Week 4: The Different forms of Child Abuse

So this week in class our topics covered a wide range of child abuse. We covered Child Physical Abuse (CPA), Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), Child Neglect, and Psychological Maltreatment

As a future social worker, the age group I want to work with is adolescents. Though I will be willing to help anyone, adolescents is where I would like to focus for now. So while we covered these topics I noticed that in some cases, adolescents seemed to be a footnote. Adolescents are still children, and I feel that it's not only important for me to know about how to help and identify adolescents in these awful positions, but also to bring light on the issues that face adolescents in these violent situations.

Child Physical Abuse:

One thing that stood out in the chapter on CPA was that there are a lot of myths around Adolescents and CPA. Society often believes that adolescents who are victims of CPA are deserving of abuse. They often times see parents as having trouble controlling adolescent offspring and have to use other forces. They also feel that this is often because an adolescent are deserving as much of the fault as parents in an argument that results in CPA. What do you think of this?

In my opinion, these are very dangerous accusations. Adolescence is a often times a time of great change in an individual. While sometimes these changes are expressed in aggressive or hostile attitudes I think a greater parent and societal understanding of the difficulties of adolescence and greater support of the indivdual can really make a difference in an adolescents life. I wouldn't have made it very far if I didn't have the support that I did when I was an adolescent. If I had even more support and understanding I think I would have made it out of high school a much happier and healthier individual than I am today. However, I know I'm one of the lucky ones. Not everyone had the support I did. That's one of the reasons I'm going into the social work field to work with this group of people. I think a lot of times we forget what it's like to be an adolescent, and why it's easy for society to blame CPA on adolescents. We shouldn't forget that while adolescents are struggling in the  nether between childhood and adulthood that parents still are in power in the relationship. CPA, nor any abuse, should be blamed on the victims. 

Child Sexual Abuse:

As a quick note in CSA, adolescents can and are victims of CSA. However, adolescents (12-17) actually make up about 40% of child sexual abusers. This subject is pretty hard to talk about for anyone, but I think it definitely holds much more stereotypes than the other forms of abuse. This is really a hard topic and sometimes taboo subject. I know I am probably not doing this section much justice because I want to focus on adolescents, but I definitely urge anyone whose interested to go into that uncomfortable territory and learn some of the crazy and heartbreaking facts. 

Child Neglect:

(these include Health care neglect, personal hygiene neglect, nutritional neglect, neglect of household safety, neglect of household sanitation, inadequate shelter, abandonment, supervisory neglect, educational neglect, emotional neglect, and fostering delinquency)

I found that it was interesting that we have defined Educational/Developmental Neglect. This form of neglect is the failure to give a child the experiences that are necessary for growth and development, especially intellectual development. A form of this, and sometimes how this is caught, is by a child being extremely truant or not enrolled in school at all. I would think this probably one of the more frequent forms of neglect in Adolescence. This really sickens me, in fact this all really sickens me. However, I choose to focus on this one aspect because of my views on education. The perpetrators that educationally neglect children are robbing them of  their power. Knowledge and education are literally power! By not allowing a child to grow mentally and grow physically (through playing with other children in a safe environment as well as P.E) we are severely hurting these children, and our own future. I feel like this form of neglect (and many others such as) can be very easily overlooked. 

Psychological Maltreatment

The other form of Abuse, the most pervasive, is psychological maltreatment and emotional abuse. It is hard to have the other forms of abuse without emotional or psychological maltreatment. Since this is form of abuse is hard to define at times because of the broad definitions it has, it is very often never reported. Some studies in this chapter of “Family Violence Across the Lifespan” show that reports of psych maltreatment

Psych maltreatment actually increases with age and that older children are more likely to be psychologically abused. However, this could also be in part that those who can report it and recognize it for what it is are older. Also, it can be assumed that most parents have used some of the behaviors that fall under the spectrum of psych maltreatment sometime in their parenting. While some of these parents use these behaviors a few times, those that continue and repeat harmful psych abuse behaviors do even more harm to their children.

Overall there was so much information in these chapters I feel that I just cannot do it justice. If any of you have any questions pertaining to any of these forms of abuse I would LOVE to do the research to find your answer! Until then I guess it’s back to the grind of the depressing, but very, very important subject!