The Child He Abused

Child abuse or child maltreatment is physical, sexual, or psychological maltreatment or neglect .. Child abuse can result in immediate adverse physical effects but it is also strongly associated with developmental problems and with many.
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• More on this topic for:
• How can abused children grow up to be abusive parents?
• The Family Dynamics of Severe Child Abuse | Psychology Today
• Child Abuse

She talks about the forms of child abuse and what to do if you suspect a child you know is being abused in any manner. It's hard to imagine someone intentionally hurting a child, yet nearly a million children are abused every year just in the United States alone. Child abuse is today's topic on The Scope. Keep your kids healthy and happy. You are now entering the Healthy Kid Zone with Dr. Cindy Gellner on The Scope. Child abuse happens when a parent or other adult causes serious physical or emotional harm to a child. Child abuse can take the forms of physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and abandonment, or emotional or psychological abuse.

The most serious cases of child abuse can end in death. Those who survive may suffer emotional scars that can linger long after the physical bruises have healed. Kids who are abused are more likely to have problems building and maintaining relationships throughout their lives and they are also more likely to have low self-esteem, depression, and thoughts of suicide.

When people think of child abuse their first thought is of physical abuse, such as striking, kicking, or shaking a child. But physical abuse can also include holding a child underwater, tying a child up, intentionally burning a child with scalding hot water or other objects like cigarettes, using an object to beat a child, starving a child, or failing to provide a child with food intentionally. Abusive head trauma or Shaken Baby Syndrome is a specific form of child abuse and is the leading cause of death in child abuse cases in the United States.

Most incidents last just a few seconds but that's enough time to cause brain damage and kill a baby. Sexual abuse happens when a child is raped or forced to commit a sexual act. It's also any sort of sexual contact with a child that is meant to sexually arouse the abuser.

So in addition to having sex with a child or even just inappropriate touching with a child, sexual abuse includes making a child pose or perform for pornographic pictures or videos, showing a child pornographic material, forcing a child to undress, not just normally like changing your clothes, but forcing a child to undress in front of you for gratification purposes, and flashing a child or showing one's privates.

Neglect is any action or inaction on the part of a caregiver that causes a child physical or emotional harm such as withholding food, withholding warmth in cold weather, or not providing proper housing. Basically anything that interferes with a child's growth and development constitutes neglect. This also includes failing to provide medical care when a child is injured or critically sick, locking a child in a closet or a room, and placing them in a dangerous situation that could lead to physical injury or death.

Abandonment is a type of neglect. Emotional abuse or psychological abuse is a pattern of behavior that has negative effects on a child's emotional development and sense of self-worth. Ignoring a child or withholding love, support, or guidance is considered emotional abuse. Just like threatening, terrorizing, belittling, or constantly criticizing a child.

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Child abuse due to substance abuse problems include allowing a child to drink alcohol or take illegal drugs, manufacturing, ingesting, or distributing illegal drugs in the presence of a child, and in some states, exposing a fetus to illegal drugs or other substances while pregnant. It would be easier if all child abusers followed a pattern and were easy to recognize, but the truth is that child abusers come from all walks of life. It's also sometimes difficult to tell the difference between ordinary scrapes and scratches of childhood and a physical sign of child abuse.

Pediatricians often can tell the difference but not always. Some ways that kids who are being abused might act include sad or angry, they may act withdrawn, fearful, have low self-esteem, or engage in self-harm, and many have persistent nightmares. Those who are abused usually have trouble developing and maintaining relationships.

They are often unable to love or trust others, especially adults with whom they can be afraid of. Keep your opinions to yourself. No one has a right to their own facts. Sorry to agree with you, but nothing you wrote is inconsistent with what I wrote. Also, the fact that some people define child abuse down in no way contradicts the fact that the vast majority of cases of real and severe child abuse go unreported.

In fact, defining it down takes away from the credibility of the real victims. I also have a diagnosed disorder. Not a disorder typically characterized as "severe", but it still causes disordered behaviors and thought patterns. If you're a licensed therapist, why are you going on the internet and implying that having a disorder is inherently bad or embarrassing, a label preserved only for the severely disabled or dysfunctional. Not what you said, sure, but heavily implied. If I found out that my therapist made a comment like this, I would be embarrassed about every conversation I'd ever had with her, every session where I opened up to her about horrible and sensitive things.

How can abused children grow up to be abusive parents?

I'd drop her in a second. Because a comment like that, written so casually, makes me feel like I should be embarrassed. That I am too dysfunctional. That I am fundamentally wrong in simply being. How horrible is that? I have another disorder. For this one, disorder is right in the name. There's no hiding from it. My behaviors and thoughts are disordered. And it makes everything so much harder than it has to be. I don't need to feel insecure just for having the disorder, on top of everything else. I am insecure enough.

I deeply hope none of your patients have heard you make comments such as this, or felt your condescension. I can't imagine how long it would take for me to go back to therapy after something like that. And I deeply hope you can realize that your words and your attitude matter. Even small comments like the one you made, they allude to an entire facet of your personality that looks down on all of us who are disordered.

Your disorder is less severe than mine, and less severe than many people with autism. It's still a disorder, and you are no better or worse for it. Welcome to the club. There are a few things I responded to in reading this article. Although the points were interesting, I believe abuse to your own child it is more complicated and less forgiving then the idea that one tries to normalize their experience with their own parents abuse by becoming abusive. Unless one has experienced the reality of abuse themselves, it becomes conjecture to believe the motivation of abuse is something simple to define by the unmet needs of childhood.

In the analysis there is no where the idea that this parent is enjoying the power they have at the control by pain and humiliation to their victim. They feel better when they act these things out and the rush of power is addictive. They dehumanize the child's experience and can not empathize because they have lost touch with their own emotions from abuse or because sociopathy can be hereditary or they just don't care to do the work to deal with their inner demons.

Much easier to excuse themselves with their own bull sht. There are people that use vulnerable others knowing they can get away with criminal behavior to act out their frustrations and need to feel like a God in their own universe to give themselves an ego lift. It makes them feel powerful, it makes them feel good to cause pain. They like doing it. They are a long way from trying to get their own parents love or any thing resembling love. The word means nothing to them.

The concept has been replaced by ultimate power and a warped idea of what respect means. You are a long way from understanding what these people are and what they do to children. When someone has really looked into the face of evil, they know this person does not want to ever understand what they do or change. They enjoy inflicting pain. The idea that someone who does this could be understood because of their childhood creates an excuse for behavior. They know what they are doing is wrong because they hide it and the child knows their life or others they love is in danger to expose it.

Having been a child victim myself, taking responsibility for my actions and future, and seeking qualified help in untangling the mess that was left for me to clean up is the only way out. One will either repeat to others or self by impressions left on the psyche, continue self destructive behaviors, have dissociative emotional states,and basically believe those harrowing, sick voices and behaviors spent on them by their parents as somehow legitimate because of who they were told they were. It is a decision to live a life that requires doing that work to freedom that is necessary.

Everyday is your own responsibility to not victimize yourself or anyone else.

One needs to relearn life, how to grow one self, how to find good people and experiences to validate who they are. One needs to learn to disengage from those destructive and toxic people they called parents. They need to see them as evil because that is what they are. It isn't a religious statement because it is difficult to believe in a loving God who is personal.

But that does not mean there isn't the Holy. You need to see the truth of their behavior as evil in order to understand the good that is out there to becoming your reality through effort and decision and with help. I make no excuses for cruelty for others and especially to children. Anyone knows it is wrong, it's a lie to believe otherwise. Everyone is responsible for their actions concerning cruelty. I don't care what biologists or psychologists explain.

We are more then that. It's just power in a twisted mind that is too lazy to control their impulses toward grandiosity by lording over the helpless. Call it what it is and stop finding excuses for this attempt to annihilate the innocent because it makes these monsters feel better type of behavior. Do everyone who has suffered under this repulsive type of human being and name it.

Preferably with an expletive. It will make all of us feel better. Actually most people in the field believe the way you do, not the way I do. And I do not blame you for believing what you do; I'm sure I would feel exactly the same way if I were in your shoes. I have found, however, that your characterization of child abusing parents as sadistic, power hungry madfolk who enjoy inflicting pain is exactly what they want you to think of them.

Some big time abusers even brag about this. And a couple of slight but important corrections to your characterization of what I said in the piece.

• Child abuse - Wikipedia.
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• If You Suspect A Child Is Being Harmed | RAINN?

I do not think the abusers are just trying to "normalize their experience. They are willing to sacrifice both themselves and their children to protect their parents and maintain what family systems therapists refer to as family homeostasis.

They do this as a manifestation of kin selection https: Also, I am in no way looking to excuse their behavior. Excusing it is in fact counterproductive, because everyone would know it was a big lie, including the abusers. To assume otherwise would be to assume that they have the intelligence of a cabbage. There is a big difference between understanding behavior and condoning it. When a patient in therapy starts to chip away at the abusive parents' denial or attacks and confronts them about what happened, I have found that employing your characterization of the parents leads to some logical contradictions and bizarre paradoxes which make no sense.

There's always more to the story than you might think. I agree with you that cutting abusive parents off is better than continuing to put up with their crap, but there is a third although very difficult option that stands a much better chance of preventing dysfunctional family patterns from being transferred to the next generation.

I wake up every day and hate my parents and family and wish they would just die. I am 46 and have a lot of problems but I never give up trying to be a better person. I changed my last name, started recovery, and hope one day I can not hate so much. I hate Gd but he still loves me. This has helped me.

1. The Watcher by the Threshold (Canongate Classics).
2. Where the Home is: The MacAllister Brothers Book Two.
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Although I know nothing about your circumstances,I would like to respectfully respond to your letter. When you are waking up every day hating your parents and family, it seems that you are living with them in your head. It is as if, in a part of you, they are still in control and you are still their child with no power to get away from what hurts. This can happen whether or not you live near them. May I suggest working with a compassionate and experienced therapist to help you navigate out of these thoughts and replacing them with new, validating and forward moving thoughts.

It is the learning to change your thinking and perspective that changes your life. I have learned this process from a wonderful psychologist myself, it is worth the work. When you learn how to place your thinking process into your own hands and begin parenting yourself and being responsible for your happiness and growth, the world opens in wonderful ways. You learn that you can control how you think in approaching your day in productive ways. Finding a person who know how to teach you this in ways you can work with is possible.

One of the things that begin to happen as you do this, is the way you view your parents. You see them as separate from you with their own problems and issues. That you happened to be born to these people who did not know how to parent in healthy ways for whatever reason. There are many reasons why people act in unacceptable or cruel ways. My guess is that most do not plan on acting out their cruelty, but it is who they are when something is triggered in them.

You happened to be the one in the vulnerable position as a child receiving their issues on you. They were once responsible for you but now you are responsible for what you do, who you decide to be and what you focus on in your own life. And even how you learn to think. I think it is good to learn how to place that anger and hate into something constructive that helps you and perhaps others.

The anger and hate is a healthy sign that something is wrong. You are warning yourself that you need to do something for yourself to change this thinking that affects your life everyday. It can be done, as this thinking and your feelings can be acknowledged but understood in a different way,making them less intrusive for shorter periods of time until they dissipate.

They can be replaced with validating and progressive thoughts that you discover as you heal. You build your own life making room for growth. You begin to focus outward. The hate becomes unnecessary. You see with a different perspective and that changes everything in your life. I am personally a work in progress, but learning this opens everything that is good out there to become a part of. Please take the time to find a good therapist that you feel comfortable with to work with you.

Doing this alone is difficult if not impossible, I would imagine. Learning to respect your life is important. I hope I helped in some way, and wish you the best of luck in your worthwhile journey. I am a survivor of sexual abuse by my partner and so is my daughter by the same man. He was my husband and her step father Many years later I am in a new relationship with a kind and patient man who I love dearly. His son was abused by his mother she at one point tried to kill him by giving him pills and it left emotional scars as well. I struggle with my partners family at times as they feel that the sons abuse is more traumatic than the abuse my daughter experienced.

I disagree as I feel either one is dispicable and neither should be put on a different level as in both cases the child has emotional scars that never really go away. Maybe I am wrong but that is how I feel. This is for Stephanie, who was once in a relationship with a man who sexually abused her and her daughter and is now in a relationship with a man whose ex-partner abused his son. Once I finally let go of my family--childhood physical and sexual abuse--I then had to learn how to NOT replace them with my friends and intimate partners.

Woman Accuses Her Ex Of Sexual Assault On Their 3-Year-Old Daughter – He Denies It

No boyfriends who were struggling with past family abuse but still in constant contact with their family; no friend whose father beat her but she still runs errands for him every day. I realized I needed people around me who were healthy--and part of being healthy means NOT excusing, ignoring, or avoiding the truth about people who once hurt us badly. The alcoholic is NOT supposed to go out with his drinking buddies once he stops drinking, and I feel like I'm not supposed to hang out with people who can see and complain about abusive behavior but are not doing anything to get away from it, once and for all.

I realize the road is long for all of us; I just think that we need to give ourselves lots of time to be in a place where people are actively working on their whole happiness. If my husband's family was comparing damage done by various abusers--an act which in and of itself feels immature and damaging--then he would either have to let go of the family members who do that or I would let go of him.

It really is as simple as: Be with people who are healthy. In the same way that I'm not going to jump into it with a heroin addict who still shoots up--I can understand why the addiction began, and sympathize with the difficulty of quitting, but I cannot, for my health, stay with him and feel the slippage of a life--both his and mine. Do not let his family invalidate your experiences, and in fact find some way to not ever even have to hear about their comparison-contrast analysis of the various abuses.

Sometimes letting go is the best option--you can still love him, but you have to love yourself and your daughter, and at the moment, it doesn't sound like you're around people who foster that love. Clair for your reply. I have distanced myself with his sister for that very reason. I had to stop answering the door when his sister came to visit if I was home by myself as I don't want to deal with the negativity.

I have been cordial when I need to be but I have learned not to put myself in a situation that makes me feel uncomfortable. I am thankful that my partner is supportive and understands my need for healthy relationships. He doesn't have much to do with his sister so it has been fairly easy. I guess sometimes I need outside confirmation that I am not crazy and that her behaviour is immature and unhealthy It has been 11 years since I left that situation and I am thankful everyday for the wonderful relationship I have with my daughter I am so proud of the person she has become.

Thanks for your affirmation that I am not crazy: Your brilliant article spectacularly illuminates the kind of evil grooming process that often always divides family sibling victims and survivors of child abuse. I am currently in the throws of re-reporting my multi-torrent abuse as a child without the mutual support and allegiance of my abused brother and sister, protecting the very person who who was a peadophile and, allowing him free reign to get away with what he did that spans more than 40 years.

My brother is particularly very angry with me for reporting the abuse again in a time when Police do take sexual abuse far more seriously than they did in the 20th century. It angers me that he is angry with me for what someone else did to him and unable to reason with his full denial of what I witnessed myself of his abuse; of what he told m years later and confirmed my own suspisions. How do I not be angry back at him for his conrary attitude?. Did I do the right thing here to report this to the police in an enlightened social time?.

By the way, I was 3 when this commoner peodophile put his hand up my skirt and placed into foster care by my mother for no reason the same year in When I went home in , the abuse continued until I was 15 - I was placed in a special needs school in at age 8 until I left in and back into foster care when I reported the abuse to Police at the time. I was the only sibling to report it to the Police yet they did little about it until re-reporting it in - they are still investigating the case.

That same peadophile has likely raped his handicapped sister in , my mother knew about this and he has very likely abused other children in those past 26 years I have been free from his control - it takes guts of steel to do what I have done and most very sad and angry that my brother continues to side with my step-sister who was also sexually abused as a child - by our mother as well as step-father. Unfortunately I can't give you any worthwhile psychiatric advice in this type of forum.

It can take a whole lot of hours of evaluation and psychotherapy sessions to get enough information to even do that. I recommend seeing a therapist familiar with family dynamics. Unfortunately such therapists have become harder to find. You can find a list of the type of therapists I recommend near the end of my blogpost http: In general, if you plan to use therapy to figure out a way to get past all the family denial and deal directly with them, it is probably not a good idea to go public with abuse accusations - with the exception of the situation in which children are still currently at risk and you are not in a position to personally protect them.

In that case it there is no real choice but to report it, but as you've already seen, the blowback from other family members can be a horrible experience. Had forgotten to mention that I think my brother has not broken the cycle of abuse even though I am not there in his life to make an informed decision, just that it appears most likely if he is protecting the abuser from police inquiry and fluctuating in his own parenthood support and care of his own children - one of them is 21 and full of hatred and emotional dissociation I am not able to ascertain the reasons why as a distant and non involved aunt.

I truly believe yet don't want to believe that my brother has or is abusing his own children - breaking the cycle of abuse he and I were most familiar with as children, yet difficult to know exactely due to our individual grooming and separation as children in the past. Some people are using words by that age, which seems to correlate with conscious memory. I can easily remember being breastfed, and my mom didn't do it for that long. I also know which of my memories were from before age 3. I remember more from those earliest pre-move years than I do from adolescence.

Another possibility is that Roseanne had the memories but miscalculated her age at the time.