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On sibling violence
Beyond Rivalry, a Hidden World of Sibling Violence
By KATY BUTLER
From infancy until he reached the threshold of manhood, the beatings Daniel W. Smith received at his older brother's hands were qualitatively different from routine sibling rivalry. Rarely did he and his brother just shove each other in the back of the family car over who was crowding whom, or wrestle over a toy firetruck.
Instead, Mr. Smith said in an interview, his brother, Sean, would grip him in a headlock or stranglehold and punch him repeatedly.
"Fighting back just made it worse, so I'd just take it and wait for it to be over," said Mr. Smith, who was 18 months younger than his brother. "What was I going to do? Where was I going to go? I was 10 years old."
To speak only of helplessness and intimidation, however, is to oversimplify a complex bond. "We played kickball with neighborhood kids, and we'd go off exploring in the woods together as if he were any other friend," said Mr. Smith, who is now 34 and a writing instructor at San Francisco State University. (Sean died of a heart attack three years ago.)
"But there was always tension," he said, "because at any moment things could go sour."
Siblings have been trading blows since God first played favorites with Cain and Abel. Nearly murderous sibling fights — over possessions, privacy, pecking orders and parental love — are woven through biblical stories, folktales, fiction and family legends.
In Genesis, Joseph's jealous older brothers strip him of his coat of many colors and throw him into a pit in the wilderness. Brutal brother-on-brother violence dominates an opening section of John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," and in Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," the cowboy Ennis del Mar describes an older brother who "slugged me silly ever' day."
This casual, intimate violence can be as mild as a shoving match and as savage as an attack with a baseball bat. It is so common that it is almost invisible. Parents often ignore it as long as nobody gets killed; researchers rarely study it; and many psychotherapists consider its softer forms a normal part of growing up.
But there is growing evidence that in a minority of cases, sibling warfare becomes a form of repeated, inescapable and emotionally damaging abuse, as was the case for Mr. Smith.
In a study published last year in the journal Child Maltreatment, a group of sociologists found that 35 percent of children had been "hit or attacked" by a sibling in the previous year. The study was based on phone interviews with a representative national sample of 2,030 children or those who take care of them.
Although some of the attacks may have been fleeting and harmless, more than a third were troubling on their face.
According to a preliminary analysis of unpublished data from the study, 14 percent of the children were repeatedly attacked by a sibling; 4.55 percent were hit hard enough to sustain injuries like bruises, cuts, chipped teeth and an occasional broken bone; and 2 percent were hit by brothers or sisters wielding rocks, toys, broom handles, shovels and even knives.
Children ages 2 to 9 who were repeatedly attacked were twice as likely as others their age to show severe symptoms of trauma, anxiety and depression, like sleeplessness, crying spells, thoughts of suicide and fears of the dark, further unpublished data from the same study suggest.
"There are very serious forms of, and reactions to, sibling victimization," said David Finkelhor, a sociologist at the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, the study's lead author, who suggests it is often minimized.
"If I were to hit my wife, no one would have trouble seeing that as an assault or a criminal act," Dr. Finkelhor said. "When a child does the same thing to a sibling, the exact same act will be construed as a squabble, a fight or an altercation."
The sibling attacks in Dr. Finkelhor's study were equally frequent among children of all races and socioeconomic groups; they were most frequent on children 6 to 12, slightly more frequent on boys than on girls, and tapered off gradually as children entered adolescence.
As violent as sibling conflicts are among humans, they are seldom fatal, as they can be among birds and a smattering of other animals.
Siblicide is common among birds of prey, including tawny eagles, brown pelicans and kittiwakes. A Pacific Ocean seabird known as the blue-footed booby pecks at its siblings and pushes them out of the nest to die of starvation while the parents stand idly by. A baby black-crowned night heron in Minnesota was twice observed swallowing the entire head of a younger nestmate until it went limp and looked close to death. Embryonic sand tiger sharks eat one another while they're still in the womb.
Piglets are born with a special set of temporary "needle teeth" to attack their littermates in the struggle for the mother's prodigal frontal teats; the runts kicked back to the hind teat sometimes starve on its thin milk.
On the Serengeti Plain of Tanzania, spotted hyena pups, who are usually born in pairs, bite and shake each other almost from the moment they leave the womb. When the mother's milk is thin, the struggles often end with the death of one pup from wounds or malnutrition — especially, curiously enough, if the pups are the same sex.
Baby animals, researchers theorize, fight mainly to establish dominance and to compete for scarce food. Human children, on the other hand, fight not only over who got the bigger bowl of ice cream but also over who decides what game to play, who controls the remote, who is supposed to do the dishes, who started it and who is loved most.
Few experts agree on how extensive sibling abuse is, or where sibling conflict ends and abuse begins. It is rarely studied: only two major national studies, a handful of academic papers and a few specialized books have looked at it in the last quarter-century. And it is as easy to over-dramatize as it is to underestimate.
In 1980, when the sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire published "Behind Closed Doors," a groundbreaking national study of family violence, he concluded that the sibling relationship was the most violent of human bonds. Judged strictly by counting blows, he was right: Dr. Straus and his colleagues found that 74 percent of a representative sample of children had pushed or shoved a sibling within the year and 42 percent had kicked, bitten or punched a brother or sister. (Only 3 percent of parents had attacked a child that violently, and only 3 percent of husbands had physically attacked their wives.)
John V. Caffaro, a clinical psychologist and family therapist in private practice in the San Diego suburb Del Mar, defines sibling abuse as a pattern of repeated violence and intimidation.
In an interview, Dr. Caffaro, a co-author of "Sibling Abuse Trauma," said abuse was most often determined by a combination of disengaged upbringing by parents, testosterone and family demographics. It occurs most often in large families composed entirely of closely spaced boys, and least frequently among pairs of sisters, he said.
"A kid can hit a sibling once and it can look pretty bad, but that's not what we consider abuse," he said. "We're looking for a repeated pattern and when that happens, somebody — a parent — has got to be out to lunch."
Abuse occurs most frequently, he said, when a parent is emotionally absent as a result of divorce, long working hours, extensive business travel, alcoholism, preoccupation with his or her own problems or other factors. "One or both parents aren't really around much to do their jobs. It's almost a given," Dr. Caffaro said, adding that "peripheral" fathers are particularly problematic.
"Things are chaotic, boundaries are blurred, and supervision is minimal," he said, noting that those families do not always look chaotic from the outside.
"Sometimes the father is just basically extensively out of town for business and Mom is not a good limit-setter," he said.
In other cases, he added, parents escalate conflicts by playing favorites, ignoring obvious victimization, intervening only to shut the kids up or blaming older children without understanding how younger children helped provoke them.
Dr. Caffaro said that in his experience sibling violence could rarely be attributed simply to an extraordinarily aggressive or psychotic child.
In nearly 15 years of working with more than a hundred families and adult survivors of sibling abuse, he said he could remember only a handful of such cases, one involving a girl repeatedly beaten up by a brother with schizophrenia. Although some children have poor impulse control, he said, violence only becomes repeated abuse when parents fail to nip it in the bud.
Several adults, contacted through a classified advertisement posted online on Craigslist and through a Web site for survivors of sibling abuse, said that their parents had ignored their siblings' intimidation.
"My parents tended to lessen the significance of the abuse, telling me that my brother loved me, really, and that he really was a nice person," wrote Kasun J., 21, an Australian university student, in a posting on the Web site he started under the pen name Mandragora.
Kasun J., who did not want to be further identified for fear of family repercussions, said in an interview that he still kept his distance from an older brother who once threw a clock and a set of nail clippers at his head.
Daniel Smith said that his parents rarely intervened when he and his brother fought, figuring that "boys will be boys."
When he was in sixth grade, he said, a school counselor, concerned about a violent short story he had written, asked him about possible abuse at home, and he felt relieved and hopeful. But as soon as he told her that it was his brother, not his parents, who was hitting him, the counselor dropped the subject.
"I remember thinking that she was sort of a fraud," Mr. Smith said.
Other people interviewed said they were still haunted by memories of older brothers — and an occasional sister — who dumped them out of bassinets, hit them with mop handles, sat on their chests until they feared suffocation, punched them in the mouth or stabbed them in the hands with a nutpick or compass point.
Several said they were second-born children, and they theorized that their abusive siblings had resented being displaced. None wanted to be further identified out of concerns about family privacy.
Many people said the effects of the early abuse had lingered into adulthood. Mr. Smith, for instance, said that he still fights a tendency to avoid confrontations, especially with aggressive people who remind him of his brother. Another man, an academic in his 50's who did not want to be further identified out of privacy concerns, ascribed what he called his "constant wariness" to his physical intimidation in childhood by an older sister.
"I have a high need for solitude when I work," said the professor, who added that the unwelcome shoving and wrestling started when he was a toddler and was one of the defining influences of his early emotional life.
"I'm attentive to noise," he said. "If somebody's around, a lot of my brain immediately turns to: Who is it? What's up? Are they going to bother me or sabotage me in some way?"
Several people said that the abuse continued until they reached early adolescence and became strong enough to defend themselves. In Mr. Smith's family, however, the fights became even more violent when he reached his late teens, because he took up tae kwon do, began lifting weights and eventually struck back.
One afternoon in the family kitchen when he was 19, in the course of a routine argument, his brother half-heartedly slapped him. This time, for the first time, it was Daniel who got his brother in a crushing headlock, and Daniel who pressed a forearm against his brother's nose until it bled.
Knowing he could hold the position forever, Mr. Smith let his brother up. When Sean tried to restart the fighting, Mr. Smith, much to his surprise, burst into long, jagged sobs.
"I remember feeling like I should have been triumphant and I did feel some of that, but I also felt scared and confused," he said. "It was a rite of passage for me. I'd accomplished something and become my own person."
The brothers never fought again, never spoke about the violence and were not close for most of their lives. Sean Smith went on to a difficult adult life, and had only recently freed himself from addiction to alcohol and methamphetamines when he died three years ago, Daniel Smith said.
Only then, he said, did he realize the unspoken depth and complexity of their connection. When asked whether he had forgiven his brother, Mr. Smith hesitated.
"Once he died, I realized that we had a pretty strong bond that I didn't understand or even knew existed," he said. "I can tell you I outcried everybody else at the funeral."
On an decidedly non-kosher, non-halal soup kitchen in Paris
Poor and Muslim? Jewish? Soup Kitchen Is Not for You.
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, Feb. 27 — More than 200 political demonstrators defied a police ban here on Thursday, scurrying across Boulevard St.-Germain and under the sycamore trees of Place Maubert to engage in their forbidden action: eating "pig soup" in public.
With steaming bowls of the fragrant broth soon passing through the crowd, Odile Bonnivard, a short-haired secretary turned far-right firebrand, climbed atop a dark sedan with a megaphone in hand and led the crowd in a raucous chant: "We are all pig eaters! We are all pig eaters!"
Identity soup, as the broth has come to be called, is one of the stranger manifestations of a growing grass-roots backlash against the multiculturalism that has spread through Europe over the past 20 years. People are increasingly challenging the care taken in Nazi-chastened Europe, and in France in particular, to avoid the sort of racial or religious insults that led to widespread protests in the Muslim world this month after wide publication of cartoons considered offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.
The movement began in the winter of 2003 when Ms. Bonnivard, a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the Identity Bloc, began serving hot soup to the homeless. At first, she said, the group used pork simply because it was an inexpensive traditional ingredient for hearty French soup. But after the political significance of serving pork dawned on them and others, it quickly became the focus of their work.
Made with smoked bacon, pigs' ears, pigs' feet and pigs' tails together with assorted vegetables and sausages, the soup is meant to make a political statement: "Help our own before others."
The "others," Ms. Bonnivard explained, are non-European immigrants who she and her colleagues on the far right say are sopping up scarce resources that ought to be used for descendants of the Continent's original inhabitants. In other words, the soup is meant to exclude those who do not eat pork — for the most part, Muslims and Jews.
"Other communities don't hesitate to help their own, so why can't we?" she asked, noting that Europe's Islamic charities serve halal food to disadvantaged Muslims and that its Jewish charities operate kosher soup kitchens.
Fair enough, one might argue, but this is France, where there is little tolerance for anything that challenges the republic's egalitarian ideals.
The authorities initially left the pork-soup kitchen alone, shutting it down only once to avoid an altercation with a group of indignant French leftists. Then came the riots that swept France in October and November last year, waking the government to the deep alienation felt by Muslim youth. As winter closed in and other pork-soup kitchens run by similar-minded groups popped up in Strasbourg and Nice — and in Brussels, Antwerp and Charleroi in Belgium — authorities worried that they might be witnessing the start of a dangerous racist-tinged trend.
In December, Ms. Bonnivard said, a van of plainclothes police chased her soup-bearing car through the streets, and several busloads of officers arrived to stop her group from setting up at their usual spot near the Montparnasse train station, citing "the discriminatory nature of the soup."
She and her fellow soup servers filed an appeal. A Paris police spokesman said the appeal was pending and would be decided "on the basis of the current regulations, in particular concerning risks to public order and incitement to racial hatred."
They have been playing cat and mouse with the authorities since then.
Ms. Bonnivard talks glowingly of the camaraderie engendered by her group's gatherings, whose motive, she said, is to defend European culture and identity. "Our freedom in France is being threatened," she said. "If we prefer European civilization and Christian culture, that's our choice."
Even newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe are more welcome than Muslims from North Africa, she said, a sentiment shared by some of the diners.
"At least here there are people who are of the same mind as me," said a woman named Hélène, 61, who is not homeless but comes for soup because she has little money left for food after paying her rent. "The French, and the Europeans in general, roll over for foreigners, and particularly Islam."
This being France, most soup kitchens provide the downtrodden with a complete French dinner, including cheese and dessert. Ms. Bonnivard's group even throws in a glass of red wine with every meal.
"The only condition required for dining with us: eat pork," reads the group's Web site, which bears the image of a wanted poster for a cartoon pig in a pot framed by the words, "Wanted, Cooked or Raw, Public Disturbance No. 1."
The police initially granted permission for the "European solidarity feast" that Ms. Bonnivard's and the other right-wing soup kitchens planned last Thursday. But the authorities called late Wednesday evening to say the permission had been revoked. Officers appeared at Ms. Bonnivard's apartment at 6 a.m. Thursday to deliver a written notice prohibiting the pork-eating rally.
By evening, four police vans filled with anti-riot police officers were waiting at the group's designated meeting point outside a conservative Roman Catholic church while Ms. Bonnivard and her associates huddled in a nearby cafe, plotting diversionary tactics so they could serve their soup before the police could intervene.
"They're more afraid of us than any march by Islamists or Jews," Ms. Bonnivard's husband, Roger, declared as people slurped soup around him. (In the end, despite the official ban, the police did not intervene.)
Bruno Gollnisch, the silver-haired No. 2 in the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, mingled in the crowd, calling the "persecution" of the soup kitchen a "betrayal of the French identity." Others handed out slices of oily sausage as flags bearing the French fleur-de-lis fluttered overhead. There wasn't a police officer in sight.
"We're not yet living in a land of Islam," Ms. Bonnivard bellowed from atop the sedan.
On NYC's private preschool insanity.
In Baby Boomlet, Preschool Derby Is the Fiercest Yet
By SUSAN SAULNY
The fierce competition for private preschool in New York City has been propelled to such a frenzy this year by the increased numbers of children vying for scarce slots that it could be mistaken for a kiddie version of "The Apprentice."
Take the case of the Rabbani twins, who live on the Upper West Side. Their father, Usman Rabbani, graduated from Yale 10 years ago, has a master's degree from Harvard and works for a major drug company in Manhattan. Despite his accomplishments, Mr. Rabbani was stumped when he sat down to compose a short essay a couple of months ago.
His assignment? To profile his two toddlers. Of his 18-month-old son Humza he eventually wrote, "He knows that birds like to sit on rooftops when they are not on the ground, that cats and dogs like to be petted, and that the blue racquetballs in the can belong in the racquetball court upstairs."
About Humza's twin, Raza, he wrote, "He is happy to point out all his body parts when asked."
With those words, Mr. Rabbani conquered parental writer's block and entered this year's version of the altered universe of private preschool admissions. After years of decline, the number of children under 5 in Manhattan, where the most competitive programs are located, increased by 26 percent between 2000 and 2004, according to census estimates. Yet the number of slots has not kept apace.
"These are the kids who are 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old now, trying to get into preschool and kindergarten," said Amanda Uhry, the owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, a consulting firm for parents. "And it's a nightmare."
This is the moment of maximum anxiety for parents, many of whom have applied to so-called safety preschools, just hoping their children will be accepted somewhere. And the hot pursuit of slots has continued despite tuition that can run over $10,000 a year for 3-year-olds. Acceptance letters were sent out last Wednesday for private kindergarten programs, to be followed next week by the telltale thick or thin envelopes from the preschools.
"We're feeling it," said Ellen Bell, an admissions official at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite private institution. "It's a real problem for us to deal with the number of applicants and deal with them properly the way we want to, to be fair with every family. These numbers are just becoming overwhelming."
"I see a greater angst in the parent, and that troubles me, and my heart goes out to them," she added. "We're sending out more news that people don't want to get."
Part of the problem is that the number of twins and triplets born to women in New York City has increased, according to city Health Department statistics.
In 1995, there were 3,707 twin births in all the boroughs; in 2003, there were 4,153; and in 2004, there were 4,655. Triplet births have also risen, from 60 in 1995, to 299 in 2004. Because preschools strive for gender and age balance in generally small classes — and also, some parents suspect, as many potential parental donors as possible — it is harder to get multiple slots in one class.
"I tell families that they may increase, hopefully double or triple, their options, by telling schools they are willing to separate their children," said Emily Glickman, whose firm, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, helps parents win admission to private schools.
"Unfortunately we are in a very cutthroat climate right now, where the schools have the power," Ms. Glickman added.
New York City has about half the capacity it needs for its youngest students, public and private, said Betty Holcomb, the policy director of Child Care Inc., an agency in Chelsea that provides referral services for early child care.
"Even if you're rich, you're not guaranteed a place in a preschool," Ms. Holcomb said.
So this year, the application essay, which parents might once have dashed off in a few sentences, has become a reason for more hand wringing.
"What do you say about someone who just popped out?" Mr. Rabbani asked. "You're just getting to know them yourself."
In a sign of how overwrought the process has become, production is in progress on a pilot for a cable television reality series, "Manhattan Mom," about the daily travails of a New York woman. A producer said the series would include at least one episode focusing on the mother's struggles to get her 5-year-old into a top private kindergarten.
But none of the 25 or so private schools the producers called will allow the producers to film any part of the process.
"They don't want publicity," said Rachel Tung, one of the producers.
Few schools were interested in talking about the application process to a reporter, either; nearly a dozen did not return calls for comment. But many parents poured out their frustration.
The preschool essays are just part of the problem, they say. Time-consuming interviews, observed play sessions, rising tuition costs and application fees, preferences shown to siblings and families who have connections to the school, and the increasing difficulty of gaining admission for twins and triplets, parents say, are making the process more stressful for the entire family.
"I didn't get a real sense of competition like this until I was doing my college applications, and even that seemed easier," said Mr. Rabbani, who went to high school in a small Canadian town near Buffalo.
Lori Malloy, who lives on the Upper West Side, watched friends try to get their children into preschool last year, and she remembered thinking, "I'm not going to get stressed out like the rest of these ladies." But when Ms. Malloy, a federal prosecutor, applied for her twins, a boy and a girl, she asked her husband to write the application essay.
"I was so nervous," she said, "and I'm someone who took the LSAT, who's written for the federal judiciary and in law review." The family applied to four schools.
"There's not a week that goes by that I don't regret that I didn't apply to three or four more," Ms. Malloy said.
Consultants are reaping benefit from the competition. Victoria Goldman, a consultant and an author of guides to Manhattan private schools, said, "This year, I've gotten more calls for nursery school than kindergarten."
In writing the essay, parents can turn to the seminars that focus on "idea starters for application essays." Some good words to use in describing your child? Enthusiastic, creative, inquisitive, sensitive, consultants say.
Ms. Uhry, the consultant, said it was almost impossible to overstate the importance of the essay.
"The first way of separating the wheat from the chaff is to get rid of those essays in which the parents couldn't be bothered enough to write a decent essay or take this whole process seriously," she said. "It is your calling card. It is your entree."
Still, no one can say for sure how much the essay matters. Some consultants think it is more important to have a strong contact or family friend already in the school of choice.
Mr. Rabbani's advice? "You have to get creative in describing your child."
Hence, his son Humza, in his essay, is "a soft-hearted jock." And Humza's brother Raza is "a thinker and a mischievous lover."
Perhaps Mr. Rabbani knows what he's talking about: Humza and Raza got into their parents' first choice of preschool two weeks ago. They were notified before most other parents because they applied through an early decision program.
Beyond Rivalry, a Hidden World of Sibling Violence
By KATY BUTLER
From infancy until he reached the threshold of manhood, the beatings Daniel W. Smith received at his older brother's hands were qualitatively different from routine sibling rivalry. Rarely did he and his brother just shove each other in the back of the family car over who was crowding whom, or wrestle over a toy firetruck.
Instead, Mr. Smith said in an interview, his brother, Sean, would grip him in a headlock or stranglehold and punch him repeatedly.
"Fighting back just made it worse, so I'd just take it and wait for it to be over," said Mr. Smith, who was 18 months younger than his brother. "What was I going to do? Where was I going to go? I was 10 years old."
To speak only of helplessness and intimidation, however, is to oversimplify a complex bond. "We played kickball with neighborhood kids, and we'd go off exploring in the woods together as if he were any other friend," said Mr. Smith, who is now 34 and a writing instructor at San Francisco State University. (Sean died of a heart attack three years ago.)
"But there was always tension," he said, "because at any moment things could go sour."
Siblings have been trading blows since God first played favorites with Cain and Abel. Nearly murderous sibling fights — over possessions, privacy, pecking orders and parental love — are woven through biblical stories, folktales, fiction and family legends.
In Genesis, Joseph's jealous older brothers strip him of his coat of many colors and throw him into a pit in the wilderness. Brutal brother-on-brother violence dominates an opening section of John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," and in Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," the cowboy Ennis del Mar describes an older brother who "slugged me silly ever' day."
This casual, intimate violence can be as mild as a shoving match and as savage as an attack with a baseball bat. It is so common that it is almost invisible. Parents often ignore it as long as nobody gets killed; researchers rarely study it; and many psychotherapists consider its softer forms a normal part of growing up.
But there is growing evidence that in a minority of cases, sibling warfare becomes a form of repeated, inescapable and emotionally damaging abuse, as was the case for Mr. Smith.
In a study published last year in the journal Child Maltreatment, a group of sociologists found that 35 percent of children had been "hit or attacked" by a sibling in the previous year. The study was based on phone interviews with a representative national sample of 2,030 children or those who take care of them.
Although some of the attacks may have been fleeting and harmless, more than a third were troubling on their face.
According to a preliminary analysis of unpublished data from the study, 14 percent of the children were repeatedly attacked by a sibling; 4.55 percent were hit hard enough to sustain injuries like bruises, cuts, chipped teeth and an occasional broken bone; and 2 percent were hit by brothers or sisters wielding rocks, toys, broom handles, shovels and even knives.
Children ages 2 to 9 who were repeatedly attacked were twice as likely as others their age to show severe symptoms of trauma, anxiety and depression, like sleeplessness, crying spells, thoughts of suicide and fears of the dark, further unpublished data from the same study suggest.
"There are very serious forms of, and reactions to, sibling victimization," said David Finkelhor, a sociologist at the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, the study's lead author, who suggests it is often minimized.
"If I were to hit my wife, no one would have trouble seeing that as an assault or a criminal act," Dr. Finkelhor said. "When a child does the same thing to a sibling, the exact same act will be construed as a squabble, a fight or an altercation."
The sibling attacks in Dr. Finkelhor's study were equally frequent among children of all races and socioeconomic groups; they were most frequent on children 6 to 12, slightly more frequent on boys than on girls, and tapered off gradually as children entered adolescence.
As violent as sibling conflicts are among humans, they are seldom fatal, as they can be among birds and a smattering of other animals.
Siblicide is common among birds of prey, including tawny eagles, brown pelicans and kittiwakes. A Pacific Ocean seabird known as the blue-footed booby pecks at its siblings and pushes them out of the nest to die of starvation while the parents stand idly by. A baby black-crowned night heron in Minnesota was twice observed swallowing the entire head of a younger nestmate until it went limp and looked close to death. Embryonic sand tiger sharks eat one another while they're still in the womb.
Piglets are born with a special set of temporary "needle teeth" to attack their littermates in the struggle for the mother's prodigal frontal teats; the runts kicked back to the hind teat sometimes starve on its thin milk.
On the Serengeti Plain of Tanzania, spotted hyena pups, who are usually born in pairs, bite and shake each other almost from the moment they leave the womb. When the mother's milk is thin, the struggles often end with the death of one pup from wounds or malnutrition — especially, curiously enough, if the pups are the same sex.
Baby animals, researchers theorize, fight mainly to establish dominance and to compete for scarce food. Human children, on the other hand, fight not only over who got the bigger bowl of ice cream but also over who decides what game to play, who controls the remote, who is supposed to do the dishes, who started it and who is loved most.
Few experts agree on how extensive sibling abuse is, or where sibling conflict ends and abuse begins. It is rarely studied: only two major national studies, a handful of academic papers and a few specialized books have looked at it in the last quarter-century. And it is as easy to over-dramatize as it is to underestimate.
In 1980, when the sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire published "Behind Closed Doors," a groundbreaking national study of family violence, he concluded that the sibling relationship was the most violent of human bonds. Judged strictly by counting blows, he was right: Dr. Straus and his colleagues found that 74 percent of a representative sample of children had pushed or shoved a sibling within the year and 42 percent had kicked, bitten or punched a brother or sister. (Only 3 percent of parents had attacked a child that violently, and only 3 percent of husbands had physically attacked their wives.)
John V. Caffaro, a clinical psychologist and family therapist in private practice in the San Diego suburb Del Mar, defines sibling abuse as a pattern of repeated violence and intimidation.
In an interview, Dr. Caffaro, a co-author of "Sibling Abuse Trauma," said abuse was most often determined by a combination of disengaged upbringing by parents, testosterone and family demographics. It occurs most often in large families composed entirely of closely spaced boys, and least frequently among pairs of sisters, he said.
"A kid can hit a sibling once and it can look pretty bad, but that's not what we consider abuse," he said. "We're looking for a repeated pattern and when that happens, somebody — a parent — has got to be out to lunch."
Abuse occurs most frequently, he said, when a parent is emotionally absent as a result of divorce, long working hours, extensive business travel, alcoholism, preoccupation with his or her own problems or other factors. "One or both parents aren't really around much to do their jobs. It's almost a given," Dr. Caffaro said, adding that "peripheral" fathers are particularly problematic.
"Things are chaotic, boundaries are blurred, and supervision is minimal," he said, noting that those families do not always look chaotic from the outside.
"Sometimes the father is just basically extensively out of town for business and Mom is not a good limit-setter," he said.
In other cases, he added, parents escalate conflicts by playing favorites, ignoring obvious victimization, intervening only to shut the kids up or blaming older children without understanding how younger children helped provoke them.
Dr. Caffaro said that in his experience sibling violence could rarely be attributed simply to an extraordinarily aggressive or psychotic child.
In nearly 15 years of working with more than a hundred families and adult survivors of sibling abuse, he said he could remember only a handful of such cases, one involving a girl repeatedly beaten up by a brother with schizophrenia. Although some children have poor impulse control, he said, violence only becomes repeated abuse when parents fail to nip it in the bud.
Several adults, contacted through a classified advertisement posted online on Craigslist and through a Web site for survivors of sibling abuse, said that their parents had ignored their siblings' intimidation.
"My parents tended to lessen the significance of the abuse, telling me that my brother loved me, really, and that he really was a nice person," wrote Kasun J., 21, an Australian university student, in a posting on the Web site he started under the pen name Mandragora.
Kasun J., who did not want to be further identified for fear of family repercussions, said in an interview that he still kept his distance from an older brother who once threw a clock and a set of nail clippers at his head.
Daniel Smith said that his parents rarely intervened when he and his brother fought, figuring that "boys will be boys."
When he was in sixth grade, he said, a school counselor, concerned about a violent short story he had written, asked him about possible abuse at home, and he felt relieved and hopeful. But as soon as he told her that it was his brother, not his parents, who was hitting him, the counselor dropped the subject.
"I remember thinking that she was sort of a fraud," Mr. Smith said.
Other people interviewed said they were still haunted by memories of older brothers — and an occasional sister — who dumped them out of bassinets, hit them with mop handles, sat on their chests until they feared suffocation, punched them in the mouth or stabbed them in the hands with a nutpick or compass point.
Several said they were second-born children, and they theorized that their abusive siblings had resented being displaced. None wanted to be further identified out of concerns about family privacy.
Many people said the effects of the early abuse had lingered into adulthood. Mr. Smith, for instance, said that he still fights a tendency to avoid confrontations, especially with aggressive people who remind him of his brother. Another man, an academic in his 50's who did not want to be further identified out of privacy concerns, ascribed what he called his "constant wariness" to his physical intimidation in childhood by an older sister.
"I have a high need for solitude when I work," said the professor, who added that the unwelcome shoving and wrestling started when he was a toddler and was one of the defining influences of his early emotional life.
"I'm attentive to noise," he said. "If somebody's around, a lot of my brain immediately turns to: Who is it? What's up? Are they going to bother me or sabotage me in some way?"
Several people said that the abuse continued until they reached early adolescence and became strong enough to defend themselves. In Mr. Smith's family, however, the fights became even more violent when he reached his late teens, because he took up tae kwon do, began lifting weights and eventually struck back.
One afternoon in the family kitchen when he was 19, in the course of a routine argument, his brother half-heartedly slapped him. This time, for the first time, it was Daniel who got his brother in a crushing headlock, and Daniel who pressed a forearm against his brother's nose until it bled.
Knowing he could hold the position forever, Mr. Smith let his brother up. When Sean tried to restart the fighting, Mr. Smith, much to his surprise, burst into long, jagged sobs.
"I remember feeling like I should have been triumphant and I did feel some of that, but I also felt scared and confused," he said. "It was a rite of passage for me. I'd accomplished something and become my own person."
The brothers never fought again, never spoke about the violence and were not close for most of their lives. Sean Smith went on to a difficult adult life, and had only recently freed himself from addiction to alcohol and methamphetamines when he died three years ago, Daniel Smith said.
Only then, he said, did he realize the unspoken depth and complexity of their connection. When asked whether he had forgiven his brother, Mr. Smith hesitated.
"Once he died, I realized that we had a pretty strong bond that I didn't understand or even knew existed," he said. "I can tell you I outcried everybody else at the funeral."
On an decidedly non-kosher, non-halal soup kitchen in Paris
Poor and Muslim? Jewish? Soup Kitchen Is Not for You.
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, Feb. 27 — More than 200 political demonstrators defied a police ban here on Thursday, scurrying across Boulevard St.-Germain and under the sycamore trees of Place Maubert to engage in their forbidden action: eating "pig soup" in public.
With steaming bowls of the fragrant broth soon passing through the crowd, Odile Bonnivard, a short-haired secretary turned far-right firebrand, climbed atop a dark sedan with a megaphone in hand and led the crowd in a raucous chant: "We are all pig eaters! We are all pig eaters!"
Identity soup, as the broth has come to be called, is one of the stranger manifestations of a growing grass-roots backlash against the multiculturalism that has spread through Europe over the past 20 years. People are increasingly challenging the care taken in Nazi-chastened Europe, and in France in particular, to avoid the sort of racial or religious insults that led to widespread protests in the Muslim world this month after wide publication of cartoons considered offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.
The movement began in the winter of 2003 when Ms. Bonnivard, a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the Identity Bloc, began serving hot soup to the homeless. At first, she said, the group used pork simply because it was an inexpensive traditional ingredient for hearty French soup. But after the political significance of serving pork dawned on them and others, it quickly became the focus of their work.
Made with smoked bacon, pigs' ears, pigs' feet and pigs' tails together with assorted vegetables and sausages, the soup is meant to make a political statement: "Help our own before others."
The "others," Ms. Bonnivard explained, are non-European immigrants who she and her colleagues on the far right say are sopping up scarce resources that ought to be used for descendants of the Continent's original inhabitants. In other words, the soup is meant to exclude those who do not eat pork — for the most part, Muslims and Jews.
"Other communities don't hesitate to help their own, so why can't we?" she asked, noting that Europe's Islamic charities serve halal food to disadvantaged Muslims and that its Jewish charities operate kosher soup kitchens.
Fair enough, one might argue, but this is France, where there is little tolerance for anything that challenges the republic's egalitarian ideals.
The authorities initially left the pork-soup kitchen alone, shutting it down only once to avoid an altercation with a group of indignant French leftists. Then came the riots that swept France in October and November last year, waking the government to the deep alienation felt by Muslim youth. As winter closed in and other pork-soup kitchens run by similar-minded groups popped up in Strasbourg and Nice — and in Brussels, Antwerp and Charleroi in Belgium — authorities worried that they might be witnessing the start of a dangerous racist-tinged trend.
In December, Ms. Bonnivard said, a van of plainclothes police chased her soup-bearing car through the streets, and several busloads of officers arrived to stop her group from setting up at their usual spot near the Montparnasse train station, citing "the discriminatory nature of the soup."
She and her fellow soup servers filed an appeal. A Paris police spokesman said the appeal was pending and would be decided "on the basis of the current regulations, in particular concerning risks to public order and incitement to racial hatred."
They have been playing cat and mouse with the authorities since then.
Ms. Bonnivard talks glowingly of the camaraderie engendered by her group's gatherings, whose motive, she said, is to defend European culture and identity. "Our freedom in France is being threatened," she said. "If we prefer European civilization and Christian culture, that's our choice."
Even newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe are more welcome than Muslims from North Africa, she said, a sentiment shared by some of the diners.
"At least here there are people who are of the same mind as me," said a woman named Hélène, 61, who is not homeless but comes for soup because she has little money left for food after paying her rent. "The French, and the Europeans in general, roll over for foreigners, and particularly Islam."
This being France, most soup kitchens provide the downtrodden with a complete French dinner, including cheese and dessert. Ms. Bonnivard's group even throws in a glass of red wine with every meal.
"The only condition required for dining with us: eat pork," reads the group's Web site, which bears the image of a wanted poster for a cartoon pig in a pot framed by the words, "Wanted, Cooked or Raw, Public Disturbance No. 1."
The police initially granted permission for the "European solidarity feast" that Ms. Bonnivard's and the other right-wing soup kitchens planned last Thursday. But the authorities called late Wednesday evening to say the permission had been revoked. Officers appeared at Ms. Bonnivard's apartment at 6 a.m. Thursday to deliver a written notice prohibiting the pork-eating rally.
By evening, four police vans filled with anti-riot police officers were waiting at the group's designated meeting point outside a conservative Roman Catholic church while Ms. Bonnivard and her associates huddled in a nearby cafe, plotting diversionary tactics so they could serve their soup before the police could intervene.
"They're more afraid of us than any march by Islamists or Jews," Ms. Bonnivard's husband, Roger, declared as people slurped soup around him. (In the end, despite the official ban, the police did not intervene.)
Bruno Gollnisch, the silver-haired No. 2 in the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, mingled in the crowd, calling the "persecution" of the soup kitchen a "betrayal of the French identity." Others handed out slices of oily sausage as flags bearing the French fleur-de-lis fluttered overhead. There wasn't a police officer in sight.
"We're not yet living in a land of Islam," Ms. Bonnivard bellowed from atop the sedan.
On NYC's private preschool insanity.
In Baby Boomlet, Preschool Derby Is the Fiercest Yet
By SUSAN SAULNY
The fierce competition for private preschool in New York City has been propelled to such a frenzy this year by the increased numbers of children vying for scarce slots that it could be mistaken for a kiddie version of "The Apprentice."
Take the case of the Rabbani twins, who live on the Upper West Side. Their father, Usman Rabbani, graduated from Yale 10 years ago, has a master's degree from Harvard and works for a major drug company in Manhattan. Despite his accomplishments, Mr. Rabbani was stumped when he sat down to compose a short essay a couple of months ago.
His assignment? To profile his two toddlers. Of his 18-month-old son Humza he eventually wrote, "He knows that birds like to sit on rooftops when they are not on the ground, that cats and dogs like to be petted, and that the blue racquetballs in the can belong in the racquetball court upstairs."
About Humza's twin, Raza, he wrote, "He is happy to point out all his body parts when asked."
With those words, Mr. Rabbani conquered parental writer's block and entered this year's version of the altered universe of private preschool admissions. After years of decline, the number of children under 5 in Manhattan, where the most competitive programs are located, increased by 26 percent between 2000 and 2004, according to census estimates. Yet the number of slots has not kept apace.
"These are the kids who are 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old now, trying to get into preschool and kindergarten," said Amanda Uhry, the owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, a consulting firm for parents. "And it's a nightmare."
This is the moment of maximum anxiety for parents, many of whom have applied to so-called safety preschools, just hoping their children will be accepted somewhere. And the hot pursuit of slots has continued despite tuition that can run over $10,000 a year for 3-year-olds. Acceptance letters were sent out last Wednesday for private kindergarten programs, to be followed next week by the telltale thick or thin envelopes from the preschools.
"We're feeling it," said Ellen Bell, an admissions official at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite private institution. "It's a real problem for us to deal with the number of applicants and deal with them properly the way we want to, to be fair with every family. These numbers are just becoming overwhelming."
"I see a greater angst in the parent, and that troubles me, and my heart goes out to them," she added. "We're sending out more news that people don't want to get."
Part of the problem is that the number of twins and triplets born to women in New York City has increased, according to city Health Department statistics.
In 1995, there were 3,707 twin births in all the boroughs; in 2003, there were 4,153; and in 2004, there were 4,655. Triplet births have also risen, from 60 in 1995, to 299 in 2004. Because preschools strive for gender and age balance in generally small classes — and also, some parents suspect, as many potential parental donors as possible — it is harder to get multiple slots in one class.
"I tell families that they may increase, hopefully double or triple, their options, by telling schools they are willing to separate their children," said Emily Glickman, whose firm, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, helps parents win admission to private schools.
"Unfortunately we are in a very cutthroat climate right now, where the schools have the power," Ms. Glickman added.
New York City has about half the capacity it needs for its youngest students, public and private, said Betty Holcomb, the policy director of Child Care Inc., an agency in Chelsea that provides referral services for early child care.
"Even if you're rich, you're not guaranteed a place in a preschool," Ms. Holcomb said.
So this year, the application essay, which parents might once have dashed off in a few sentences, has become a reason for more hand wringing.
"What do you say about someone who just popped out?" Mr. Rabbani asked. "You're just getting to know them yourself."
In a sign of how overwrought the process has become, production is in progress on a pilot for a cable television reality series, "Manhattan Mom," about the daily travails of a New York woman. A producer said the series would include at least one episode focusing on the mother's struggles to get her 5-year-old into a top private kindergarten.
But none of the 25 or so private schools the producers called will allow the producers to film any part of the process.
"They don't want publicity," said Rachel Tung, one of the producers.
Few schools were interested in talking about the application process to a reporter, either; nearly a dozen did not return calls for comment. But many parents poured out their frustration.
The preschool essays are just part of the problem, they say. Time-consuming interviews, observed play sessions, rising tuition costs and application fees, preferences shown to siblings and families who have connections to the school, and the increasing difficulty of gaining admission for twins and triplets, parents say, are making the process more stressful for the entire family.
"I didn't get a real sense of competition like this until I was doing my college applications, and even that seemed easier," said Mr. Rabbani, who went to high school in a small Canadian town near Buffalo.
Lori Malloy, who lives on the Upper West Side, watched friends try to get their children into preschool last year, and she remembered thinking, "I'm not going to get stressed out like the rest of these ladies." But when Ms. Malloy, a federal prosecutor, applied for her twins, a boy and a girl, she asked her husband to write the application essay.
"I was so nervous," she said, "and I'm someone who took the LSAT, who's written for the federal judiciary and in law review." The family applied to four schools.
"There's not a week that goes by that I don't regret that I didn't apply to three or four more," Ms. Malloy said.
Consultants are reaping benefit from the competition. Victoria Goldman, a consultant and an author of guides to Manhattan private schools, said, "This year, I've gotten more calls for nursery school than kindergarten."
In writing the essay, parents can turn to the seminars that focus on "idea starters for application essays." Some good words to use in describing your child? Enthusiastic, creative, inquisitive, sensitive, consultants say.
Ms. Uhry, the consultant, said it was almost impossible to overstate the importance of the essay.
"The first way of separating the wheat from the chaff is to get rid of those essays in which the parents couldn't be bothered enough to write a decent essay or take this whole process seriously," she said. "It is your calling card. It is your entree."
Still, no one can say for sure how much the essay matters. Some consultants think it is more important to have a strong contact or family friend already in the school of choice.
Mr. Rabbani's advice? "You have to get creative in describing your child."
Hence, his son Humza, in his essay, is "a soft-hearted jock." And Humza's brother Raza is "a thinker and a mischievous lover."
Perhaps Mr. Rabbani knows what he's talking about: Humza and Raza got into their parents' first choice of preschool two weeks ago. They were notified before most other parents because they applied through an early decision program.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 03:27 am (UTC)The people who primarily abused me no longer exist. They grew up and I don't hold the adults they became accountable for the children who they were, because I know that they have changed. But that doesn't make it okay. And I intend to protect any children of mine from such things. I can't protect them from every random incident, but I can probably protect them from regular, daily abuse.
Every so often I marvel at how amazing it is that I and all of my siblings lived to adulthood. I hadn't really expected that, and it came close a few times. But we all made it.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:22 am (UTC)How bout they stay home with the kids like they're supposed to, and do some teaching of their own?
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:42 am (UTC)We don't have a public preschool program, or even a good public pre-k program. We don't have the resources to help have one parent stay home with the kids until they enter kindergarden or the first grade.
What people are supposed to do? Hell, I agree. I think kids that young need to be with their families if possible. Pity it's generally *not* in our society.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 05:07 am (UTC)And even if they had full day pre-k, instead of the 2.5 hours offered here, that's STILL not enough if you work a 9-5 job! You still need to pay for child care before and after school.
I saw, where I am moving, that they have childcare (for a small fee) at a few schools both before AND after school. So working is easier. Child care is more affordable out there, too. Sure, pay is less than there but your expenses are a LOT less, at least it is friendlier not just for single parent families or two income families, but one where a parent stays home. There are more OPTIONS and that is how it should be.
And yeah even before we hit financial hardship, we wanted one of us to stay home. It made more SENSE.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 03:27 am (UTC)The people who primarily abused me no longer exist. They grew up and I don't hold the adults they became accountable for the children who they were, because I know that they have changed. But that doesn't make it okay. And I intend to protect any children of mine from such things. I can't protect them from every random incident, but I can probably protect them from regular, daily abuse.
Every so often I marvel at how amazing it is that I and all of my siblings lived to adulthood. I hadn't really expected that, and it came close a few times. But we all made it.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:22 am (UTC)How bout they stay home with the kids like they're supposed to, and do some teaching of their own?
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:42 am (UTC)We don't have a public preschool program, or even a good public pre-k program. We don't have the resources to help have one parent stay home with the kids until they enter kindergarden or the first grade.
What people are supposed to do? Hell, I agree. I think kids that young need to be with their families if possible. Pity it's generally *not* in our society.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 05:07 am (UTC)And even if they had full day pre-k, instead of the 2.5 hours offered here, that's STILL not enough if you work a 9-5 job! You still need to pay for child care before and after school.
I saw, where I am moving, that they have childcare (for a small fee) at a few schools both before AND after school. So working is easier. Child care is more affordable out there, too. Sure, pay is less than there but your expenses are a LOT less, at least it is friendlier not just for single parent families or two income families, but one where a parent stays home. There are more OPTIONS and that is how it should be.
And yeah even before we hit financial hardship, we wanted one of us to stay home. It made more SENSE.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-06 07:16 am (UTC)