Essay On Psychological Maltreatment

While the scars survivors endure from their physical or sexual abuse are long-lasting, most agree that the psychological abuse that comes along with the rest of their maltreatment is much more difficult to cope with and overcome.
While emotional abuse of children is prevalent in society today, it remains difficult to define, and identify. Emotional and psychological abuse has been stated to include verbal or emotional assault, destroying child’s property, purposeful allowance of self-destructive behaviors, threats of harm, and inadequate affection. Similarly, researchers have come to the conclusion that psychological maltreatment results from a pattern of abuse that includes rejecting, isolating, terrorizing, ignoring, or corrupting the child.
While emotional and psychological abuse often overlap, O’Hagan states that emotional abuse stems from a repetitive, negative response to the “child’s expression of emotion and its accompanying expressive behavior,” and that psychological abuse, while …show more content…
Since protective services want solid evidence that abuse is taking place, many children are left to endure the abuse from their caregivers due to the lack of visibility of scars. Protective services look for three pieces of evidence when assessing a situation: the behavior is identifiable, there are current and visible harm to the child, and there’s a link between the parental behavior and the harm exhibited by the child. Since many of the practices used to raise children and ‘better’ them are so deeply engrained in the many cultures of the world, it becomes increasing difficult to determine when these actions are abusive and have had a direct impact on the development of the child. Factors such as divorce of parents, poverty, unemployment, the child being seen as ‘difficult’, and prejudice from family can often set the stage for abuse to