'Of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible and the most powerful was word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood, arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided. But the word managed to destroy, without leaving clues.' – Paulo Coelho.
According to a research on human behavior, a person's psychology and mentality is fully developed by the age of 12, which leads us to percept that the first twelve decades of a human life are the most crucial ones. And that a child undergoing this period is inclined to receive uttermost attention and care. However, child abuse of all kinds is fairly mundane around the world, whether it includes physical abuse, sexual abuse or mental abuse. Second marriages, excessive number of off springs, mental instability, stress and past experience of being abused are the principal causes leading to abusing a child. Although, harassing children, physically and sexually is still very much viral, but it has been observed that people are growing conscious of this issue rapidly, and opposition to child abuse is spreading like wildfire.
What our society is still impervious to however, is the peril of emotional abuse – the most overlooked in the mighty list of maltreatments. Emotional abuse is by far the most damaging of all types of child abuse, even sexual abuse. It cuts to the very core of a person, leaving scars that maybe far deeper and more lasting than the physical ones.
Constant and unnecessary scolding, excessive swearing, insulting, blaming, threatening, demeaning, ridiculing, criticizing, belittling, these are the few situations that falls into the category of emotional harassment.
As I reckon, a child's mind is like an inception; ideas can be planted and they can be stolen. This makes kids vulnerable, raw and so their fate can be easily molded by the people around them and what they do.
Causing a child to be terrified by constant threats, intimidating behavior, unpredictable and extreme responses to their behavior, calling names, verbal humiliation, isolating them and other treatments of this sort could actually damages a person's psyche and decays mental health.
Emotional abuse through verbal aggression, considered apart from other forms of abuse, turned out to have strong links with later depression, anger, hostility and dissociation.
An important misconception related to this kind of abuse is explained below.
The words persistent and systematic are crucial to the definition of child abuse. Emotional child abuse isn't a parent telling his child once, "Why did you smashed the glass? Don't do that again!"
Emotional abuse is systematic. It's a consistent destructive force in a child's life. For example, an emotionally abusive parent will tell a child, "Why did you smash the glass? You are so clumsy..." and then, at some point in time, close enough to be linked to the first event, "You smashed something again? Can't you ever do something right?" and then later, again at another point close enough in memory that the child ties it together, "You are always smashing things because you're not careful. You don't pay attention. You're always messing things up." And so on...
In time, the emotionally abused child adopts the phrase into his or her memory as something that defines them: "I am always messing up. I don't pay attention. I am not careful." He takes the words as a description of who he is... and the phrases will come back to him often.
All the destructive words, whether encased in subtle phrasing or baldly hurtful, will become part of the child's 'self talk.' The words will become truths to the child.
One of the reasons child abuse is peril, is because children can't raise their voice against it before the damage is done, because they couldn't possibly understand what is being done to them, they have no idea that it shouldn't be this way, that they shouldn't be demoralized this way, what they think is that this is the way it should be, that every kid in the world is brought up like this. It is when the damage of maltreatment is done and they compare their upbringing with others that they realize the measure of their dysfunctional childhood. The impacts of their upbringing unleash themselves from time to time. All the pent up anger and resentment, all the mixed confusion and pandemonium, all the buried insecurity and uncertainty, revealing itself. And the worst of all is the self loathing part of the person rising from the slumber. All the childhood dilemma and the malignant fraction of the soul resurfacing. And the sad part? The concealment of the scars imposed. The invisible scars.
