III. More About the Children Available for Adoption, Page 9
What is Emotional Abuse?
Almost all parents yell at their kids sometimes; abuse is more than that. Emotional abuse includes constantly being made to feel unworthy or unloved, belittled, yelled at, told you are unwanted, treated like a servant or an animal, or blamed for everything that goes wrong in the family (called scapegoating). Sometimes one child in a dysfunctional family will be singled out for this treatment while other children may be treated normally; in other families all the children are abused.
Normal parents show love and affection most of the time and normal children can deal with episodes of shouting because they know that underneath they are loved and cherished. Abused children don’t get the antidote of love. Parents who emotionally abuse their children generally have low self-worth and may abuse at least partly for the same reasons that other people are racists: to have someone lower than themselves. Normal parents don’t tell their children they hate them and wish there were dead or make them sleep on the floor in the kitchen. Normal parents make an attempt to find out who’s guilty when something is broken instead of always automatically blaming the same child. Normal parents don’t constantly tell Jack that he’s stupid and ugly and won’t ever amount to anything, and why can’t he be like his brother Paul who’s smart and handsome and good.
Emotionally abused children need love and affection and they need to have their self-respect built up. Emotional abuse is very often accompanied by physical and sexual abuse.
What is Physical Abuse?
Simon came to us after being severely abused. He had had cigarettes stubbed out on his bottom, had human bite marks, a broken leg; his teeth had been hit so often that they were black — the nerves had been killed. He had burns from where he’d been made to sit on a room heater. At two and a half years old he’d never had real food and didn’t know how to chew. He couldn’t talk, never made eye contact, and treated people like pieces of furniture. He’s made a lot of progress since then. He’s in class three and reads at class two level; he can speak and makes eye contact. Just a few of the things we were told he would never do.
Most parents don’t actually believe in spanking, even though we do it sometimes. Sometimes we spank too hard. We feel guilty afterwards and resolve to handle the situation better next time. We apologise. Parents who physically abuse their children don’t see physical punishment as wrong. Some people think beating children with belts and burning them with lighted cigarettes, or pouring scalding water over babies is OK. Some of them are sadists and do it because they enjoy hurting children. Others genuinely think that what they are doing is normal, right, even moral. Others have so little control over their anger that they will pick up a child and throw it against a wall before they can be stopped or stop themselves. Others are so ignorant that they think spanking a baby will teach it not to cry. Many of these parents will have been physically abused themselves. If they were beaten as children they may reason that it “never did them any harm”.
Unfortunately physical abuse often goes on for years before anyone notices or takes action to report the family to the social services. Some abusing parents are very good about hurting children in ways that don’t show or which can be hidden by clothing. Children taken into care from abusing families may show numerous scars or old untreated fractures. Some of them are left with permanent brain damage or physical disabilities; all of them have permanent emotional scars which the adoptive family will have to treat.
There are some cases where one child has been killed or abused by a parent, or parent’s partner, possibly in a fit of anger. Maybe the other children have not suffered directly themselves, but it is very unlikely that they would be left in the care of a parent who had been shown to be unable to protect them from harm.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
