Fintan O'Toole made a useful point in relation to the grim attack on a fourteen year old boy in Navan this last week. He asked why so many persisted, albeit sincerely in calling him a 'young man' when the truth is he is a child.
Just switch the language of TikTok's classification to what it should be: "Attack on child in Navan". Would that not make the idea of sharing that video much more obviously creepy?
Or is it that referring to children subjected to extreme bullying by their peers as men and women helps us to keep at bay the knowledge that our children inflict violence on other children all the time?
It was an attack on a child.
This is useful too:
Monday's after-school attack was by no means an isolated incident.
According to Belong To, a national organisation which supports lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex young people in Ireland, there has been a rising level of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in the past 18 months which they describe as "deeply distressing."
"We know that members of our community feel increasingly unsafe in public spaces and that the Gardaí [police] saw a 29% increase in reports of hate crimes and hate-related incidents last year," Belong To said in a statement.
"These feelings of unsafety and uncertainty stand in stark contrast with the jubilance of 2015 as we welcomed Marriage Equality," they added.
On a slight tangent, O'Toole suggests that in his experience school wasn't as violent when he was that age. I'd agree to an extent albeit with caveats. I was fortunate that the school I went to did not allow the teaching staff to use physical violence, but there was violence here and there amongst the students, not so much on school grounds, though that was a factor, as much as off them. I can't recall an incident that resulted in concussion, but I saw violence meted out by some to others at a similar age. And all this really impacted on people subsequently. I know people who were genuinely traumatised by bullying and the violence that accompanied it. I'm sure many of us do.
No comments:
Post a Comment