Why we MUST tell children the truth about life’s horrors
By HILARY FREEMAN, who says hearing her family’s stories about the Holocaust made her stronger
WARNING: the following article contains words which some readers might find upsetting. Can you imagine if everything you read in this paper was prefaced with that sentence? It would be ridiculous.
Yet, little by little, such ‘trigger warnings’ are invading every area of our lives.
Nobody, it seems, is allowed to be scared, upset or offended any more. And I find that worrying. It is mollycoddling on a giant scale, and I don’t think it’s good for us.
Far from making the world a better place, I believe it is helping to create an ever more narcissistic and selfish society, in which individual sensibilities are valued above all else.
Watch TV and an announcement alerting you to potentially upsetting scenes will be broadcast before a show begins. On the news, prior to the screening of any footage of war, disaster or other human tragedy, we are informed that ‘some viewers may find the following images disturbing’.
It’s the same on the internet, where notes forewarn readers that content on a site might trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction, so it should be avoided by those of a ‘sensitive’ nature.
Well, I’m sorry, but we jolly well should all feel upset at seeing television images of starving people or mass graves. And to turn away and pretend it’s not happening can be to play into the hands of the perpetrators of terrible events.
As a child, I knew only too well that the world could be a terrifying place. But the monsters I feared weren’t hairy giants: they goose-stepped and wore swastikas.
My grandparents were Holocaust survivors and most of their family perished in the Nazi death camps. It was why my mum had no grandparents of her own.
My middle name — Rachel — was given to me in memory of my grandma’s niece, Rachel Stern, who died in Auschwitz when she was six, along with her parents.
I thought a lot about that little girl, whom I would never meet. My grandpa liked to talk about what happened in Germany. He didn’t give any ‘trigger warnings’.
My grandparents, Sidney Brook (originally Siegfried Baruch) and Thilde Nussbaum, made it to Britain in 1939 as teenagers, and by the skin of their teeth.
MY GRANdMOTHeR had seen her father’s shoe shop destroyed on Kristallnacht — the night when Nazis burned and looted Jewish homes and businesses across Germany. They had beaten up her brother in front of her. She had to leave behind her parents and eldest sister, Rachel’s mother. They all perished.
My grandfather, an only child, also had to say goodbye to his parents and never saw them again. There is a record of his father, my great-grandfather, being shot during the ‘evacuation’ of the Riga ghetto in 1942. More than 3,800 people were murdered that night.
I can’t remember how old I was when I discovered that little girls like me could be — and were — shot, gassed and incinerated in ovens, or when I saw images of emaciated survivors. It feels like something I’ve always known.
But I didn’t end up traumatised. Quite the opposite. It helped me to grow up strong and resilient, with the knowledge that people can survive in spite of terrible personal losses.
It also gave me a strong sense of gratitude that I had been born in Seventies Britain, and a desire to make sure others didn’t become victims of hatred or genocide.
The philosophy I was taught was: talk about it, so it doesn’t happen again.
Yet today we coddle and ‘protect’. At universities, students are told they can skip lectures which contain material that might disturb them, and are given notice that upsetting subjects are to be discussed.
Last week, at Newcastle University, lecturers were instructed that any students distressed by talking about racism or abuse should be allowed to have their deadlines extended.
I could almost understand this sort of babying at an infant school, but that still doesn’t make it any more acceptable.
Just last week, it was reported that a pre-school had banned a toddler from wearing his monsterprint leggings because they frightened a little girl. The leggings, adorned with smiling cartoon monsters, were ‘too scary’. Oh, please! Toddlers are irrationally afraid of all kinds of things — my 17-month-old daughter bursts into tears at the sound of the hairdryer, but I haven’t banned hairdryers from the house. Feeling discomfort and learning to deal with it is part of growing up. Monsters are meant to be ugly and scary. Fairytales, with their child-eating witches and wicked stepmothers, are meant to be scary, too. Psychologists have argued that they help children learn to cope with their strongest fears. For hiding away from horrible truths doesn’t make them go away. Yes, the TV news often makes for unpleasant viewing — but sometimes being upset or offended is a good thing. Life is often scary, painful and tragic — and sometimes we need to be punched in the guts and shown exactly what we’re up against. At least it puts our trivial concerns into perspective; at best it spurs us into action.
So I applaud the parents of Jessica Whelan, who, at the worst time in their lives, chose to post a harrowing image of their young daughter, who was dying of cancer, on a social networking site.
They were drawing attention to what it is like for a child to suffer and die from this hideous disease, in the hope that it might save another child from the same fate.
Some called it oversharing. I call it brutal, much-needed honesty.
Too often teenagers are criticised for their lack of empathy, a byproduct of gorging on the fabricated shocks and thrills of the internet, which has left them desensitised to real horrors. A heavy dose of reality is probably what most of them need.
Who decided that we are all special little snowflakes, too delicate to face the real world? And who decides what content merits a trigger warning?
When trigger warnings first appeared, they were supposed to protect people suffering from conditions such as PTSd (posttraumatic stress disorder), or who were victims of abuse. But now they appear to cover anything that might upset anybody, from discussions of weight to spiders, blood or dental trauma. Seriously, don’t mention your tooth extraction because someone, somewhere may have a dental phobia.
I’m not advocating that we encourage young children to read about torture or executions. But I would far rather a child saw an upsetting report, then discussed it with their parents, than spent hours playing violent computer games in which shooting people has no real consequence.
BRINGING up children to avoid anything that upsets them doesn’t make them nicer. It makes them self-centred. And it isn’t a giant leap from looking away from upsetting images on TV, or walking out of a lecture hall because we don’t like what’s being said, to turning a blind eye to the stranger being attacked in the street.
What has looking the other way ever achieved? Nothing good. It brought us the Jimmy Savile scandal, for one.
Isn’t it ironic how many of us shun reality, yet feast on scripted ‘reality TV’? Or prefer viewing the world through our camera phones, detached from what is happening before our eyes?
Being screened from reality does not make people strong and happy. When bad things happen, we need to have the knowledge, tools and resilience to cope.
It is high time we stopped infantilising each other. It’s time we all grew up.