ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY
Essay Topic:
The evaluation of all the potential possibilities to prevent violence against women.
Essay Questions:
How is violence defined and what relation does K-12 education has to violence?
Why is teaching non-violent behavior important?
Why does male violence against women occur in the long run?
Thesis Statement:
As children learn everything connected with aggression and violence and how to deal with it they become “armed” and do not get lost in situations that require active actions in order to recognize or respond to any type of violence against women be it a physical, verbal, sexual, or emotional type of abuse.
Preventing violence against women Essay
Table of contents:
o Introduction
o Violence definition and K-12 education
o Teaching non-violent behavior
o Male violence against women
o Violence-prevention through education
o Conclusion
1.Introduction
Education has always played an integral part in the lives of every single child in the country and in the world. This is not surprising as it is education that gives children the knowledge to think, evaluate and be able to identify a problem and solve it. Social skills, critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, empathy training – all of these are obtained through the process of education and are an essential part of a becoming a multi-sided developed personality. One of the major characteristics of such a personality is the ability to solve all the conflicts without any aggression and especially without violence. The process of socialization of children through age appropriate K-12 in all the skills listed above put school-boys in the group that are less likely to be violent to women and minimize the values and beliefs that boys form according to their male entitlement. As children learn everything connected with aggression and violence and how to deal with it they become “armed” and do not get lost in situations that require active actions in order to recognize or respond to any type of violence against women be it a physical, verbal, sexual, or emotional type of abuse. Boys acquire the ability to react and recognize violence against women owing to the education and knowledge they get they and it is a strong presupposition to not being aggressive. Nevertheless school is just one of the factors influencing boys and the other one is family. If the family’s interpersonal relations are characterized by high rate of violence, school non-violent education may fail to succeed.
2. Violence definition and K-12 education
If we take violence against women and children as the criterion to identify children from adverse families and as something school-education tries to reduce such behavior to its minimum, it is necessary to identify the term “violence” itself. The term ”violence” is ordinarily used to define aggression and acts of abuse that eventually cause damage to private property, animals and even people. Violence is a manifestation of a behavior with a destructive orientation. Random domestic violence, the one that is very common nowadays causes a lot of troubles nowadays for too many people and especially women get serious, irretrievable injuries that changes do harm to their physical possibilities in everyday vital activities. Violence to women does truly damage the society’s “morality” and is the example of a primitive gender based conflict based on the notion that women are men’s “private property”.Violence against women is a synonymy of any act of discrimination and physical abuse aimed to hurt a girl or a woman. One of the most spread acts of violence against women is domestic violence, rape and others.
As all the children, including boys, tend to copy the behavior of adults and their parent in the first place, they become very sensitive to violence in terms of copying it, too. Sometimes school-education becomes the only source of showing children the ways of recognizing the responding to violence and if the process of education is harmonious and professionally then it empowers all children and particularly boys to become active participants and not just observers of violence-prevention.
The abbreviation K-12 is used for the designation for the primary and secondary education in North America. K-12, or “Kay through twelve” is a shortening for “kindergarten through twelfth grade” education. This education implies working with children from five to 18 years old, and this is the whole period when the children learn all the values and believes that will define their future life. The K-12 education if conducted properly is an excellent precondition to educate boys not to be passive in the women-oriented violent acts but to have enough information in order to stop them. The age from 5 to 18 is an exceptional period for education, as it becomes a “filter” for violence in general and violence against women in particular. At the age of 18 young men start their proceeding life. They start looking for a couple and thinking about their future wives, so it is essential to make sure they do truly know how to control their anger and not let it transform into violent behavior against women. The K-12 education is based on the notion that every child is unique and needs a differentiated approach. Besides the fact that K-12 classroom instruction works to meet individual student’s needs as the classrooms often include children with different level of abilities, it also provides skills that are designed to teach the student to be successful in his environment. As children spend most of their time in school it become the very place to motive them not to be aggressive and violent against girls and women.
3. Teaching non-violent behavior
The K-12 education in terms of preventing violence against women is very much needed by the society because the contemporary exposure of children to violence id immense and have never been as available as now. Television, video and computer games, films constantly give the weak child’s mind new patterns of aggressiveness and violence. Sometimes children do experience violence themselves or grow up in the atmosphere of threat or in a neighborhood that constantly provides examples of inability to self-control and to stop the conflict peacefully. Children start taking all of these as a “normal” fact and see nothing bad in behaving in the same way for the only thing they do – is the simply copy what they see.
The reason that the personality of the teachers nowadays is valued more than their knowledge in the course they teaching is because the values and behavior examples delivered to children in the sensitive period outweigh some gaps in the course. Good teachers protect children from violence and make sure their development is healthy and they learn what true beauty and virtue is.
The basic reasons children in general and boys in particular can be so easily influenced by violent behavior is because such behavior as it has been mentioned before is actually learned. The brain starts making critical connections in the period of childhood but in reality these connections are not truly “critical” as they are taken a priori. At the beginning the child’s mind is a “Tabula Rasa”, a clean board, on which teachers and family with their hand draw the picture of the child’s future behavior and personality. So basically saying, the violent behavior against women performed by men is simply an imprint that a man got when he was a boy. While thinking only about the fact that exposure to violence causes boys to be violent in future, teachers and parent should not forget that love is the tool to teach the child to be understanding and patient, to be loving and non-aggressive. Mutual understanding makes the child learn constructive way of conflict solving and also learn how to control himself and not to express his anger in any destructive way. The education from Kindergarten through the twelfth grade that is based on acceptance, love and true devotion to children is a guarantee of preventing violent manifestations in the lives of these children. If children feel that they are needed and expected at school, if they feel safe expressing their thoughts and know that they are respected and never humiliated they will never humiliate anybody themselves and will have less problems dealing with a stress (Mullender, 2004). It is common knowledge that aggression is a protection and violence is a strong, fixed aggressive behavior (Kimmel & Michael, 1989). And there is no secret in the fact that the majority of teachers are women. If a boy learns to be aggressive from Kindergarten till his senior year in High School the probability that he will not be violent to women is very low. So here it is necessary to face two major facts: the two most important factors influencing the boy’s violent orientation are school and family. The majority of teachers are women and the most important person for a child – mother, belong to the female gender, too. In case mother fails to teach her son solve the conflicts constructively and the teacher fails to develop his problem solving skills – aggression against women is very probable to occur. K-12 education with its ability to teach children to cope with negative feelings in non-destructive positive ways nowadays has turned to the key element in teaching non-violent behavior against women. This is true for very often parents are very busy working and have no time to open their child the door to the productive, non-aggressive life.
4. Male violence against women
Violence in its very essence is a manifestation of the destructive desire to control and have power over another human being. According to Bancroft there nine types of abusive men which can use different styles starting with a strictly verbal abuser and ending with a physical batterer (Bancroft, 2003). Male violence against women is a desire to feel complete control over a human being that for ages has been seen as a “weak gender”. Therefore violence becomes the way of proving that a man or a boy really belongs to a male gender and therefore women have to “knuckle under” him. In other words male violence against women is a characteristic of men, who were abused or neglected in their childhood (Bancroft, 2003).
According to the information not known at wide public but collected by the Federal bureau of investigation – out of all the domestic violence acts – 95 percent are violent behavior manifestations against women. So this is all basically about the gender violence and primarily violence over women committed by men. The men who were abused in their childhood or were victims of family and school neglect most commonly commit violent criminal behavior. If a little boy is constantly exposed to his father beating his mother he is a potential abuser for every woman in his life (Widom & Maxfield, 2001). The situation becomes even worse if a little boy is abused himself, too. The main problem concerning children and boys that are being abused is that cannot learn what is empathy for other people and for the pain they are experiencing. They treat other people the same as they were treated themselves. So, if a child that is abused or watches his family members or neighbors abuse their relatives get not proper attention at school the boy easily converts into a criminal and his life will be broken because of his broken child’s heart. Violence against women – is not the fault of men but their misfortune. The true reason is that men used to be boys and these little boys did not have anybody to love and understand them neither at home nor at school. They did not have anybody to teach him or her how to control their anger, for anger is the major feeling such “abusive” children experience. They are angry with the people who are so indifferent to them and they become sure nobody is honestly able to understand them and become and violent (Bancroft, 2003).
This issue is not even about women letting men abuse them and turning them to police and not about men believing that the punishment will not hard. This is about the possibility to prevent violence against women when men are little boys are seek for love just as any girl does (Kimmel & Michael, 1989). Male violence against women has different various forms: verbal violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, battered women and others. All of these are result to the inability to build normal relationships. As it has been mentioned before school is the second most important element in bringing up successful and psychologically healthy men. The aim of K-12 education is to fill in the blanks of dysfunctional relationships within the family of the boy and especially in terms of relations with women. An attentive female teacher, showing respect and love for a little boy shows him that he is worth of love the way he is and does not have to use his male advantages such as strength to show his dominance over women. As the majority of men are heterosexuals, their female companions are the one that experience violence the most.
5. Violence-prevention through education
K-12 education can be rather effective in term of growing up non-violent males. Under the condition of an individual differentiated approach to the each boy the process education can guarantee several ways of preventing violence against women. This can happen through the establishment of positive interactions between the teachers and the male-student, learning how to build productive relationships, taking into account the person interest of the child. As the K-12 education implies a lot of sport activities, which take away the spare energy that a growing body has and can use in the direction of violent acts. The K-12 education provides the attention to a large variety of aspects concerning the child’s life that could lead him to aggression and afterwards – violence. This is achieved through the development of different kind of skills such as physical, social, cognitive and emotional aspects. If a boy gets the required attention if not at home, but at least at school in terms of emotional attachment and psychical exercises he is not in the “risk group” for becoming violent towards women.
Contemporary schools provide a counselor to every child and this person is responsible for observing the child behavior. In cases the behavior becomes not adaptive and abnormal the counselor may feel free to turn for a psychological assistance or speak with the child’s parents. The professionalism of teachers should primary reveal the ability to teach the boy to regulate his emotional conditions. K-12 through teaches boys how to speak off their thoughts and emotional conditions. This completely coincides with one of the best steps in the prevention of violence against women. The K-12 education teaches makes boys learn that it is okay to be angry and that each person sometimes does feel angry but the biggest difference is how a person reveals his anger to others. A boy, being in class learns that there are inappropriate ways of showing his anger and the most productive way to do it is to tell what he is feeling and not physically hurt a human being. Such an approach implies that a boy will never hit a woman though originally women are believed to be weaker than men are.
6. Conclusion
Boys learn violence by watching grown ups. Not depending on the fact whether the boy’s family is or is not “healthy” in term of violence school takes the most part of the responsibility of teaching boys how to be not violent. The K-12 education can prevent boys and eventually men form being violent towards women by teaching them to solve their problems using word of respect and a wide range of non-violent actions. The female teachers become an essential part of K-12 stopping violence against woman. If a boy established relations that are full of mutual respect and emotional attachment with a female teacher he will learn how to control and monitor his “negative” feelings and therefore will take this pattern for the rest of his life!
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