The giants and the pygmies amongst us

This is a dog-eat-dog world, but when adults kill children even that saying proves inadequate to express the horror. It's sheer horror when four schoolboys were strangled to death in Habiganj because the adults couldn't settle their differences in a sensible manner. When a mother threw her newborn from a six-storey building in Bailey Road or some kind of a grandfather killed a fifth-grader in Keraniganj, that horror worked like gunshot. The impact depended on the range between the gun and its target. 

So when children are killed by their loved ones, it has the impact of a shotgun fired from a close range. It devastates us most because the cruelty is more disturbing than the crime itself. But it's still disturbing even when there is distance in the relationship between the killers and their victims. The whole country recoiled in contempt when strangers in Sylhet beat up a minor to death while he was tied to a post, or when an employer in Khulna forced a compressor tube into the rectum of a boy and busted his organs like overblown balloons. 

Thus one thing constant in the varying nature of killing children is how ruthlessly a life is nipped in the bud. Be it infanticide, prolicide or paedocide, that nipping is shocking no matter who does it and how it's done. It's abortion done in mothers' laps instead of their wombs when promising lives are extinguished like sentences erased before written.

Not that it doesn't happen in other societies. And it's also not something that isn't supposed to happen. If revolution devours its own children, so does evolution. In fact, it must be a design of nature that animals from time to time shall kill their young. Mother bears, felines, canids, primates, and many species of rodents from rats to prairie dogs have been eating their young. Insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds also have been implicated in killing, and sometimes devouring, the young of their own kind.

Nature throws even more bizarre patterns of this mindless crime. A male damselfish selects and guards a small territory in a coral reef before a female damselfish visits him and lays eggs. It's the responsibility of the male to fertilise, guard and protect those eggs. But the father fish chooses to eat any eggs that are too small or not growing fast enough. Studies of one species, the Cortez damselfish, have found that about 20 percent of eggs get eaten. In another species of damselfish, the Scissortail Sergeant, the female fish lays "fake eggs" to see if the father will eat them, before trusting him with real eggs.

Humans aren't fish except for their choice to swim with or against the current. It's not clear exactly at what point of that swimming human minds snap, meaning the loss of sanity under some kind of provocation. But children are always victims for no fault of their own. The boys in Habiganj died as vehicles of vengeance sought by a rickshaw puller to settle his score with enemies who had thrown him out of a village panchayat. The mother who threw her baby was ashamed of an unwanted pregnancy after she was raped. And, a distant grandfather was stoked by greed to kidnap a boy in the family and then took his life after the plan tanked. 

The number of children killed in Bangladesh is perhaps miniscule when weighed against the entire population. Bangladesh Shishu Adhikar Forum found in its study that a total of 968 children were tortured to death in the last three and a half years. The alarming news is that the number of child murders was 61 percent higher in 2014 than the previous year.

One doesn't have to be a psychologist to understand the sickness. When grownups don't pick on somebody their own size and instead choose children to channel their rage, the loss of adulthood is obvious. And that rage is often an outburst of wretchedness that screams inside conflicted souls constrained to undermine their own worth. Winston Churchill warned us decades ago that when the war of the giants is over, the wars of the pygmies will begin.

The children aren't safe in their homes, playgrounds, schools and neighbourhoods because the adults aren't safe in their own minds. These adults in their impaired political, social and economic conditions feel harassed and intimidated. They are paranoid and nervous, forever struggling to rise after falling in their own eyes. 

That explains why there is a sudden spate of atrocious crimes against children, who are bearing the brunt of fury and lust that drive the impulses of their adults. Fruits are never safe when the trees are endangered. Human civilisation is a delicate balance between the giants and the pygmies. When one side goes down, the other is bound to rise. 

The writer is editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. 

Email: badrul151@yahoo.com