Child Abuse Description

description of child abuse

• Depression: Symptoms may include excessive sleeping, listlessness, and thoughts of suicide.
• A sense of “Drifting:” Numbing through life, without pleasure or goals.
• Feelings of Isolation: Adults may feel “different” from others. Some survivors of abuse reports of feeling like “damaged goods” as though they were forever scared and no one could ever accept them.
• Troubled Relationships: Adults abused as children may be unable to form close relationships. Some allow themselves to be abused again, because the role feels familiar and secure – and it’s the only one they know. Other become abusers themselves.
• Self-destructive Behavior: Adults who thing they’re bad may subconsciously “punish” themselves through:
• eating disorders (overeating, anorexia, bulimia, etc.)
• prostitution
• abuse of alcohol or other drugs
• cutting, burning

Others may cause problems at work and destroy their chances of advancement – or even lose their jobs.

Problems Raising Children:

Abused children see few good examples of parenting while they’re growing up. If they later have children of their own, they sometimes:

• Don’t know what to expect from children at deferent ages. For example, a parent might assume that an infant can be toilet trained, or that a 5-year-old thinks like an adult.
• Can’t cope with the stress that raising children can bring.
• Can’t feel close to their children, although they want to. Some parents who were physically or sexually abused as children are afraid to touch or hold their own children.
• Abuse their children, because their parents taught them that it’s OK to abuse the ones you love.

But these parents can break the cycle of abuse if they:

• Understand why they behave as they do.
• Learn new parenting skills.
• Receive needed support during their child-rearing years.

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