A Farah Provincial Reconstruction Team initiated a program to help malnourished children circa 2009 | Photo by Tracy DeMarco/USAF via Wikimedia Commons
The six-year-old boy in Virginia, USA, went to school as millions do daily, but he was different. He tended towards violent behavior. He bullied other children, picked fights, kicked others, and was unruly in the classroom. This day, he reached into his backpack, took out a gun, and fired three shots at his teacher. She was seriously wounded but survived.
Pedro, an 11-year-old Filipino boy, was sent by his impoverished, widowed mother with five children to stay with his maternal aunt and uncle. They beat and whipped him frequently. The bruises and scars on his body are evidence of that cruel abuse. He was referred to the Preda Home for Boys as a very underweight, sad, depressed, and confused child. He was holding in feelings of hurt and pain, anger and resentment. He was a boy against the world.
He was stressed and tense, and with the slightest provocation by another boy, he would fly into a rage and attack this tormenter with kicks, blows, cursing, and punching. The aggressive, violent behavior was shocking. At the Preda Home for Boys, he had Emotional Release Therapy, released his anger and pain in the therapy room, and recovered. He became calm and grew in maturity and self-confidence. He found the courage to file a criminal case against his aunt. The aunt was arrested and posted bail. Soon, she will be prosecuted, and the case will be trialed.
Maria, 15 years old, lived with her nine brothers and sisters and a grandmother, a scavenger in extreme poverty. They lived in a cramped 15-square-meter shack in a slum in Pasig. Maria went on the streets to beg for food and was sexually abused and raped by neighborhood men. She became depressed and hopeless and turned to sell herself for money.
Maria was emotionally disturbed, wild with anger, and showed highly aggressive behavior to the authorities when they picked her up on the street and brought her to the Preda home. She was angry at the world, hated hunger, and only had her clothes.
When Maria first arrived at the Preda Home for abused children, she aggressively bullied other children until staff immediately intervened. Yet, she chose to stay, although free to leave. She will surely recover with care and therapy. The source of her aggression is likely severe malnutrition from birth, lack of love, care, and food, and being raped by brutal adults.
But aggressive behavior may not always arise from malnutrition, hunger, and deprivation. A few months ago, a student fraternity at a Catholic college in Manila called the newly-recruited candidates for membership. One by one, 12 well-off students started shouting abuse at the candidates. They humiliated and degraded them. They bullied them as if they were animals.
They selected the first student for initiation by hazing and began to kick, punch, and beat him. They used wooden paddles and beat him in a violent frenzy. They continued to beat the boy to death and then buried the body. Fifty-eight students have been murdered in this way in the past years in various Philippine universities. Is it just an initiation practice out of control to inculcate group conformity, loyalty, and cooperation? Perhaps, it is the peer pressure to conform and belong to a select group that demands they imitate the aggressive practices of the group. It is most likely that the “bad social genes” of aggressive behavior are carried to the next generation of fraternity members.
In the case of Wilson, he grew up in poverty. His mother suffered from malnutrition, and likely he did also. That malnutrition caused a failure of Wilson’s brain to develop, resulting in weak understanding and an inability to control emotions. Then he suffered the pain of being abandoned and abused, which caused more aggressive anger.
“Another equally severe downside of malnutrition in and out of the womb is the brain’s underdevelopment. The unfortunate children grow up with low IQs, learning disabilities, and short attention spans. These conditions lead to aggression in children like Wilson and Maria. “
One thing we know for sure is that every act of sexual, physical, and verbal abuse is recorded in memory, buried deep inside the person, and added to the pool of pain and hurt to be carried within for the rest of their lives. That is how children are scarred and damaged for life. It cannot be healed until removed by reliving the abuse and freely expressed in tantrum-like sessions of release by shouting and punching the cushions in the therapy room as if hitting the abuser again and again. This is done in the Preda Emotional Release Therapy. It is a healing process that frees the child from the pain of the buried memories of abuse. It empowers the child to live a more normal life, having confronted the abuser in therapy and helped to release their feelings.
Maria also suffered from malnutrition, which affected her genes, and expressed extreme teenage hardship. That deprivation and injustice likely contributed to feelings of anger and aggressive behavior. The well-off college students are more likely victims of peer group control by fear of inculcating slave-like loyalty to the group and their desire to belong and be accepted.
Another equally severe downside of malnutrition in and out of the womb is the brain’s underdevelopment. The unfortunate children grow up with low IQs, learning disabilities, and short attention spans. These conditions lead to aggression in children like Wilson and Maria. An acclaimed study on the island of Mauritius showed that children malnourished at three years old showed signs of elevated aggression at eight years old. By the time they were eleven, like Pedro, outbursts of violent behavior were seen.
These behaviors were kicking other children, biting, lying, stealing, and punching others. By 17, they were expressing severe aggressive, destructive behaviors. Malnutrition in Maria and Wilson contributes to their aggressive behavior. The violence they see and experience on social media and television exasperates it.
What we eat or fail to eat causes our brains to develop and our hearts and organs to be healthy. Sadly, the food industry has captured the taste of so many that junk food malnutrition will continue, and there will be more aggressive and violent children, teenagers, and adults. We urgently need to teach healthy food choices.
Intelligent legislators and government officials must pass laws to curb advertising by the junk food industry. Otherwise, we are heading for a more violent future for our children and society than we already have. (Google: Infant malnutrition predicts conduct problems in adolescents BBC.com/Reel
Please watch the latest Arte.tv documentary, ARTE Reportage Philippines: Child Rape Online.
