Child Forced To Bathe Is Abuse

I read an article today that made my hair stand on end and my skin crawl.  Some days I wonder if adults really understand what it is to be human or are they just aliens in a human body.  This story was about a third grader at a Texas school that was forced to bathe.  Evidently according to teachers and school officials, the kid smelled and they took it upon themselves to violently scrub him down.  I'm sure Sandusky would have been jealous.

Of course I don't know all the facts in the situation nor do I accept the media's story as the gospel truth.  After all, the media does tend to distort the facts in a frequent manner.  Regardless, if this story is true, it leaves me speechless. How on earth anyone who calls themselves an educator could do what they did to this child, is beyond me.  Plain and simple, it was child abuse.  They should all be locked up.  When did we become a society that so disrespected our children and treated them as something we could do anything we want to with the kids?

This story of course strikes a chord with me because I was only allowed to take one shower a week as a kid.  This shower of course was done on Saturday night so we would be presentable for church on Sunday.  After all, you didn't want the people at church thinking we were bad people.  We had to keep up the image of everything being fine in our family.


During the rest of the week, it didn't matter if we smelled or not.  We were allowed to wash up in the sink, but anything more than that and we were ridiculed.  My younger brother told me years later that he would rush to school in the morning and try to bathe in the school locker room.  Okay, I wasn't that smart.  I'm sure my classmates probably hated being close to me.  After all, I grew up on a farm and thought body odor was just a natural smell.  I'm sure you're getting the picture.  The reason given for not taking more than one shower a week was we needed to conserve water.  Yet, we had our own well on the farm.  Of course, I won't get into the fact about how we had to shower together in our family.  That is another entirely different one that would take time to tell.

Yes people, there are strange families out there and some pretty screwed up things that go on.  What these teachers and educators did was no better.  There is never a time that a small child should be subjected to pain and humiliation like what this third grader went through.  There were far better ways to handle this than through a form of child abuse.  Each one of these educators should be ashamed of themselves and I can only hope that they don't get done to them what they did to this third grader.  May their lives be spared of humiliation even though they had no problem humiliating this child through abuse.

My heart goes out for this little kid and for my life growing up.  It is difficult to read these stories of child abuse when they connect so readily with my own life.  I write about these things so hopefully it shines the light of truth upon the evils that take place in our world.  We all like to believe that we live in this world where nothing like this happens, but the only thing is that when we think this way, we have our eyes closed.  It is time to wake up and stop child abuse in whatever form it takes.

To read the article on MSNBC.com, click this link.

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