description of child abuse
Consequences of Abuse:
What are the consequences of child abuse? Obviously children are horribly scarred and traumatized. Many have recurrent nightmares or other physical and emotional symptoms. Multiple Personality Disorder is linked to early childhood abuse.
Many investigators of child abuse, along with hundreds of trial transcripts tell the frightfully sad story of children terrified of the very people who are responsible in the eyes of a compassionate society to love and nurture children. Frequently, the terror is so intense that abused children cannot eat or sleep. Suicide attempts and death fantasies are common.
Children feel violated, humiliated, dirty, and guilt-ridden. Their sense of safety and well-being is shattered, along with self worth and confidence. More than 60 percent of bulimics report childhood abuse. These symptoms often manifest first during the teen years.[6]
As abused children become adults, they exhibit more signs of hopelessness, neurosis, timidity, depression, drug and alcohol dependency and anxiety, even multiple personalities. For them, life is ruined. Vulnerable and helpless, they were violated and in a sense, their entire personhood has been raped – perhaps repeatedly and brutally.
Understandably, most survivors will not be able to trust again or intimately relate and truly love. Survivors cope by dissociating. Many report having an unusual ability to “will the self to sleep.” For some, this is exhibited as sleep-walking or memory loss. In extreme cases Dissociative Identity Disorders is on the increase.
The latest available research shows that many women, abused as children, tend to be unconsciously drawn to men who are abusive. Adult survivors are often battered spouses and/or the mother of a sexually abused child.
The most unfortunate become prostitutes and/or addicts. Recent studies have shown that more than 60 percent of these women were sexually abused as children.[7]
Up to 40 % of those abused as children become abusers as they grow into their teens or earlier. The inabilities to trust, love, nurture, and care for others caused by parental abuse spawns, in some, an aggressive parasitic anger in which misdirected rage is poured out on children.
Researchers say that sexual abusers of children, whether male or female, practitioners of incest or out-of-family exploitation, often share one common characteristic: they themselves were abused as children. And the pattern of sexual abuse is repeated.