Child Abuse is maltreatment, any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or other care giver that results in harm, potential for harm, or threat of harm to a child.  Examples of acts of commission include physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.  Examples of acts of omission included failure to provide (physical, emotional, medical/dental, or educational neglect) or failure to supervise (inadequate supervision, or exposure to violent environments).

Types of Abuse

There are four primary types of child abuse:

Physical Abuse

Sexual Abuse

Emotional Abuse

Neglect

While the first two categories get the most attention, perhaps because they involve physical violence, neglect is by far the most common form of child abuse, accounting for more than 60 percent of all cases of child maltreatment.

Child Neglect:  Types and warning signs

Neglect is a pattern of failing to provide for a child’s basic needs, to the extent that the child’s physical and/or psychological well-being is damaged or endangered.  In child neglect, the parents or care givers simply choose not to do their job.  There are three basic types of neglect.

Physical Neglect:  Failure to provide adequate food, clothing, or hygiene; reckless disregard for the child’s safety, such as inattention to hazards in the home, drunk driving with kids in the car, leaving a baby unattended, abandoning children without providing for their care or expelling children from the home without arranging for their need.

Educational Neglect:  Failure to enroll a child in school permitting or causing a child to miss too many days of school; refusal to follow up on obtaining services for a child’s special educational needs.

Emotional Neglect:  Inadequate nurturing or affection, exposure of a child to spousal abuse.  Permitting a child to drink alcohol or use recreational drug, failure to intervene when the child demonstrates antisocial behaviour.

Refusal or delay in providing necessary psychological care.  Emotional child abuse is maltreatment which results in impaired psychological growth and development; it involves words, actions, and indifference. Abusers constantly reject, ignore, belittle, dominate, and criticize the victims. This form of abuse may occur with or without physical abuse, but there is often an overlap.

Examples of emotional child abuse are verbal abuse; excessive demands on a child’s performance; penalizing a child for positive, normal behavior (smiling, mobility, exploration, vocalization, manipulation of objects); discouraging caregiver and infant attachment; penalizing a child for demonstrating signs of positive self-esteem; and penalizing a child for using interpersonal skills needed for adequate performance in school and peer groups. In addition, frequently exposing children to family violence and unwillingness or inability to provide affection or stimulation for the child in the course of daily care may also result in emotional.

Almost any adult involved in a relationship with a child is a potential perpetrator. Parents, teachers, pastors, social workers, neighbors, lawyers, or judges may all be capable of emotional maltreatment. Common characteristics of the abusing adult include blaming or belittling the child in public, describing the child negatively, always assuming the child is at fault, having unrealistic expectations of the child, openly admitting to disliking or hating the child, threatening the child with severe punishment, withdrawing comfort as a means of discipline, being emotionally cold and un supportive, suffering from alcohol and drug abuse, and possessing a violent nature.

Most emotional abuse occurs for many of the same reasons that physical abuse occurs. Parents are vulnerable to becoming involved in maltreatment if stresses in their lives build up or if they are unable to manage these stresses. They may also have diminished capacity for understanding and dealing with children (mental retardation, psychopathology, alcoholism, and drug abuse), false ideas about children’s needs, or sadistic psychosis. Also, the abuser’s goal may be to control. Nevertheless, a single factor may not lead to abuse, but in combination they can create the social and emotional pressures that lead to emotional abuse. Specific types of problems that can contribute to emotional abuse are social problems that can contribute to family stress (unemployment, poverty, isolation from relatives and friends, divorce, death, immature parents), health crises (illness of a family member, disability of a family member, drug and alcohol abuse within the family), and mental health problems (mental disability, depression).

The consequences of emotional child abuse can be serious and long-term. Many research studies conclude that psychopathologic symptoms are more likely to develop in emotionally abused children. These children may experience a lifelong pattern of depression, estrangement, anxiety, low self-esteem, inappropriate or troubled relationships, or a lack of empathy. During their childhood, victims may fail to thrive or their developmental progress may be halted. Some may also become poorly adjusted emotionally and psychologically. As teenagers, they find it difficult to trust, participate in and achieve happiness in interpersonal relationships, and resolve the complex feelings left over from their childhoods. As adults, they may have trouble recognizing and appreciating the needs and feelings of their own children and emotionally abuse them as well.

To effectively identify and confirm emotional abuse, it is necessary to observe the abuser-child interaction on varied and repeated occasions. If emotional abuse is suspected, action can be taken regardless of whether the suspected offender is within the child’s home, child care setting, or elsewhere in the community. It is the caregiver’s responsibility to report and not investigate suspicions of child abuse. It is the child protection agency’s responsibility to investigate reports of any type of abuse. A careful evaluation of those involved and the sources of stress should be completed by appropriate and skilled professionals. Usually, a team consisting of a child protection worker, a physician, a psychiatrist or psychologist, a public health nurse, a childcare staff, and a teacher will become involved.

Health care professionals and concerned individuals need to increase awareness for and education in emotional child abuse in the community and among parents. Secondly, parents and guardians need to be encouraged to develop strong attachments with their children and learn to express warmth and positive regard for them. Finally, families have to be encouraged to form relationships with support systems available to them. In addition, more research in topics related to emotional child abuse and parent-child relationships must be undertaken.

Some signs of child neglect

Clothes that are dirty, ill-fitting, ragged, are not suitable for the weather, unwashed appearance; offensive body odor Indicators of hunger: asking for or stealing food, going through trash for food, eating too fat or too much when food is provided for a group.

Apparent lack of Supervision:  Wandering alone, home alone, left in a car, colds, fevers, or rashes left untreated; infected cuts; chronic tiredness.  In schoolchildren, frequent absence or lateness; troublesome, disruptive behaviour or its opposite, withdrawal in babies, failure to thrive; failure to relate to other people or to surroundings a single occurrence of one of these indicators isn’t necessarily a sign of child neglect, but a pattern of behaviour may demonstrate a lack of care that constitutes abuse.

Physical Child abuse: Types and warning signs

Physical child abuse is an adult’s physical act of aggression directed at a child that causes injury, even if the adult didn’t intend to injure the child.  Such acts of aggression include tricking a child with the hand, first, or foot or with an object; burning the child with a hot object; shaking, pushing, or throwing a child; pinching or biting the child; pulling a child by the hair; cutting off a child’s air.  Such acts of physical aggression account for between 15 and 20 percent of documented child abuse cases each year.

Many physically abusive parents and care givers insist that their actions are simply forms of discipline, ways to make children learn to behave.  But there’s a big difference between giving a child’s arm until it breaks.  Physically abusive parents have issues of anger, excessive need for control, or immaturity that make them unable or unwilling to see their level of aggression as inappropriate.

Sometimes, the very youngest children, even babies not yet born, suffer physical abuse, because many chemicals pass easily from drugs or alcohol during pregnancy can cause serious neurological and physiological damage to the unborn child, such drugs or alcohol in breast milk.  A woman who drinks or uses drugs when she knows she’s pregnant can be charged with child abuse in many jurisdictions if her baby is born with problems because of the substance use.  Serious neurological and physiological damage to the unborn child, such as the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome; mothers can also pass on drugs or alcohol in breast milk.  A woman who drinks or uses drugs when she knows she’s pregnant can be charged with child abuse in many jurisdictions if her baby is born with problems because of the substance use.

Another form of child abuse involving babies is shaken baby syndrome, in which a frustrated caregiver shakes a baby roughly to make the baby stop crying.  The baby’s neck muscles can’t support the baby’s head yet, and the brain bounces around inside its skull, suffering damage that often leads to severe neurological problems and even death.  While the person shaking the baby may not mean to hurt him, shaking a baby in a way that can cause injury is a form of child abuse.

An odd form of physical child abuse is Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, in which a parent causes a child to become ill and rushes the child to the hospital or convinces doctors that the child is sick.  It’s a way for the parent to gain attention and sympathy, and its dangers to the child constitute child abuse.

Is Corporal punishment the same as physical abuse?

Corporal punishment, the use of physical force with the intent of inflicting bodily pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control, used to be a very common form of discipline.  Most of us know it as spanking or paddling.  And many of us were spanked as children without damage to body or psyche.  The widespread use of physical punishment, however, doesn’t make it a good idea.  Most child-care experts have come to agree that corporal punishment sends the message to children that physical force is an appropriate response to problems or opposition.  The level of force used by an angry or frustrated parent can easily get out of hand and lead to injury.  Even if it doesn’t, what a child learns from being hit as punishment is less about why conduct is right or wrong than about behaving well or hiding bad behaviour out of fear of being hit

Causes of Child Abuse

Some people think that children are only abused by strangers, but sometimes the person who has abused you is a friend of your parents or even a family member, like an uncle or auntie, or even a parent.  If you are abused, you will probably feel hurt, sad, angry, scared and sick inside.  You may even feel like it is your fault.  But it is NOT YOUR FAULT and you do not deserve to be abused.  Remember that you CAN get help by talking to someone who cares, like an adult you trust or child line.  Scared and sick inside.  You may even feel like it is your fault.  But is it NOT YOUR FAULT and you do not deserve to be abused.  Remember that you can get help by talking to someone who cares, like an adult you trust or child line.

Parental Causes

Background of emotional deprivation

Unwanted pregnancy

Colic baby

Isolation and lack of support

Patriarchal family structure

Cycle of violence (parents who were abused children themselves often end up abusing their own children

Discipline versus abuse (where parents can’t tell the difference)

Blurred boundaries (where there is no clear boundary set by the parents between child and parent.

Ecological Causes

Poverty

Overcrowding

Problems in the marriage

Abuse of substances (drugs, alcohol etc)

Child Problems

ADHD/Handicapped child

Unrealistic expectations

Latch key children (children who have to come home to an empty house)

Weak bond between mother and child

What can parent do as a solution?

Parents should try to have personal relations with their kids and humble themselves before them.

Parents should try to spend quality time with their kids

Parents should express interest in their kid’s everyday life.

Parent should monitor those whom their kids spend time with.

Passing on self-esteem to your child

There seems to be a strong correlation between our own self-esteem and the self-esteem of our children.  This point was driven home the other day when I happened to catch an episode of “Oprah” while folding laundry.

The subject of this particular show was self-esteem in children.  They interviewed mothers of three and four year old girls who were already concerned about their weight and saying things like, “I am too fat”.  Then they brought on a beautiful young woman who said that she had extremely low self-esteem.  She related how she would go home and cry and cry because she thought she was so ugly.

I was wondering how someone so beautiful could possibly think she was ugly? And why were these preschoolers already thinking about their weight? Then the moment of realization came when their mothers were brought on the show and both mothers and daughters were interviewed.

The young woman related that growing up she would often find her mother in her room sobbing.  When she would ask her mom what was wrong, her mom would say something to the effect of, “Oh I just look so hideous today”.  Things of this nature happened often with the mom always saying how fat she  (herself) was or how horrible she looked.

Well, somehow these feelings of insecurity and self-doubt were passed down from mother to daughter.  Even though the mom would try and build up her daughter by telling her how pretty she was, the daughter somehow only managed to carry on the negative messages that her mom kept telling herself every day.

This was so eye- opening to me.  All of the kids on the show ended up with low self-esteem not because their mom’s put them down, but because their moms’ continually put THEMSELVES down.  In many cases, the moms’ had grown up with low self-esteem because of situations in their own life growing up and so they purposely praised their children in the hopes of giving their children the self-esteem that they themselves never had.

But apparently the message that the parents gave about themselves talked far more loudly than the encouragement they gave to their children.  Watching this really made me think about my own life and has helped me to be more cautious of negative self-talk.

If we want tour children to have a positive self-esteem, then it is critical that we have our OWN self-esteem first.  Our children learn so much through observing and if they see happy capable parents, then they will have a lot better chance of becoming happy, capable adults as well! Something to thin about!