 Welcome to the Advocates, where thought-provoking topics are discussed with no-holds-bed. Here on Plus TV Africa, we basically call a spade by its name. The issues of child brutality are what I'll be focusing on today. There are better ways to train a child. Juliet advocates for the need for professional workers to have a side hustle and speaks on single parenthood. Felix talks about the need for women inclusion in all aspects, and Victor talks about the expectations for the new year. Sit back, and after this break, we'll be here to dissect it all. Please stay with us. Spoil the road, spare the child. Yes, you heard that right. Spoil the road, spare the child. I just came back from a three-hour interstate drive from a relative secondary school where my close relative was hit by the school bus driver. I know the nerve, right? A non-academic staff of a secondary school had the temerity to hit a student. But this is not an isolated incident. Father Pro revealed that a student in the same school was flogged 24 strokes of the cane for touching another student inappropriately. Now, am I in support of inappropriate physical contact? Of course not. But also, is the punishment for such behaviour physical abuse? The answer is a father resounding no. I travelled that long distance to pass a simple message to the management of the school. A forward message, very simple, yet very strong. Stop beating people's children. It is rather unfortunate that this conversation even has to be heard in the year 2021. What was even more heart-wrenching was the information gotten that the children around the incident laughed and chalked when this dastardly behaviour took place, which goes to reveal sadly that not only had the staff crossed his boundaries, but the children had been indoctrinated to believe that it was OK for a child to be physically abused in their presence. So instead of reporting it, they laughed. The road rakes to high heavens. Did you have a student who lost his life recently due to physical abuse by other students? At what point do we actually draw the line? At what point is it OK for students to report physical abuse? But the children are not really the problem. The problem didn't even start from the school. Physical abuse is a social, spiritual, mental and global threat, a pandemic that must be stopped in its tracks immediately. More often than not, the origin of physical abuse can be traced to the home where some parents turn their children into punching bags and toys of prey. There are homes with different weapons of choice brandished by parents to meet our discipline on their erring words at the slightest provocation. More often than not, when you physically abuse your children, you unconsciously tell them it's OK to be hit by someone who is angry with them. And I speak as a parent. I know firsthand what it feels like to want to punish our children for bad behaviour. I personally believe the road of instruction achieves better results than the physical road of destruction. Child psychology actually posits that when you beat your children, it not only caused them bodily harm, there is also a psychological and mental trauma that is attached. It's even more endemic in Africa. We're being beaten by our parents is more or less, you know, bragging rights. You know, the one whose parents had the best beating skills was the most disciplined and non-nonsense parents. Many of us, even trade banter, are growing up beating experiences. You know, the question is, where did that actually, all that beating, where did it actually leave us? Physical abuse is a social pandemic. It must be addressed by governments and societies everywhere. Physical abuse is a spiritual pandemic. Religious bodies and leaders must address it immediately. Physical abuse is a mental pandemic. It must be dealt with by everyone who has a functioning brain. Stop beating people's children. Whether they're your children, whether they're your staff, your spouses, your students, your words, or anyone at all. Just stop it. I totally agree with you. We should actually stop doing it, especially to other people's children. And I think it's coming from our own upbringing, where some of us were beaten to obedience. But what we had then was we knew obedience. You could say it was submission because we were afraid. So we had this in our mind, we were rebelling in our spirit. But because we would lose inheritance, we would be disowned, we would starve and die, we complied. But that thing wasn't obedience. So there are other ways to get children to comply, to obey. I mean, there's the retriever system where you take something that is important and there's the nutty corner for very young children. And you can even do the positive side whereby you come up and say, you reward them for good behavior. So they cannot see what it is like to do the right thing. But whatever you do, you should not force a child to obey you. You end your respect and your ways to do this. I mean, that's my own take. What do you think, Felix? Well, Victor, even when he was saying this, I was just reminiscing about this in a secondary school. We both went to military school at some point. I did the grade placement. Subjected to corporate punishment. But I stayed anyway. And actually, they subjected us to some level of corporate punishment. I remember when I crawled for coming to school, it's from when we came down from the bus. I crawled on the third route into the school at the Suja. Sujas were starting to go, to us it was normal. But over time, I think I agree with your ideology. It's not wrong to punish children, but the punishment should not cause the emotional and physical harm. The other way is you can punish a child so that the child can have some level of recourse to think, okay, I reflect what I did was wrong and I need to apologize for my wrongdoing. At the other hand too, most African parents, most Nigerian parents, they don't upload their children when they do good. You only hear them interacting with their children when they do something wrong. And the interaction, they wouldn't even want to listen to what the child has to say. Sometimes you have to listen to the child. He may have done something wrong, but look at the intent. What was the intent behind what he did? If he did something wrong, but he had a good intention, maybe you need to just distribute the child, be patient with your children. When you or she do something good, upload it. So I think I agree with your sentiment. Absolutely. I call it the thinking corner. In my home, I don't call it a naughty corner. Because only in that corner you feel like, oh, I've been naughty. I call it the thinking corner. The reason is simple. Every child has the ability to think, to process information. So when they've done something wrong, I explain this to them. When I say go to the corner and think about it. So it's a thinking corner. So when you get that, because again, language communication is very important with this child and they pick up things very fast. So when you explain in detail what it is, and you say go to the corner and think about it, then come back and let's have a conversation. I find this works for me. And I feel like conversations, dialogue, would actually work better than physical, just being physical all the time. Exactly. And shortly before Victor will respond to that, because I think we want to say something. This also transcends parent-child relationship. If you look at government enforcement agency as a citizen, somebody is doing something wrong on the road and a soldier or a policeman will come rather than cautioning him using the appropriate level of force that is allowed within the ambit of the law. You see them coming. Mistakes with Kovato. With Kovato attacking. He's wrong. He's wrong. You don't challenge. I remember when I was in secondary school, I had the opportunity of challenging a soldier because then I was in secondary school and I went to a military school. I felt they were harassing drivers on the road. And then I said something. Why are these soldiers doing this? The man standing beside me was a soldier. He didn't listen to me. He hit me. I said, because I was a student, he would let me go. And I looked at him and said, they can actually allow these people. He was like, you won't understand. But he actually hit me for saying that. I just let it go. But you see, this is wrong. If you want to correct somebody, you don't have to cause bodily harm to that person. You can actually correct the person and maintain your discipline as a soldier without causing bodily harm. So Victor, you want to ship in something? Yeah, you know, all we know is all we've learned and all we've learned is none of the original, right? So I come from a business angle, right? So if I want to get Juliet's money, I just need to know what to sell to Juliet to get out the money, right? And if you think about it, so if I don't know how to get to sell something to Juliet, I would use a weapon to get money out of Juliet. So either ways, we're all sort of like taking money from people. Now, so I'm doing it legally by selling a solution. Intelligently. Intelligently. Now, so I'm doing it by willpower. So I don't have what to sell. I don't have anything to sell. But I don't want what this person has. So either way, Juliet is paying money to different types of people. So if you bring it back to, you know, the issue that we have here, right? So it's what people will not do beyond what they know. It's what we were introduced to. It's what we grew up knowing, right? So it's not like you say, oh, don't do that, it's hurting your child. Just like telling someone that he's drinking. Do not drink. It's hurting your lungs. I mean, the phenomenons of it ones are supposed to like to die young, right? They see that on the sick, but they see smoke. So they can't hear that. Their ears can hear, but their mind cannot hear it. So let's go back to the basis, which is how do we begin to re-engineer a new thinking system whereby people begin to see, you know, different other methods of correction? You know, there's things that we did in psychology around positive reinforcement. Somebody does what I reward my child. You know, they don't, they do badly. I take away the reward. You're not going to play PS2. You're not going to play game. That's punishment. Yeah, that's what I said. I mean, we start with someone actually making them. I mean, for instance, when I was driving today, when I was like, you're going to go out there, I say this, was it starts with somebody saying this is wrong? There was a time when owning slave was okay. It was actually legal. It was a capital punishment. It was okay. It was okay. You know, by the way, and I'm sure you have something to say. She's still there. Oh, yes. I grew up without being beaten. Personally, I can count the amount of times I was beaten by my parents, both of them. And they like to think I turned out quite alright without the beating. But in Kenya today, we have a lot of high school students burning down schools. So schools are getting closed. And now they are going back to the conversation of it's because parents are not beating their children. So I think this is a very sensitive topic. In Kenya today, they're saying we have stopped beating our children and that's why they are burning down schools and that's why they're not being as respectful as they should. So this is definitely a very, very sensitive topic to be discussing. But I personally don't beat my daughter. I like to think that I can actually talk to her and she actually understands. But most of the parents are going to want to beat their children because that's how they think they have power over their children. So this is a very sensitive topic and thank you for bringing it up. We don't have to raise kids by beating them for us to feel listened to or for us to feel like we're instilling discipline in our kids. Thank you very much, Anne. And the truth is we actually can exhaust. So we had said that we're going to have an old episode to talk about this. We should have a big topic. And just to speak with Anne to what Anne said. Sometimes just the impatience. I mean, a parent just feels if I strike, I can get quicker results than sitting down and having a conversation and dialogue. But thank you very much, Anne. Thanks, everyone. Up next is Anne. Please stay with us.