The Web presence of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education, Inc.
A resource for parents, students, educators, education policymakers, healthcare providers, children’s advocates, and all others who are concerned with the safety and wellbeing of children

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The European Children’s Network – EURONET – is a coalition of networks and organisations campaigning for the interests and rights of children (defined in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as all persons under 18 years of age). They share a common concern that children’s rights should be taken into account in all EU legislation, policies and programmes which have an impact on children’s rights.

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1. The child is always innocent.

2. Each child needs among other things: care, protection, security, warmth, skin contact, touching, caressing, and tenderness.

3. These needs are seldom sufficiently fulfilled, and in fact they are often exploited by adults for their own ends (trauma of child abuse).

4. Child abuse has lifelong effects.

5. Society takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her.

6. The victimization of the child has historically been denied and is still being widely denied, even today.

7. This denial has made it possible for society to ignore the devastating effects of the victimization of the child for such a long time.

8. The child, when betrayed by society, has no choice but to repress the trauma and to idealize the abuser.

9. Repression leads to neuroses, psychoses, psychosomatic disorders, and delinquency.

10. In neuroses, the child’s needs are repressed and/or denied; instead, feelings of guilt are experienced.

11. In psychoses, the mistreatment is transformed into a disguised illusory version (madness).

12. In psychosomatic disorders, the pain of mistreatment is felt, but the actual origins are concealed.

13. In delinquency, the confusion, seduction, and mistreatment of childhood are acted out again and again.

14. The therapeutic process can be successful if it is based on uncovering the truth about the patient’s childhood instead of denying that reality.

15. The psychoanalytic theory of "infantile sexuality" actually protects the parent and reinforces society’s blindness.

16. Fantasies always serve to conceal or minimize unbearable childhood reality for the sake of the child’s survival; therefore, the so-called "invented trauma" is a less harmful version of the real, repressed one.

17. The fantasies expressed in literature, art, fairy tales, and dreams often unconsciously convey early childhood experiences in a symbolic way.

18. This symbolic testimony is tolerated in our culture, thanks to society’s chronic ignorance of the truth concerning childhood; if the import of these fantasies were understood, they would be rejected.

19. A past crime cannot be undone by our understanding of the perpetrator’s blindness and unfulfilled needs.

20. New crimes, however, can be prevented, if the victims begin to see and be aware of what has been done to them.

21. Therefore, the reports of victims will be able to bring about more awareness, consciousness, and sense of responsibility in society at large.

Dutch version of United Nations,  The Convention on the Rights of the Child   -  the Articles 5 – 41 of  54

Artikel 5.
De Staten die partij zijn, eerbiedigen de verantwoordelijkheden, rechten en plichten van de ouders of, indien van toepassing, van de leden van de grootfamilie of de gemeenschap al naar gelang het plaatselijke gebruik, van wettige voogden of anderen die wettelijk verantwoordelijk zijn voor het kind, om te voorzien, op een wijze die verenigbaar is met de zich ontwikkelende vermogens van het kind, in passende leiding en begeleiding bij de uitoefening door het kind van de in dit Verdrag erkende rechten.

Artikel 6.
1. De Staten die partij zijn, erkennen dat ieder kind het inherente recht op leven heeft.

2. De Staten die partij zijn, waarborgen in de ruimst mogelijke mate het overleven en de ontwikkeling van het kind.

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kinderrechten.nl
De site waar u alles over rechten van kinderen kunt vinden…
Lees hier alles over het Kinderrechtencollectief!

Klik op bovenstaande afbeelding om alle kinderrechten in de
boekenkast te vinden!

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op  kinderrechtencollectief

We hebben een paar jaar geprobeerd iets te doen aan de manier waarop de overheid omgaat met kinderen, ouders en gezinnen. We vinden te weinig medestanders, te weinig mensen die hier actief aan mee willen werken. We vinden dit jammer.

Maar blijkbaar is de Nederlander niet zo geinteresseerd in kinderen. Dat blijkt ook wel uit onderzoeken naar de uitwerking van de kinderrechten, de vele reportages over jeugdzorg waar ook nauwelijks enige actie uit voort komt. Het idee dat leeft in Nederland is volgens ons dat geen kind mag lijden, zelfs al betekent dat dat een kind in een nog slechtere omgeving komt zoals een gevangenis. Geen Nederlander interesseert het blijkbaar dat het voor een kind traumatisch kan zijn als het gescheiden wordt van de ouders. Men bekijkt de situatie niet van alle kanten maar alleen vanuit een ideale, zelf bedachte situatie. Als het daaraan niet voldoet grijpt men in zonder de consequenties daarvan in te zien of daar ook maar enigszins mee rekening te houden.
Wij voorspellen dat er over een tiental jaren een vereniging komt met  een naam als ‘kinderen van de jeugdzorg’ of ‘voormalige staatkinderen’ om samen te gevolgen van het huidige beleid te bespreken, te herbeleven en een plaats te geven. En dat daar ook een ‘kind van -’ afdeling noodzakelijk blijkt.

Wij vinden het jammer dat er niet met minder emotie over gesproken kan worden. Dat men niet accepteert dat er overal wel eens wat ellende is, wat tegenslag in de persoonlijke sfeer. De ‘duitse’ grundligkeit nekt ons nu!

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This site offers an alternative perspective to the bio-psychiatric industry, and to the millions of psychotropic prescriptions written for children and adults.

We really do have natural, built-in ways of psychological healing. With attention and adequate resource, anyone can reemerge from even the greatest distress and most extreme states of mind.

Wildest Colts Resources. Support for adults in their work with young people, especially in challenging situations. Defense of parents from coercion, and young people from labeling and drugs.

Does your child have ADHD? (video)

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Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD has been an adult & child neurologist, in private practice, for 35 years. Making "disease" (real diseases–epilepsy, brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, etc.) or "no disease" (emotional, psychological, psychiatric) diagnoses daily, he has discovered and described real, bona fide diseases.

It is this particular medical and scientific background that has led him to view the "epidemic" of one particular "disease"–Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)–with increasing alarm. Dr. Baughman describes this himself. Referring to psychiatry, he says:

"They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive–termed them a ‘disease.’ Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term ‘research.,’ has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically–the "epidemic" having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between 5 and 7 million today–this remains the state of the ’science’ of ADHD."

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When parents hear me say that attention deficit disorder is a myth, they sometimes become very upset. They think I’m saying that their kids aren’t jumpy, distractible, forgetful, impulsive, or disorganized. That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s quite obvious to me that our nation’s children have probably never been so hyperactive. The question is, what accounts for this? Is it a medical disorder called ADD (or ADHD as it’s sometimes called)? I think not. I think instead that what we’ve learned to call ADD is instead a number of things all jumbled up together under this simplistic label.

Kids can be hyperactive for any number of reasons: because they’re anxious or depressed, because they’re allergic to milk, because they’re bored with school, because they have a different kind of mind and aren’t being challenged, because they’re over-stimulated from television and video games. I could go on. The point is that the ADD label makes is too easy to ignore what might be going on beneath the surface of things. "Oh, he has ADD? Whew! Glad we know what the problem is now." But perhaps we don’t really know at all.

Although there is a great deal of support from the medical and scientific community for ADD, once one looks into the literature, things become less clear. Nobody can actually tell you, for example, how many kids have ADD. Though the literature traditionally says 3-5% of all children have ADD, I’ve seen statistics in textbooks that have ranged from .019% (in England where its far less common) to 10% and above. ADD is in the eyes of the beholder.

Many of the "tests" that are used to diagnose ADD are flawed. The behavior rating scales that ask parents to rate their kids on a scale from I to 5, for instance, in terms of hyperactivity, impulsivity and so forth, are very subjective and parents and teachers often don’t agree on what they see in the same child. The continuous performance tests that are often used to diagnose for ADD are a joke. One of them is a box that sits on a table. The child is told that random numbers will appear in a screen on the box. They are instructed to press the button below the screen whenever a 9 is followed by a 1. What a stupid task! Yet on the basis of this, children are being diagnosed and having their medication levels adjusted.

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Imagine for a moment that you are visiting a plant nursery. You hear a commotion outside, so you investigate. You find a young assistant struggling with a rose bush – he is trying to force open the petals of a rose, and muttering in frustration. You ask him what he is doing, and he explains, "My boss wants all these roses to bloom this week, so last week I taped all the early ones, and now I’m opening the late ones." You protest that every rose has it’s own schedule of blooming; it is absurd to try to slow down or speed this up; it doesn’t matter when roses bloom; a rose will always bloom at its own best time. You look at the rose again, and see that it is wilting. But when you point this out, he replies, "Oh, too bad, it has genetic dysbloomia. I’ll have to call an expert." "No, no!" you say, "you caused the wilting! All you needed to do was meet the flowers’ needs for water and sunshine, and leave the rest to nature!" You can’t believe this is happening. Why is his boss so unrealistic and uninformed about roses?

Such a scene would never take place in a nursery, of course, but it happens daily in our schools. Teachers, pressured by their bosses, follow official timetables, which demand that all children learn at the same rate, and in the same way. Yet children are no different than roses in their development: they are born with the capacity and desire to learn, they learn at different rates, and they learn in different ways. If we can meet their needs, provide a safe, nurturing environment, and keep from interfering with our doubts, anxieties, and arbitrary timetables, then – like roses – they will all bloom at their own best time.

My heart goes out to those children who have been labeled "ADHD" ("attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder"), the latest "learning disability" label. Many educators and researchers believe that these children and their families have been cruelly deceived by the use of these labels. Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a former learning disabilities specialist, changed professions when he "began to see how this notion of learning disabilities was handicapping all of our children by placing the blame for a child’s learning failure on mysterious neurological deficiencies in the brain instead of on much needed reforms in our system of education." Dr. Armstrong turned instead to the concept of learning differences, and wrote In Their Own Way, a fascinating and practical guide to seven "personal learning styles" first proposed by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner. Dr. Armstrong urges us to abandon convenient but harmful labels such as "dyslexia" and focus on the real problem of "dysteachia". He warns that "our schools are selling millions of kids short by writing them off as underachievers, when in reality they are disabled only by poor teaching methods."

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