What Good Is Progress If We Cannot Protect Our Children?
I recently came across a LinkedIn post by Conor Pall, an Australian man reflecting on the boy he once was. At fourteen, he found the courage to speak up about violence, only to discover that the very systems meant to protect him made things worse.
His words stayed with me.
We spend so much time teaching children to speak up. How much effort do we put into making sure adults know how to listen, believe and act?
I remember being that child. Speaking up about abuse didn't necessarily bring protection. Sometimes I wasn't believed, and when adults did believe I'd been hurt, the question became what I had done to deserve it.
What I learned was to keep quiet.
Those lessons don't end when childhood does. We carry them into adulthood, into relationships, workplaces and every encounter with an institution that is supposed to protect us.
And institutions don't simply teach children silence. Sometimes they teach them to justify violence.
What we call discipline
I grew up in England and attended Catholic school. Pinching, slapping, rulers and canes were part of what adults called discipline. Some teachers were far more enthusiastic about it than others, but the practice itself was accepted.
Imagine what that teaches a child.
Not just that misbehaviour has consequences, but that people in authority have the right to hurt you. That your pain is justified if someone bigger or more powerful decides it is. And that challenging what happened might bring more punishment.
We tell children violence is wrong, then teach them that lesson with violence.
When I became a mother, I decided I wasn't going to beat my children. I'd had enough of being hit.
I used to watch people riding horses and wonder why an animal could be given more patience and compassion than a child. Why would a four-year-old need a slap rather than a conversation? How had we convinced ourselves that causing pain was a legitimate way to teach someone how to behave?
People questioned my decision. Some thought I was a bad mother. There were moments I questioned myself, too. That's how powerful something considered normal can become. Even when you decide not to repeat it, you can find yourself wondering whether you're the one getting it wrong.
Here's what troubles me. Why did England need legislation to stop teachers from hitting children in the first place?
Corporal punishment was abolished in state schools in 1987, but independent schools weren't covered until 1999. The children hadn't changed. Their capacity to feel pain hadn't changed. What changed was society's willingness to question an authority adults had long assumed they were entitled to use.
Why did adults need to be legally prohibited from doing to children what would be called assault if they did it to another adult?
Not just one country's story
This isn't confined to England.
I was born in Canada, where Indigenous survivors and families have spent generations telling us about children taken from their communities, abused in residential schools and, in thousands of cases, never returned home. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented how government policy and religious authority worked together to separate Indigenous children from their families, languages and cultures. Many of those schools were run by Catholic orders and other churches.
What happens when the institutions teaching children morality are the ones practising, tolerating or concealing violence against them? And who decides whether those children's suffering deserves recognition?
We see these failures across countries, cultures, religions and generations. It is global.
Consider child marriage. According to UNICEF, about twelve million girls are married before their eighteenth birthday every year. Many countries have laws against it, yet exceptions, loopholes and weak enforcement keep it alive. A child may be considered too young to vote, but adults can arrange a marriage that changes the whole course of her life. We call it tradition, parental authority or religious practice. Where is the child's right to refuse?
Legality and morality are not the same thing. Sometimes laws protect children. Sometimes they permit what harms them.
Violence that gets passed on
That's what makes it so heartbreaking. We've made extraordinary advances in medicine, technology and education, and in our understanding of human development. Yet we still struggle with something as basic as treating children with dignity.
Violence against children was often tolerated. It was defended as necessary for their own good. Adults could inflict pain and call it discipline, obedience or character-building. Even now, we debate whether hitting a child is acceptable in certain circumstances, instead of asking why hurting someone smaller, younger and dependent on us should ever count as teaching.
And violence doesn't always end with the person who first experiences it. The World Health Organization has linked corporal punishment to increased aggression, greater acceptance of violence and a higher risk of using violence later in life. Those are risks, not destinies. Many people who were hurt make a conscious choice never to hurt anyone else. But we can't dismiss the connection just because it makes us uncomfortable.
We condemn the violence that frightens us while defending the violence we've come to accept as normal. We call it discipline in the home, correction in the classroom, authority in an institution. Then, when violence shows up somewhere else in society, we ask where it came from.
Maybe we should ask what we've been teaching.
The cost of silence
And what about silence?
Silence isn't always peace. Sometimes it's pain that nobody has bothered to hear.
When children learn that speaking up brings disbelief, blame or punishment, silence becomes self-protection. It doesn't mean the pain has gone. It may simply mean nobody is listening anymore.
Some children withdraw. Some struggle with fear, anger or distrust. Some grow up to become advocates, as Conor has. Others are left trying to survive circumstances that never gave them the chance to heal.
We can't measure a child's worth by how admirably they respond to what adults put them through.
Harm doesn't need a hand raised
A child doesn't have to be struck to be seriously harmed. Neglect, deprivation, displacement and institutional indifference can be devastating, too.
If children are so precious, why do we accept a society in which some have nowhere safe to sleep?
Family homelessness exists right here in North America, in some of the wealthiest societies in the world. Canada's 2024 national homelessness survey recorded nearly 4,100 dependent children reported by respondents experiencing homelessness, a figure that does not represent every child experiencing homelessness in Canada. In the United States, 259,473 people in families with children experienced homelessness on a single night in January 2024, including 145,415 children under eighteen. Not all were sleeping outdoors, but neither shelters nor temporary arrangements are a substitute for the security of a permanent home.
What does protection mean when a child is hungry, homeless, frightened or sleeping somewhere unsafe?
We can't praise resilience as if it excuses the conditions that made resilience necessary.
Conor deserves recognition for speaking about the boy he once was, and for using his experience to advocate for children today. But not every child responds the same way, or gets the same opportunities, or the same outcome. Some have it worse.
We celebrate children for overcoming adversity while tolerating the conditions that expose other children to the same adversity. What exactly are we celebrating?
A better measure
We usually measure progress by the laws we've changed, the institutions we've built, the technology we've invented and the discoveries we've made.
A more revealing measure might be how we treat people when we have power over them, especially when they can't defend themselves. That applies to children, but it follows people into adulthood.
We have generations of knowledge about the consequences of violence. We have research, international agreements, child protection laws and institutions that claim to be dedicated to children's welfare. But knowing what's right and having the power to define it are not the same.
Children have been telling us what's wrong for generations.
We just haven't always wanted to hear them.
So as we congratulate ourselves on how far we've come, I keep coming back to this question.
What good is progress if we cannot protect our children?
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