Emotional Maltreatment

As Tonya walks into her classroom at her new school she is very quiet, and does not trust anyone but herself. Then as a student tries to share the crayons she turns her face away and starts to cry. This is something many children face today that adults and caregivers might consider shyness or getting used to change when really the situation is so much more; it is called emotional maltreatment. Most people in our society either do not know about this or even worse could be doing this and not know about it. Today our society faces many problems, but one that is not paid enough attention to is child abuse. Every year children are either injured or even die from child abuse. For the federal fiscal year, 2004, three million children were either abused or neglected, 872 000 were victims. That is a dramatic number that could be easily decreased. There are many reasons why children are abused and why the parents do it, and there are also many forms of child abuse. And the number of abused children is growing every day. This should tell society to wake up and stop this.

Researchers have found that most people do not understand the significance of child abuse or the definition of it. C.A.P.T.A. defines child abuse as any recent act or failure to act on the part of the parent that results in death, serious physical or emotional harm. There are four forms of child abuse which are sexual, neglect, physical, and psychological emotional maltreatment, which is the one we will be looking at. Since child abuse is controversial, researchers state that it is difficult to determine the definition of emotional abuse. This is considered an “insidious component” inherits to all types of child abuse. The actual definition of emotional abuse is a repeated pattern of caregiver behavior or extreme incident that convey to children that they are worthless, flawed, unloved, and unwanted. Not only is there an original definition, but there are many parts to emotional abuse. Psychological emotional maltreatment has more negative effects on children than the physical abuse alone. Some types of emotional are spurning, terrorizing, isolating, exploiting, denying emotional responses. Sometimes the abuser does not even know the crime they are committing. Although what they may not know is that they are hurting the child in ways they have no idea and it will affect them for the rest of their life.

A child’s life is one of the most precious things ever. Why would anyone want to harm them? There are many factors that lead to abused children. Some of them even happen before the child is born. Some of these factors are, marrying the wrong mate this could cause many problems throughout the childs life. Also unwanted pregnancies could be a big problem because it puts tons of stress on the mother of the child. Also, parents who were also abused as a child, because that means that they didn’t even receive the right treatment growing up so how are they even suppose to know how to raise a child.

There are certain factors of each side to why they are abused also. These include, family factors, parent or caregiver, child, and environmental factors. One main factor with parents would be history of maltreatment. Substance abuse, attitudes and knowledge, or age. Also family structure has a lot to do with it like parent child interaction, or domestic violence child factors would include age or special education disorder. Because younger children seem to get abused more than older would be environmental factors, which would include poverty, violent conditions or community. Although many of these factors do not seem likely or sensible for anyone to hurt a child, it happens and it goes on everyday in