Sticks and stones.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS - Bullying and the legal system

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." So goes the childhood chant, which sounds brave and resilient, but also is a clarion call for bullies to kick it up a notch and see about that bone-breaking business.

It is a good thought--that one can be resilient and resist buying into verbal abuse and cruel messages. That would be great. It is, apparently, either impossible or necessary, and much depends upon who you are. Psychologically, children and adolescents are vulnerable, as are those who suffer various disabilities that make them susceptible to misuse and exploitation. The law has codified other groups into protected status, while still others enjoy the privilege of being left open to any and all attacks and slurs, without recourse, and simply are expected to take it as part of the cost of living.

It is hard to remember, as adults, what it was like to be a child. We imagine ourselves as children, but often do so by imposing our grownup self into a memory that was experienced by someone smaller, frailer, less intellectually advanced, helpless, and existentially at risk. Thus, the victim of childhood sexual abuse blames herself for not fighting back because the adult she has become is bigger, stronger, and knows it could be better to fight. The four-year-old child she was at the time weighed 30 pounds and was utterly helpless. In the same way, we recall childhood humiliations and imagine all sorts of things we could have done, except, of course, we could not, because we had not the maturity, insight, or other resources to do so. We are putting a heroic mature self into that old film to write a new ending and, while there is a certain useful narrative therapeutic process in that, it is not useful in terms of finding a new way to abuse oneself with blame and guilt.

For children, the information from the outside world creates the psychological scaffolding on which knowledge is organized. This includes the sense of self. Abusive adults create warped scaffolding in children's heads, and the "self' constructed on this framework will be twisted and suffering. Adults who are minimally engaged create sparse scaffolding, and the information that comes in later, when school begins, struggles to find a toehold. Treatment becomes, to some extent, destiny.

For adults, the current legal situation and sociopolitical system see it differently. To these modern eyes, certain people are very sensitive and vulnerable, and even...