5 Categories of Abuse and 3 Common Effects

There are as many forms of physical abuse as there are adults’ ability to imagine and invent them.

Belts, baseball bats, BB guns, plastic ties, chains, ropes, fists, fire, starvation, stovetops… these and many more methods of punishment are used to brutalize hundreds of thousands of girls and boys each year—most often by their own parents. Our research concludes that over 4,000 children each year finally succumb to violent abuse. A dozen a day.

These deaths typically occur after months or years of escalating abuse, growing steadily worse, until these children can take no more and die from catastrophic injuries or starvation. Or, having lost all hope, make the decision to end their own lives.

Often, when hearing about an incident of severe abuse, we may be tempted to believe that it was a one-time-only event. That is almost never the case. Abuse typically begins at a lower or moderate level, and then escalates over time. By the time the public becomes aware of a particular case, it most likely has been going on at least for months, if not years.

An abundance of evidence shows that in the abuser’s mind, inflicting pain on a child has an effect similar to taking certain drugs. That is, there is a feeling of satisfaction gained from inflicting pain, and that over time, increasing the severity of the abuse is necessary in order for the abuser to receive the same degree of satisfaction.

This is similar to the understanding that the dosage of some drugs must be increased over time in order to provide the same desired effect. With increasing severity of abuse, as with increasing certain drug’s dosage, an addiction can form in the brain of the abuser.

A similar effect is related to the mind-body connection. In this case, once an abusive adult begins the physical motions of beating a child, the mind reacts positively to what the body is doing. That, in turn, causes the abuser to want to beat the child longer and harder. This is how children end up dead.

Some facts about psychological abuse, also called emotional abuse or psychological maltreatment:

• Psychological abuse is often discounted as less serious because there are no physical injuries.
• Psychological abuse is more difficult to diagnose because there are no physical injuries.
• Psychological abuse is a direct assault on the mind of a child by a more powerful and sophisticated adult mind, which is able to negatively manipulate—and damage—the mind of a child.
• Adults who experienced severe psychological abuse as a child are often unaware of how deeply it has affected their lives in areas of employment stability, romantic relationships and developing mental illnesses or severe chronic depression.
• Many child psychiatrists who are experts in the field of child abuse agree that due to its effects throughout a person’s lifetime, psychological abuse is the most damaging of all forms of abuse. When severe, as with other forms of abuse, it can lead to suicide in children. The psychological abuse of children, however, can also lead to suicide after they have become adults, years or decades after the abuse has stopped.

The more common forms of psychological abuse include calling the child names, belittling the child verbally, threatening the child with severe and frightening punishments, verbally badgering the child with a raised voice. Statements such as “you’ll never amount to anything” or “you never do anything right” or “no one could ever love you” and so on are common. These few examples are mild compared to the horribly demeaning language often used against children in real life.

Less commonly, a child may be told things by one parent to get that child to hate and fear the other parent. A parent who, in the eyes of the child, may have done nothing wrong that the child is aware of. The parent under attack typically feels the need to tell the child a different “truth” to defend against the first parent’s attack. This can cause a child to withdraw and shut down emotionally, not knowing who can be believed—or which truth is the “real” truth. Furthermore, the child can end up in a position where his or her love of both parents is slowly dying. That feeling of isolation, in turn, can lead to severe chronic depression and thoughts of suicide.

In both situations, yelling or screaming at the child can certainly intensify the effect of the verbal statements.

The mental pain and emotional damage of psychological abuse lasts a lifetime, even with therapy which can help the child or adult learn to accept what happened. For most, the pain never goes away because the memories never go away. However, in some cases, therapeutic techniques such as Dissociation may help lessen the emotional pain of childhood memories. Many experts in this field tell us that psychological abuse is the most damaging of all, since the memories—and the effects—remain “fresh” inside the mind for a lifetime.

Learn More About Psychological Abuse

The sexual abuse of a child is often confused with rape. There are usually distinct differences, however. Whereas rape is more likely to involve a stranger or someone the victim recently met, the sexual abuse of a child is much more likely to involve a family member, relative, or family friend. In other words, the abuser is usually known by the child.

Furthermore, rape is almost always a single event, while sexual abuse typically occurs multiple times or many times by the same perpetrator.

Another difference is that rape is defined in most all states as unwanted or forced sexual intercourse. Sexual abuse on the other hand more commonly involves inappropriate touching, oral stimulation, and verbal statements, and intercourse is less common. There are always exceptions, of course.

The federal government’s definition of sexual abuse “…includes fondling a child’s genitals, penetration, incest, rape, sodomy, indecent exposure, and exploitation through prostitution or the production of pornographic materials.” (Definition sourced from: https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/whatiscan.pdf  – page 4)

Sexual abuse often causes psychological trauma in addition to possible physical injury. Such mental trauma has led some victims to commit suicide as children, and even well into adulthood for others, whether the victim was a girl or boy.

Victims include all gender identities, with girls being the most common victims. Many experiences are never reported because of the stigma involved. Girl victims experience fear and humiliation, but are often able to tell their mothers (even though sometimes mothers won’t believe them, or don’t want to believe them, especially if it involves their husbands). Due to societal constraints or expectations, it is often more difficult for boys to report sexual abuse by another male, especially after they become teens. They may feel both humiliated and emasculated, and too embarrassed to report the incident even to their own parents.

For children, abuse involving sexual molestation or intercourse can lead them to become more promiscuous as young adults. That is due to their self-esteem having been damaged, and having had their normal and expected physical limits and boundaries forcefully removed from them when they were younger.

Sexual abusers of children—pedophiles—are more often men, regardless of the victim’s gender. In our research, however, we seem to see a growing number of cases of women involved in the sexual abuse of children. There appears to be an increase in several areas—female teachers abusing minor male students, mothers sexually abusing their young or toddler sons, and mothers selling their daughters for sex so they can be paid with drugs or money. In rarer cases, one of which is cited in our Special Report, some mothers offer their daughters to men not for payment, but because they like to watch their daughters being raped.

Finally, we include child pornography in the category of sexual abuse. While it is a complex subject and occurs on varying levels, the children, often pre-pubescent, experience psychological damage on a conscious and/or subconscious level depending on their ages. They are being asked or coerced into doing things they cannot yet fully understand and sexual behavior or sexual situations thus become a confusing thing to them. That, in turn, can lead to unhealthy attitudes towards sex as the child moves through puberty and into adulthood.

Recommended Books

An excellent book on the subject of child sexual abuse is Sexually Victimized Children by David Finkelhor, Ph.D., © 1979 and published by The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Publishing Company. Although an older book, it remains one of the most comprehensive studies of child sexual abuse. It was the author’s doctoral dissertation and yet is written in a manner easily understood by adult readers. His follow-up study, Child Sexual Abuse, © 1984 by The Free Press, solidified his position as a leading authority on this subject.

Neglect in the dark world of child abuse refers to the withholding of anything needed by the child in order to remain physically and mentally healthy, and to thrive.

Physically, that can mean withholding food, water, adequate clothing, a clean and safe place to sleep, normal toilet facilities, schooling or education, and medical attention when needed.

Psychologically, neglect usually refers to withholding physical, emotional and verbal affection. This includes not holding an infant or toddler, not touching or hugging a child, not speaking to a child, not saying any words of love or affection, and so on. You could call it emotional starvation as opposed to physical starvation. Even when given perfectly adequate physical necessities, an infant can die without physical and verbal expressions of affection.

In other words, we were all born to be loved! We need to be loved and properly cared for throughout infancy and childhood in order to thrive.

Related to depriving a child of needed affection, there is abandonment. When a parent’s name or location are not known, or the child has been left alone in conditions where the child becomes seriously harmed, or the parent has not maintained contact with the child, that child is considered to have been abandoned. This can and does happen to children of all ages. (Abandonment definition paraphrased and condensed from: https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/whatiscan.pdf    page 4)

Neglect and deprivation can lead to children’s death, and hundreds of times a year it does. Many children die each year from intentional, slow starvation. The starvation is often aggravated by locking a child in an unfurnished or poorly furnished room or basement, or in a dark closet, or chained to a bed many hours a day, with a bucket for a toilet, or no bucket at all. A little food and drink is given, but not enough to sustain normal weight, let alone gain weight as children should be doing as months and years pass.

For all these reasons, we include extreme neglect and deprivation in the category of violent abuse. It can be, and often is, deadly. Such deaths often occur slowly, over a period of many months or even years.

Typically, four categories of abuse are cited by most sources: physical, psychological, sexual, and neglect. We have added a fifth category: child sex trafficking. This commonly involves a combination of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. It is a brutal form of child abuse and causes intense psychological trauma in addition to any physical injuries. We believe it deserves its own category.

Related to the above, the federal government had not included child sex trafficking in its definitions of child abuse because it is not carried out by parents or caregivers. However, in some cases, parents have sold their own children into sexual slavery for money or drugs. And child sex trafficking certainly is extremely abusive to the children suffering this horrible fate. After this section was written, we were gratified to find that on a 2018 government website, child sex trafficking was finally included as a fifth category of child abuse. That is a positive development. The federal government site and mention of child sex trafficking can be found at:

https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/guide_2018.pdf    page 37.

Both young adults and children can become victims of sex trafficking. Runaway children are most susceptible to being lured into sexual slavery once their money has run out. They end up hungry, homeless, and desperate. Many ran away in order to escape abuse at home. Once held captive, their abuse is usually worse than the abuse they ran away from.

As with pimps who lure young women and sometimes young men into prostitution and then seek to control them, child sex traffickers gain and maintain tight control over children. In this case, to exploit them for profit to be sexually abused by pedophiles.

One difference here is that traffickers usually move their captives from city to city, staying just a few days to a few weeks in each location. This makes them more difficult to discover by law enforcement. Certain websites provide details on the children and their locations, in coded terms understood by pedophiles. A major site on the Dark Web, Backpage.com, which allegedly facilitated sexual contact between adults and children was closed by the government in 2018. There are no doubt other sites to take its place, however.

To keep children compliant, they may be drugged or beaten into submission at first, and threatened by the traffickers not to tell anyone. The threats often include the threat of great harm or death to the child’s family members which, of course, is terrifying to the child and is useful for gaining compliance.

While runaway children make up a majority of child sex trafficking victims, some children have been kidnapped by ruthless criminals to be put into “service” or sold into sexual slavery rings that operate here and abroad. Thus, they may end up in other counties, states or even other countries. They are being kidnapped right off the streets in their own towns and neighborhoods and not seen again for months or years until they can escape or are found and rescued.