When Innocence Was Beaten Out of Children

Safe was never guaranteed where I grew up.
Safe was conditional.

I grew up watching children get punished simply for being different—long before anyone around me had even heard words like autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, or neurodivergence. I didn’t learn these concepts from textbooks.
I learned them from the screams, the beatings, and the silences inside the homes around me.

None of my children are autistic.
Yet when they were toddlers, a close relative would often guide me to “slap them” whenever they:

• flapped their hands
• ran in circles
• rocked back and forth
• covered their ears during loud sounds
• cried from sensory overload
• wrote with their left hand
• hit developmental milestones slightly later than other children

Back then, I didn’t understand why these harmless behaviours triggered panic in adults. Now I see it clearly: they were repeating a generational script where neurodivergent traits weren’t seen as signs — but as sins.

Left-handedness was “bad.”
Delayed speech was “defiance.”
Sensory overload was “stubbornness.”
Stimming was “misbehaviour.”

Children weren’t understood.
They were “corrected” through force.

So for generations, children were beaten for rocking, zoning out, covering their ears, speaking late — beaten for being different. Parents were even shamed if they didn’t hit their children “enough.” The belief was simple: hit the “difference” out before adulthood.

But neurodivergent children carried their traits anyway — and carried the trauma on top of it.

I saw and heard so many of these stories.
In villages, in poor homes, in uneducated families.
Some were beaten into silence.
Some were tied to cots.
Some were mocked for behaviours they never chose.

One memory never left me.

An adult woman with schizophrenia kept gently reminding her father he had promised to take her to a carnival. She wasn’t misbehaving. She wasn’t aggressive. She was asking like an innocent child: “Chalo na, time ho gaya hai…”
Her father, irritated, removed his shoe and beat her mercilessly in front of everyone.

I was just a child when I watched her being beaten to pulp for nothing.

And it cemented something in me:
Difference is punished when ignorance is worshipped.

I lived this too.
I spent a large part of my childhood escaping into vivid inner worlds — a survival response. Dissociative daydreaming. Zoning out. Losing track of instructions. Paying for it with shame, beatings, and ridicule.

Trauma research shows that several CPTSD features — dissociation, hypervigilance, chronic daydreaming, emotional flooding, and sensory overwhelm — can closely resemble neurodivergent traits. I already know I meet the clinical criteria for CPTSD, so the overlap is familiar to me both professionally and personally.

From everything I witnessed and everything I lived, one truth became clear:

Children were punished not because they were wrong —
but because adults didn’t know how to understand them.

Awareness protects.
Silence destroys.