the willful infliction of pain and suffering on children through physical, sexual, or emotional mistreatment. Prior to the 1970s the term child abuse normally referred to only physical mistreatment, but since then its application has expanded to include, in addition to inordinate physical violence, unjustifiable verbal abuse; the failure to furnish proper shelter, nourishment, medical treatment, or emotional support; incest and other cases of sexual molestation or rape; and the use of children in prostitution or pornography.
Surveys in North America and Europe that ask adult subjects to recall childhood mistreatment indicate that between 10 and 30 percent of young girls are subjected to exploitation or abuse as widely defined above. Estimates of abuse or neglect by parents or guardians range from about 1 out of every 100 children to more than 1 in 7, and figures are far higher if emotional abuse and neglect are included. Although widely prevalent, child abuse often is overlooked by family, friends, and health professionals. Prejudice, anxiety, and shame—not lack of information—seem to be the major reasons for the failure to recognize these private acts of violence—a form of tacit denial that leads to their perpetuation. Child abuse can have serious future consequences for its victims, including delays in physical growth, impaired language and cognitive abilities, and problems in personality development, learning, and behaviour.
Cruelty to children has several major causes. Abusive patterns of behaviour by parents can be viewed as maladaptive responses to stressful situations and feelings of powerlessness. As such, they represent the warped efforts of adults to master situations that are out of their control and to regain a psychological equilibrium through the imposition of their will on defenseless children. Psychiatric and pediatric studies have shown that a large proportion of parents who abuse their children were themselves physically or emotionally mistreated during their childhood. Typically overdisciplined and deprived of parental love in their infancy, these parents repeat the pattern with their own children, often in the belief that they are legitimately exercising their parental right to punish a child. This “cycle of abuse” is a particularly important factor in cases of sexual abuse, and it is now widely believed that many child molesters were victims of abuse as children.
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