This doesn't only happen in Asia or 'third world' countries. I never understood how or why parents could be so cruel to one particular child while apparently being normal loving parents to others.
That, sadly, is the norm in child abuse cases.
One child becomes the scapegoat...
consider this...
http://www.davepelzer.com/aboutb.htmDave Pelzer one child in this household in this story. He was the one that was abused. Out of 38,000 cases of child abuse in California, Dave Pelzer's was judged the third worst.
David J. Pelzer's mother, Catherine Roerva, was, he writes in this ghastly, fascinating memoir, a devoted den mother to the Cub Scouts in her care, and somewhat nurturant to her children--but not to David, whom she referred to as "an It." This book is a brief, horrifying account of the bizarre tortures she inflicted on him, told from the point of view of the author as a young boy being starved, stabbed, smashed face-first into mirrors, forced to eat the contents of his sibling's diapers and a spoonful of ammonia, and burned over a gas stove by a maniacal, alcoholic mom. Sometimes his mother will lock him in the bathroom with ammonia in buckets. Sometimes he would breathe into a cloth that was dry. Soon after that mother realized he was breathing into a cloth so before she put him in there she would make sure the cloth had already been soaked into the ammonia so it could not help him. Sometimes she claimed he had violated some rule--no walking on the grass at school!--but mostly it was pure sadism. Inexplicably, his father didn't protect him; only an alert schoolteacher saved David.
Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 4:57 pm
I wonder how can those captors think that way? I guess back in Britain a couple of hundred years ago we wern't much better. 
