We’re a brutal species, it seems. When I scan the newspaper and read about terrible events, not natural disasters but “man’s inhumanity to man,” I wonder why this is.

Have we evolved so little from animals whose emotions and instincts propel them into conflict and then behavior that can be characterized as “blood lust?”

Then I read about men who have achieved leadership roles, Ariel Sharon and Saddam Hussein among them, who were raised in households characterized by violent parenting and a narrow, super-masculine idea of male adulthood. Yet I know that not all people raised by aggressive parents turn into similarly destructive people.

Recently, I sat in a meeting and scanned only a handful of the faces around the table. One woman’s mother had died the previous month and that woman had spent many days dealing with her mother’s personal effects. Given that the daughter said she’d seen the mother only three times since she was 17, that must have been a grievous task.

In fact, the woman said she was deep in grief, unable to sleep, having nightmares. The daughter, by the way, is crowding 50, just to give you some perspective on three contacts since the age of 17. I didn’t ask and didn’t hear why so few contacts, but I can guess.

Another person at the table was adopted at an early age, but when he went to his native village in Southeast Alaska where his birth mother was from, where his Tlingit relatives might be, he was spurned. “Your mother was trash, and so are you.” His adoptive family had their own Scandinavian Protestant ideas about proper child rearing, and those practices were no more affirming.

A conversation a few days later with a woman I barely know devolved, or perhaps I should say “evolved,” quickly into a story about her large family of siblings being taken away from her Cherokee parents and divided up into various foster households – families may have been too positive a word, given her description of conditions. Only after reconnecting with her Cherokee extended family did this woman begin to feel more self-acceptance.

Another woman, in her late thirties, was raised by a mother who was a bit of a philanderer, in that one affair resulted in a child whom her father unknowingly raised as his own … or perhaps he was merely trying to keep the peace and preserve the vestiges of his marriage. A second affair and second unasked for offspring resulted in divorce. Several marriages, several divorces, several kids ensued.

Then I can tell you quickly about my mother because the story so easily reflects the others: four marriages, four divorces, and three daughters, each with a different father.

I, too, left home at 17 and became emancipated economically and emotionally, if not legally. There was love, but there was also emotional and physical abuse. There was judgment and condemnation for the smallest infractions – but that’s not an unusual experience for a person, adult or child, living with an alcoholic.

My mother died just before my 25th birthday. The unfinished business between us was one of the factors in my deep, uncontrollable sadness during the year that followed, as well as the sheer tragedy of a beautiful and bright woman dying the ugly death that cirrhosis of the liver and uremic poisoning can provide. The greatest loss of all was the loss of hope: When the parent dies, the child has to give up on ever having an affirming relationship with that parent.

Sometimes I wonder if these kinds of stories have been par for the course throughout human history. I’ve read that the idea of childhood being some kind of protected state and parenthood being a responsibility to bring out the best in the child – that this is a very modern concept, that children have always been a commodity in service to the parents, whether to work the fields or factories, to act as servants in the household, or to care for the parents as they age. Perhaps these little individual tragedies are an inevitable part of being human, for most humans.

But, if that’s the case, then is it any wonder we have whole societies with brutal approaches to crime and punishment, that engage in fear-driven programs of international domination, or that we humans find it so difficult to have enough in the material world to offset the deep emptiness that comes from being brutalized at an early age.

Victoria Stoppiello is a free lance writer from Ilwaco, where she hopes all families have the emotional and material resources to provide caring homes for their children.