it, but it's something to do with neural networks in the brain needing to be stimulated to join up. Perhaps someone better informed than me can come along and explain it more coherently.

Understanding is always useful. Ignorance almost never is. I find it depressing that a civilisation which has managed to send people to the moon and abolish smallpox, is still content to fall back on pre-enlightenment mediaevel explanations for human cruelty.

my point is that you can have all these factors at your disposal and still not be able to certainly predict that someone will kill.

it is generally only after an incident that the true risk factor is established.

if we were able to convict purely on a list of pre dispositions, a lot of us would be jailed by now.

risk assessment is based on a lot of unknowns and possibilities, unfortunately it does not arm professionals with crystal balls.

LittleBella - research in Australia points to the 'cry it out' method of getting one's child to sleep has this effect on the neural pathways too. In other words, as I remember it, it is to do with cortisol (I think) levels which are related to stress in the infant so the higher the stress levels for whatever reason, the higher the cortisol levels and the less neural pathways that are made. Or something like that.