One of my avocations is archeology.  I’ve never been on an archeological dig (yet), but I like reading about them and their discoveries, and the stories they suggest about the people who lived once upon a time.

This post is going to be about two articles I came across today.  The first one I came across, about Roman gladiators, was also posted today, and the second one was posted two days ago, but I found it after having read the gladiator story.

In Britain, archeologists have discovered what appears to be a Roman gladiator graveyard.  The discovery consists of skeletons, most of which were decapitated and the bodies apparently buried with respect.  Indications that the skeletons belonged to gladiators include almost all being male, their having been taller than average height for the time, and one arm having been stronger than the other, as happens when someone routinely wields weapons such as swords and clubs.  One of the skeletons also bears bite marks from a large carnivore, like a lion or bear.

The article offers a little education about gladiators, including that sometimes they started training for the profession in their teens.

Such a profession to choose.

That got me to thinking about gladiatorial events and the people who went to be “entertained” by them.  Yes, we now have the likes of UFC and WWE, and yes, I do wonder about those who find that entertaining, but at least it’s meant to stop short of someone dying.  It’s not that the minds of people who are entertained by violence and gore are unfathomable–having practiced psychology I know they can be fathomed.  But for all the understanding of the factors that lead people in that direction, there’s still and always the question of why they choose that direction.  There are enough other people coming from similar circumstances who made a different choice–enough to confirm that other choices are possible.

So there I am, wondering about the hearts and minds of people who, once upon a time, went to watch other people fight and die a violent death, for entertainment.  And then I came upon the second story, about children in a residential treatment facility in Texas.

It’s a story that reveals hearts and minds more depraved, I think, than those who went to gladiatorial contests.  In the latter case, they were watching trained, adult, professional warriors, and the contests were further sanctioned by the state and deemed a normal part of the culture.

The story involving the Texas children, however, is very different.

A joint report by the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune, revealed hundreds of violations in residential treatment facilities serving the most vulnerable Texas children.  The incident among the hundreds that gets the most attention in the news report is when staff forced seven developmentally delayed girls to fight each other while the staff cheered and laughed.

Whatever the developmental debilitation of any of those girls, they come nowhere close to matching the moral debilitation of the staff involved.

There is one thing about the report itself that bothers me, though, and it bothers me a lot.  That’s the fact that findings of sexual abuse by staff received not much more than passing mention.   Granted, there are many, and many types, of abuse covered in the article, including punching, choking, and illegal drugs, in addition to forced fighting and sexual abuse.  And the story also cites an earlier forced fighting atrocity at an adult care facility, which has become infamous as “the Corpus Christi Fight Club,” and one of its aims is to question why there wasn’t the same level of outrage over what happened at the facility for children. But to give the forced fighting center stage while short-shrifting the seriousness of sexual abuse of children can send a dangerous message, especially to perpetrators of child sexual abuse, who are always looking for validation that what they are doing “isn’t so bad.”

All of it, all of it, is so bad.

And WWE and UFC ratings just keep going up.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen