The new Christianity Today came to the library today, and I had to stop and read the cover story, by Wess Stafford of the Christian charity Compassion International.

Stafford tells a harrowing story of years of abuse in an African boarding school for the children of missionaries (if you’re not aware, the standard practice for most Western missionaries in “the bush” has traditionally been to send the children to boarding schools for months of the year). The people who ran the school, as he remembers them, were people who’d wanted to be “real” missionaries, but didn’t make the grade for one reason or another, and were dumped into the “unimportant” work of loco parentis. Stafford’s analysis was that they were embittered, and took their frustrations out on the kids.

I have a deep, personal interest in this subject, as I’ve told you before. Reading such accounts, I flash back painfully to that chronic, corrosive feeling of living in a situation where all the power is in the hands of the grown-ups, and you know they’re doing wrong (not just “You’re the meanest mom in the world!” but a genuine recognition of profound injustice—kids know the difference), along with complete impotence to protect yourself or get help. Stafford tells how one experience of public humiliation actually helped him to find his inner strength, and to devote his life to protecting children.

In one way, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could treat children that way.

And yet, I do know how. Those of us who’ve been on the receiving end have learned from observation, and from the contagious effects of anger. Let me meditate a bit on how a person becomes a monster.

1.First of all, it takes a strong dose of self-absorption. Being obsessed with your own pains and fears and disappointments leaves you with less emotional capital to spend on others. “How dare that child cry! Does he think I don’t have anything better to do than take care of his petty needs?” Any amount of self-delusion may follow—“I’m opposed to the abuse of children, but of course my particular case is special.”

2.Secondly, it takes practice. Once you start abusing, it gets easier, because you grow angry at the victims. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that Nazis tortured people today because they hated them, but tomorrow would hate them because they tortured them. I recall as a boy, helping my dad with a chore related to raising young pigs. It involved putting rings in their noses, and… something else which I won’t call by its name. I’m a tenderhearted sort by nature, and felt badly at first, but before long I was handling those pigs pretty roughly, because they MADE ME MAD with their squealing and trying to get away.

3.Finally, it helps a lot to have group support. One assumes that at least the majority of the adults in the school Stafford describes were sincere Christians. It seems doubtful that they were all sadists by nature, or pedophiles. But if you have enough assertive people who agree on certain practices, and enough passive people who allow themselves to be bullied into silence (or who just pretend not to know) you’ve got the ingredients for an extremely sick situation.

It’s a matter for shame and repentance that such things could happen in a Christian institution, or on a smaller scale in a Christian family. Such matters call for individual repentance and accountability, and for institutional oversight. People who work with children should be carefully scrutinized, and should welcome such scrutiny. Passive people (and I speak as one of them) should not be placed in authority, and should push themselves to learn godly courage if they have no choice about it. All should die to themselves, and remember (or be stiffly reminded) that we are not called to meet our own needs, in our own way.