While discussing with someone recently about the world of parenting, they referred to a time when they were younger and their mom prevented them from doing something that they really wanted to do. She went on to say how grateful she was to her mom for actually doing that to her and how she had seen the effects play out in her life. As she said that, a thought came to my head: one about the times when my friends and sometimes I would make the same comment, praising either our parents or teachers for directing us, but in our case the correction was mixed with abuse, so my question is: were our parents or authoritative figures right for using abuse to correct us?

Before we continue, I want to state that I do understand that there is a need for correction given to a child. My issue isn't against correction, but the abuse involved when correcting a child.

To help us with this question, I would like to introduce a psychological term: The self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy "is an expectation or belief that can influence your behaviors, thus causing the belief to come true." Basically, this is a situation where an individual has a particular belief about an event that changes his behavior in a way that makes the initial belief true. For most of us, at one point in our lives, we have gone through a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it felt real. Now, I want to attempt to expand this term from the individual to society. An expansion we will call "society's fulfilling prophecy".

A society-fulfilling prophecy will have the same properties as a self-fulfilling prophecy; the only contrast will be that one deals with the self and the other deals with society as a collective of selves. Our new term, society fulfilling prophecy, would be defined as "an expectation or belief held by members of a society that influences their behaviors in a way that causes the belief to come true.".

Every society has beliefs that are quite popular, accepted, and integrated within the group; such beliefs are usually repeated without question. Anyone who experiences abuse in an isolated place, where abuse is also common amongst the people in that area, might not see the abuse as negative, especially if the area deems the abuse as positive rather than negative. Africa has become such a place that a number of us grow up in households where abuse is normalized in some way or another, and because the belief is that the abuse is needed to direct us right, we will have the tendency to see possible reasons why such abuse is helpful, but as we did that, we also ignored how it has negatively imparted on our lives, an ignorance that makes us blind to what actually damages us emotionally.

There's a reason why Africans who travel out as kids and come back later can't comprehend the normalization of abuse that is experienced; their exposure to a non-abusive environment allows them to see abuse in its full light.

We need to start to understand that abuse hurts more than it helps anyone; we need to understand that we have normalized not only abuse but the damaging effects on us, effects that aren't healthy for us or those around us. We have to make a conscious effort to release and heal from our hurt, so we don't pass it on again.