Our pediatrician asks some subset of our children a few standard “Are you being abused?” (though less blunt than that) questions at each physical. I say some subset, because I’m not sure what age it started at, but I know my oldest (12) gets at least part of her physical done privately. So there’s at least one person who asks them directly on an annual basis, even with no evidence or indication of abuse.
I think doctors should ask to get at least part of the physical done privately (I mean, without parents). But what do you when the parents don’t agree?
I was most definitely being abused, though I don’t know if any of those papers would have caught it, since it was almost completely emotional. To this day I still get people scoffing and saying it wasn’t such a big deal when emotional scars last incredibly long, longer than physical scars, I’d wager. Especially since most people agree beating your children is wrong, but cutting them down day after day is considered “They just cared about your well-being”.
However, my mother never let me alone with the doctor, for a second. Even as a teen I remember thinking “What if I was having sex? Or doing anything that I want to talk to the doctor about. I’d have no one to talk to, at all.”
I don’t know, it’s a difficult situation to balance. Considering how up in arms parents get over teaching the kids sex education, I can’t imagine how this might go over.
What is it we say in science-speak? It would enhance sensitivity, but your specificity would go in the shitter. Or something like that.
(I might have that backwards; not being in research, that was one of the topics I learned for the test and promptly forgot.)
Hmmm… one of the guys I went to college with, was in the news a decade or so later. He was disciplined by the medical association for doing the hand-in-pocket thing while giving a young teen girl a pelvic exam, on at least 2 occasions.
What’s the joke about an AIDS test that’s 90% accurate? If 1% of the people have AIDS, you’d get about 10 false positives for every true case found. And you still miss 1 in 10 AIDS cases…
I don’t know the answer to that - my wife takes the girls in for physicals. I’ll check with her.
I don’t know what’s being said these days, but back in the 80s, nobody defined or even mentioned emotional abuse. At least, not to me. Or the behaviors that would constitute emotional abuse weren’t spelled out, so I thought the way my parents treated me was normal and loving – because they told me they loved me, so how could it be abuse? (And yes, as an adult, I associate being treated like shit with love. Sad, ain’t it? :mad: )
I’m getting ready to return to the homestead for my high school reunion. My BFF from back in the day and I have been talking, of course, and just the other day, she sent me an email wondering why she never told an adult what was going on with me. She was feeling some guilt that she hadn’t done anything about it.
I put her mind to rest with the following:
•Kids should not be expected to solve adults’ problems. The onus of responsibility was not on my friends to report the abuse that was going on at the time.
•I had told some adults and because I wasn’t being beaten and marks weren’t left, nobody did anything. Perhaps I’d not told the right adults. However, telling a few who did nothing taught me that adults didn’t care and my needs don’t matter and I should just suck it up because a lot of kids were being starved and beaten, so being told you’re a piece of shit for not doing the dishes properly (they still got done) is not considered “abuse.”
• It was entirely possible that reporting the abuse would have taken me out of the frying pan and landed me right in the fire. I considered talking to a trusted teacher or a guidance counselor, but to me foster care/children’s home seemed like the likelihood of worse abuse would be much higher in that situation. I knew a girl in foster care and she’d told me she’d run away after her stepfather kept trying to fuck her. So they put her in the children’s home where the other girls beat her up on a daily basis, stole and destroyed her things, and so forth. It sounded much worse than where I was at, so I took heed of her tearful pleadings to suck it up and put up with it. Even when my stepbrother moved in and began sexually abusing me. (When that was found out, I was punished for being a slut and “asking for it” and was sanctioned by my church. My church leaders referred me to a counselor and my parents took me to three appointments before they decided I didn’t need any therapy, so my issues weren’t dealt with until I was an adult and got real therapy from a non-church-affiliated therapist. The cops and CPS were never called; the sexual abuse was never reported. By my own parents. They thought advising me to pray and repent for my slutty ways was sufficient.)
• I very much think that the language used in talking to kids matters. If you’d asked me if I was abused, I would have said no. If you’d asked me if my parents ever made me feel like I was a worthless piece of shit who deserved less than nothing, I’d have said, “Oh yeah! Of course. Wait – what do you mean? That’s abuse?” I thought all parents were hypercritical, judgmental, violent, and patronizing until I went to college and started meeting other people’s parents… who seemed unnaturally nice. My father would have been shocked and horrified (and still would be) if he’d been told that his parenting methods were considered abusive. He has no idea what kind of damage he caused, so his refusal to acknowledge it, IMO, is a result of ignorance.
I was born in 77 and never heard a word about abuse in school. The only thing related that I can remember are “don’t get in the car with strangers” talks.
I think that’s more a matter of changing definitions and cultural mores than “nobody talked about it”. True, nobody talked about it, but that’s because it wasn’t widely considered abuse. Heck, even today, I feel huge swathes of guilt and unease calling my relationship with my ex “abusive” because all he did was make me feel like a worthless human being. Lots of people still don’t consider emotional abuse “child abuse”, just like you didn’t as a kid.
In the 50’s, it was not only okay, but it was expected that you’d hit your kid with a belt, or a switch, or a paddle. It wasn’t abuse, it was discipline.
In the 70’s, paddles were mostly considered abuse, but parents were still expected to spank with a hand on a bare bottom, or a wooden spoon to the hand. It wasn’t abuse, it was discipline.
In the 80’s, spanking came to be considered abuse, but parents were still expected to yell at their kids and often told them how stupid and what a waste of oxygen they are. It wasn’t abuse, it was discipline.
Now parents are expected not to yell at their kids and tell them how stupid and what a waste of oxygen they are, but they’re…well, that’s a little unclear. There are many competing theories about how we’re supposed to - or even if we’re supposed to - provide discipline without physical or verbal abuse. I wonder which strategy will be considered abusive in another 20 years that’s perfectly acceptable now?
When I say that adults were always talking at us about abuse, I mean physical and especially sexual abuse. I was well into middle school before emotional abuse was even suggested as a thing, and it was always the final addendum and often had a slash, because we hadn’t really decided what to call it yet: “Child abuse - physical, sexual or verbal/emotional…”
Back in the day emotional abuse was discipline, period, no matter if you were a child or not. It was considered a legitimate exercise of authority.
Especially for men, an essential rite of passage was learning to stand still while a man of higher rank ground you down. As a man, you needed to learn to do it to others as well as submit yourself.
The OP addresses a number of different types of abuse. People seem to be more damaged, or the damage seems to last longer psychologically, from sexual or emotional abuse, but I see it all on a spectrum of damage. And people’s comfort level of addressing it. And the way it plays out in adult life. The eventual results of lack of resolution have a similarity: chemical abuse, repetition of the abuse in relationships, psychological disorders, suicide.
Maybe one of the things that makes it seem different is that sexual stimulation can be a strong reinforcer even of things that make a child feel ashamed or unhappy.
Children try to make sense in their sometimes limited way of what is happening to them. What kind of sense can a child make of, “Someone touches me and it feels good and icky at the same time and then I get a treat?” Or “Someone touches me and tells me they will kill my kitten if I tell.”
Sometimes the adult rationalization for that kind of abuse might be, “Someone had sex with me as a child. That proves how sexy (powerful) I am.”
I was born in the forties. Not a word was ever mentioned about abuse throughout my grade and high school education or at home. I don’t think my parents were Victorian prudes. In retrospect I suspect they had witnessed abuse in their own homes and were as confused as children about how to address it.
I know recognize that several educators were observing and making themselves subtley available. In that time and place school was for reading, writing and 'rithmetic. The social issues were left to the community and the home. I’m guessing the experienced/ sensitive staff were aware that an abused child has difficuty learning but there was no platform for addressing it in place.
I’m 54 years old. In my adolescence in the late 60’s and early 70’s my father hit me with a belt a few times and sometimes left a welt once because I was smarting off. He do not hit or punish us regularly, but when he did he was serious. and we were usually misbehaving. I learned to hold my tongue and was more socially respectful of others. My father was not some crazed loon, he was usually a very termperate man, but there were points where he would lose his temper with us, and we (there were 4 of us) sometimes behaved badly.
Was that abuse? Should the authorities have been called? Was an intervention required? I was being an asshole and he punished me. I guarantee you I paid far more attention after I got hit than any talking to or time out would have accomplished.
Perhaps a means of surveying for abuse would be to ask children a question like “What’s the meanest thing your parents do to you?”. If the answer is “not letting me eat candy”, then you’re probably OK. If it’s “hitting me”, you’ve got a problem. If it’s “yelling at me”, then you need to pry a bit deeper to learn the context (“Don’t touch that stove, it’s hot!” is proper, “You idiot, you can’t ever do anything right!” is not).
Of course, this would require an actual human to read and interpret all the responses, and I’m not sure that most schools have the budget for that.
The basic rule of thumb (and the SCOTUS has backed this up) is that if it leaves a visible mark, it’s abuse. If it doesn’t, it falls within the scope of permitted discipline. This is the primary reason that there’s still virtually nothing whatsoever that can be done about emotional abuse.
It’s a bad idea all around for educators to go all CSI on a child when they suspect abuse. Mandated reporters, if they get any training at all, are taught to get just the barest minimum of salient information from the suspected victim and then turn it over to DFCS. The last thing anybody needs is somebody with a savior complex (and there are plenty of those in the field of education) planting information in a child’s head.
I think it must have varied from place to place. I was boren in 1971, and never heard a word about child abuse until I was near Junior high. I remember distinctly seeing a headline in a paper about it and asking my mother what it was. My wife (same age) was abused as a child and similarly bemoans the fact that child abuse was never discussed in her school.
Plus, the problem is - what are the authorities supposed to do about it? The foster child system is randomly broken, already completely overloaded, and in most cases far worse fate that a lot of the emotional abuse that parents might inflict. So the ideal solution is to correct the parents’ behaviour. However, you are dealing with parents who are not thinking calmly, maturely and rationally to begin with. “Tattling” will simply give them one more thing to hold over the child’s head and scold them about. Threatening to take away the child if things don’t get better just gives the parent one more thing to threaten with - if you say anything you’ll end up in a house where you get no treats, no TV, no videogames, and on allowance and nobody cares about you.
Emotional abuse is a relatively modern addition to the list of abuses. Another new one is parental alienation, which has only surfaced as “abuse” in the last 10 years or less.
Dave Pelzer, who has made highly dubious published claims of severe childhood abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother, stated in one of his books that his teachers never reported their suspicions for fear of losing their jobs. This was early 1970s. It may be true, but I would take anything that comes out of Pelzer’s mouth with a grain of salt. I’ve asked people who were active in this field a decade or so later (early to mid-1980s) if this could be true, and they expressed skepticism while acknowledging that it might be remotely possible.
My wife was born in ’58 and she was the victim of some pervy stuff (not quite sure how to categorize it, I’ll explain if anybody wants me to) at the hands of her neighbor. She didn’t know it was wrong until she saw a TV special about child maltreatment when she was a pre-teen and asked her mother if what happened to her constituted abuse. Ironically, we used Zabasearch to track the guy down a few years ago and found that he’s still alive, older than Methuselah, and still working as a kiddie photographer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Reported for forum change.
Psh. That wouldn’t have been a threat to me. I already lived in a house with no treats, very little TV, no videogames, no allowance and nobody cared about me.
This is a worthwhile question to ask, I think. Again, on a continuum, how much actual dysfunction did the former abuse cause in a person’s adult life?
Perhaps some children, with more resilience, smarts, or luck for that matter, bounce back from the way they’ve been treated as a child. And that’s a valuable lesson to tell youth.
We tend to focus on the negative part and forget to teach the life-saving lesson that recovery from abuse is possible. Not only possible, but sometimes the lessons learned dealing with an abusive parent, can be channeled into productive life habits.
I think that’s pretty much the whole point of being alive - learning to turn the things that hurt us into something useful and ourselves into stronger human beings.
Currently, perhaps more than any other time in history, the knowledge and the help is out there and people are talking more openly about it. Sometimes I’m surprised by how much young people know and help support each other in these issues.
This is probably more appropriate for IMHO.
Colibri
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