Civilisation is Measured by How it Treats its Most Vulnerable

Dedicated to the children – past, present, and future – whose voices were silenced, whose pain was hidden, and whose memory demands that we finally see the pattern.

I. The Bones That Speak

In July 2026, archaeologists announced a discovery from ancient Mesopotamia: the remains of an infant, dating back approximately 5,500 years, showing clear signs of repeated blunt-force trauma to the skull and ribs. The injuries occurred over time – weeks before death. Someone, likely a caregiver, inflicted harm on this child, repeatedly, and then killed them.

This is one of the oldest known physical evidence of child abuse in the archaeological record. It is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

The question we must ask ourselves is not merely what happened, but why. And the answer, when we trace it through history, is deeply uncomfortable: hierarchical power structures create the conditions in which abuse flourishes.

II. The Dark Pattern Through History

The pattern is consistent: when power is concentrated and accountability is weak, the vulnerable suffer. We see it throughout history:

• Ancient Rome, where infanticide and exposure were common practices, and where the paterfamilias held absolute power of life and death over his children.
• Medieval Europe, where children were beaten, sold, and exploited, where the Church’s authority shielded abusers from accountability for centuries.
• Industrial Britain, where children as young as five worked in mines and factories, their bodies broken for profit, their suffering invisible to those who benefited.

Modern Institutions, where abuse is hidden behind walls of authority. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012–2017) documented the “huge extent of child sexual abuse” within religious and state institutions. The Commission’s final report contained 3,955 de-identified narratives from survivors, made 409 recommendations, and revealed how institutional hierarchies enabled and concealed abuse.

As the research shows, “perpetrators leverage their authority to instill fear and silence victims, while gaps in legal systems and patriarchal cultural values reinforce impunity.” Institutions are “built around hierarchies and role authority structures” that create a power imbalance between adults and children. Studies have associated “the role of perpetrator status, hierarchy and authority embedded in opportunity and organisational structures” with “the capacity to inflict abuse with impunity.”

III. The Manufacture of Killers: A Predictable Process

Violence towards others is not genetic. It is a function of learning. The abused child becomes the violent adult. The child exposed to hatred learns to hate. The child raised in exclusivity learns to see others as less than human.

This is not unique to any one culture or religion. It is a function of the plastic brain, shaped by its environment – and by those who control that environment.

The Nazi Regime

The Nazi experience demonstrated “the human capacity to shape child and adolescent development toward a pervasive culture of hatred and violence.” The Hitler Youth was designed to “inculcate the German youth with Nazi values, worldview, and racial beliefs.” Through these organisations, the regime planned to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, “turning instruction into indoctrination, and children into Nazis.”

Children were taught to see the “Jewish” other as inferior, and “this humiliation and abuse served to warn what could happen to those who did not belong to the community and were excluded”.

The Yugoslav Wars (1991–1995)

During the breakup of Yugoslavia, “children received extraordinary media attention as quintessential victims who played a vital role in nation-building processes”. “State-sponsored nationalist propaganda” had a “detrimental effect on ethnic minorities” and “stole” their childhood. Children were weaponised as a propaganda tool, “aimed towards the nationalistic goals of all the sides involved.”

Sparta and the Manufacture of Warriors

Ancient Sparta provides one of the earliest examples of systematic childhood indoctrination for violence. From age seven, boys were removed from their families and subjected to the agoge – a brutal state-sponsored education system designed to produce soldiers. Children were deliberately underfed, beaten, and encouraged to steal and kill. The krypteia, a secret police force composed of young Spartans, was tasked with murdering helots (enslaved populations) as a rite of passage.

The result was a society that produced killers – but at what cost? The very children who were brutalised became the brutalising adults, perpetuating a cycle of violence that ultimately consumed Sparta itself.

IV. Israel: A Contemporary Case Study

The pattern repeats in the modern State of Israel, where a political and religious structure that mimics a theocracy shapes young minds in settings of exclusivity and superiority.

Domestic Violence

The statistics are staggering. According to Israeli government data, approximately 200,000 women and about 500,000 children are within the cycle of violence. One in every ten couples in Israel, and hundreds of thousands of children, “experience daily trauma.”

In 2025, domestic violence cases in Israel surged. There was a 38% increase in cases of violence against children. Every nine days in 2025, a woman was murdered in Israel. Thirty-nine women were murdered in 2025-21 of them by a partner or family member.

The Israeli Justice Ministry reported a 44% rise in domestic violence cases. Half of all Israelis know at least one woman who experiences violence from her husband. Up to 45% of women in Israel will be victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives.

Violence Against Children

According to the UN, in 2025, 9,465 grave violations were committed against children in the occupied Palestinian territories by Israeli forces. Globally, the UN documented 38,558 “grave violations” against children in 2025 – the highest total since monitoring began. The highest numbers of grave violations were verified in Israel and Palestine.

The UN verified that in 2025:

• 6,266 children were killed globally in conflict zones
• 14,224 children were killed or maimed
• 6,607 children were recruited into armed groups
• 8,322 children were denied access to humanitarian aid
• 4,573 children were abducted

The UN Human Rights Office stated that “Palestinian children have not been spared extraordinary levels of Israeli violence,” and that “the pattern, at a minimum, shows a dangerous scale of dehumanisation and disregard for Palestinian lives.”

Sexual Violence

In May 2026, the UN added Israel to its list of countries and organisations suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict zones. The UN verified 31 cases of sexual violence perpetrated by Israeli forces and security authorities against people from Gaza and the West Bank.

Documented violations “consisted of rape, including with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals, touching of breasts and genitals, strip and cavity searches conducted without apparent security justification, forced nudity and threats of rape.”

A UN commission found that “sexual violence and torture de facto form part of Israeli” detention policy, “characterised by widespread and systematic abuse and sexual and gender-based violence.”

Settler Violence

In 2025, Israeli settler violence in the West Bank rose by 27% compared to the previous year, with severe attacks spiking by over 50%.

Societal Dysfunction

The toll of this violence is reflected in the mental health crisis gripping Israeli society. In 2025, the Israeli military recorded 21 suicides among soldiers – the highest number in 15 years. Suicide represented 14% of all military deaths. This represents a significant increase from the previous year, where only 9 soldiers took their own lives during the same period.

V. The Mechanism: How Hierarchies Create Killers

The pattern is not accidental. It is systematic. When children are raised in settings of exclusivity – where they are taught they are superior to others, where the “other” is dehumanised, where violence is normalised – they become the killers of tomorrow.

The process operates through several mechanisms:

1. Dehumanisation of the “Other”

Children are taught that certain groups are less than human, undeserving of empathy or basic rights. This is the foundation upon which all subsequent violence is built. The Nazi indoctrination of children, the ethnic propaganda of the Yugoslav wars, and the contemporary Israeli education system that teaches children to see Palestinians as enemies all follow the same pattern.

2. Normalisation of Violence

When children are exposed to violence – whether in the home, in the media, or in state-sponsored propaganda – they come to see it as normal. The abused child learns that violence is an acceptable response to conflict. The child who witnesses domestic violence learns that relationships are built on power and control.

3. Manufactured Fear

Demagogues take charge and expose the general population to manufactured fear and hate. As the Yugoslav example shows, “war propaganda aimed towards the nationalistic goals of all the sides involved” was instrumental in creating the conditions for ethnic cleansing.

4. Elimination of Empathy

When children are taught that the “other” is not fully human, empathy is eliminated. The Nazi curriculum taught children that Jews were “inferior”. Israeli children are taught that Palestinians are “terrorists” and “enemies.” The result is the same: the capacity to commit violence without remorse.

5. The Cycle Continues

The child who is abused becomes the adult who abuses. The child who is indoctrinated becomes the adult who indoctrinates. The child who is taught to hate becomes the adult who kills. This is not destiny – it is learning. And what is learned can be unlearned. But only if we recognise the pattern.

VI. The Role of Hierarchical Structures

Hierarchical structures do not cause abuse directly – but they enable it. They create conditions where:

1. Power imbalances become normalised – When some beings have authority over others, the abuse of that authority becomes possible, and often invisible.
2. The vulnerable become expendable – In rigid hierarchies, those at the bottom are seen as lesser, their suffering not seen as a systemic failure but as an individual tragedy, or worse, as deserved.
3. Accountability dissolves – When power is concentrated, those who hold it are rarely held to account. Abuse becomes private, hidden, unchallenged.
4. Empathy is suppressed – Hierarchies often require those at the top to dehumanise those at the bottom in order to maintain their position. Empathy becomes a liability.

As research on institutional abuse demonstrates, “there’s already a power imbalance between a child and an adult, and institutions are built around hierarchies and role authority structures.” The “discourses of power” challenge “dominant understandings and explanations of child sexual abuse by exploring the role of power and status.”

VII. Conclusion: The Measure of Civilisation

The Mesopotamian infant, beaten to death 5,500 years ago. The children of Sparta, brutalised into killers. The victims of the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia, the children of Gaza and the West Bank. The pattern is the same. The mechanism is the same. The result is the same.

Civilisation is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable. By this measure, we have failed. Repeatedly. Systematically. Catastrophically.

But the pattern can be broken. It requires:

• Recognition – Seeing the pattern for what it is
• Accountability – Holding power structures responsible for the abuse they enable
• Education – Teaching empathy, not hatred; connection, not exclusivity
• Courage – The courage to name the pattern, to resist the hierarchy, to protect the vulnerable

The bones of the Mesopotamian child speak to us across 5,500 years. They ask us: Will you finally see the pattern? Will you finally break the cycle?

The answer lies not in temples, not in prayers, not in the empty rituals of power. It lies in how we treat the most vulnerable among us.

And that is a choice we make – every day, every moment, every generation.

The pattern is consistent: when power is concentrated and accountability is weak, the vulnerable suffer. The question is not whether we will see the pattern. The question is whether we will finally have the courage to break it.

References

1. Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. (2017). Final Report. Commonwealth of Australia.

2. Israeli Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. (2025). Domestic violence hotline data.

3. Israeli Ministry of Justice. (2025). Domestic violence statistics.

4. United Nations. (2025). Report of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict.

5. United Nations. (2025). Conflict-related sexual violence – Report of the Secretary-General (S/2025/389).

6. United Nations Human Rights Office. (2026). Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children.

7. Israel Police. (2025). Crime statistics.

8. IDF Suicide statistics.

9. World Health Organization. (2025). Health at a Glance: Israel.

10. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish.

11. White, M. & Terry, K. (2008). Child sexual abuse in youth-serving organisations. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse.

12. Abraham Initiatives. (2025). Arab community murder statistics.

13. ELI – Israel Association for Child Protection. (2025). Child abuse statistics.