A Definitional Approach to Understanding Child Abuse Etiology - Research Paper Example

A Definitional Approach to Understanding Child Abuse Etiology Child abuse is an affliction on society that few remedies can fix. Not only are the immediate effects the abuse has on a child great, but the inevitable costs of caring for the child in hospitals, and maybe even the cost of housing him or her in prison due to social deviancy, are difficult for any nation to bear. Although the effects of child abuse are immense and deserve their own discussion, what is perhaps more important than the issue of effect is the issue of cause, and therefore how to prevent the abuse of children. By preventing child abuse, a society can hardly worry about the effects of that kind of environment on children. However, while the effects of child abuse can be clearly measured quantitatively by statistics dealing with prevalence and qualitatively with cognitive effects, the causes of child abuse are often multipart and strongly dependent on context. This makes the process of abstracting general principles from many specific cases difficult for the researcher. Of course, there are many opinions on the controversial issue, but not all of them are valid. Only those methods that are supported by the literature and empirical research are worthy of consideration as a true cause. There are a myriad of different psychological and sociological factors that contribute and interact with one another to create conditions for abuse that cannot be generalized for all cases (Oates). Looking at abuse from a differential definition approach may help with understanding the different root causes of child abuse as they exist in modern Western society, and looking at each of these different kinds of abuse through a lens of current theories will illuminate both problems with trying to abstract general principles about child abuse as well as potential explanations for its prevalence. What child abuse is, and what it encompasses in terms of harmful acts, is often undetermined and undefined in common debate on the subject. Assuming one’s audience all has the same concept or idea of the spectrum of child abuse is a faulty one for several reasons. First, some people were abused as children and not all of them in the same way. Second, researchers and those otherwise concerned with the issue of child abuse may have a special focus on a particular subject within the research. Third, child abuse is a complex problem and it is often difficult for those without special background knowledge to understand the breadth of the issue (Garbarino). Regardless, it is important to define exactly what one means when talking about child abuse, if not for the simple reason that all participants in the debate or discussion on the issue should be on the same page. The public and professional academics frequently ask the same questions about child abuse, such those dealing with its prevalence, its trends, its effects, and so on. However, the problem of child abuse is complex and its causes many. In the survey that follows, the many causes of child abuse shall be scrutinized for validity and the effects of child abuse shall be ignored as inconsequential to the reasons why people abuse children. This entails that the analysis ought to be completely fact-based and positive, as opposed to the common urge to make normative prescriptions out of the findings of the research. Child abuse may be divided between four broad areas: (a) physical abuse, (b) sexual abuse, (c) neglect (nonorganic failure to thrive), and (d) emotional abuse (Oates 18). These different kinds of abuse overlap and coincide with distinctions between a person’s body and a person’s mind. Of course, a child can be subjected to multiple kinds of abuse and frequently one kind of abuse, such as physical abuse, is preceded by emotional abuse which seen as less invasive. “Physical abuse” refers to any child who receives non-accidental physical injury because of acts or omissions on the part of his parents or guardians (Martin xi). This definition, with responsibility given to parents and guardians, recognizes the vulnerability children face to excessive force on the part of parents. This definition conforms to the finding that most physical abuse is caused by individuals who have caretaking responsibility to the child (Belsky). Although this definition, like other definitions, has its advantages, there is no universal definition that all professionals are willing to commit to. One problem with defining child abuse deals with evolving and unfixed notions of child’s rights that not only differ temporally (across time) but also spatially (across cultures) (Martin). What is considered acceptable in terms of treatment of children changes between societies and generations (Zhao). Sexual abuse is the involvement of dependent, immature children in sexual activities which they do not fully understand, are unable to give consent to, or that violate social taboos (Schecter and Roberge). In all forms of child abuse, the child is not consenting. In the form of sexual abuse, a child may consent, but that consent is not informed; that is, the child is by definition too dependent and immature to make a rational, informed decision about the sexual act. Sexual abuse has also been called the exploitation of a child by the power and authority of an adult in coercing the child into sexual compliance (Sgroi 9). The differences in defining sexual abuse make the issue difficult in comparing the results of studies by researchers using different definitions. Neglect and nonorganic failure to thrive are terms referring to two different but intimately related acts. Although physical abuse and sexual abuse often have immediate, recognizable effects on children, neglect and failure on the part of parents frequently result in unseen dangers. Children suffering from neglect suffer from long-term nutritional and biological deficits (along with later problems in parenting) (Myers). Neglect is the failure of parents to provide any number of basic needs to a child for whom they are responsible (Oates 15). These basic needs include love, security, food, clothing, housing, medical care, education, praise, recognition, and so on. Once again, temporal and spatial differences separate those things certain communities regard necessary for children; however, across cultures, children have very broad needs. The nonorganic failure to thrive is a term that refers to an effect, not a cause, like if a doctor diagnosed a child with “a cough” without giving an underlying diagnosis (Oates). A child with a nonorganic failure to thrive is one that is showing a decline away from a previous growth pattern, which affects the linear growth of a child. In that case, emotional or nutritional deprivation has caused a condition in which the child is not growing normally. Formally defined, a growth failure is the failure to maintain a previously established growth pattern, which responds to a combination of providing for the infant’s nutritional and emotional needs (Oates 17). Fourthly, emotional abuse is perhaps the most important and most unseen form of child abuse. It has been argued that emotional abuse underlies all other forms of child abuse, since the psychological message of debasement and worthlessness that is received is usually received by children suffering from physical and sexual abuse (Garbarino). It is regular, verbal harassment of a child by criticism, disparagement, ridicule, and threat that means rejection and withdrawal by verbal and nonverbal means (Oates 20). Emotional abuse can be caused any adult, outside or inside the home. Spatial and temporal differences between cultures and generations may account for a vast amount of emotional abuse around the world (Garbarino). The norms of one culture or one time may change and in another become unacceptable. However, independent of culture or time, a child’s feeling of rejection and lack of self-esteem will have deleterious effects on the child’s development into a functioning adult (Oates). Working with these definitional frameworks, one can answer more effectively why physical, emotional, and sexual abuses occur. However, the causes of child abuse, first and foremost, are difficult to understand in general. Child maltreatment occurs because of a variety of factors, with no single cause of child maltreatment, or any necessary or sufficient conditions. Models made based on sociology, psychology, social-interaction, and psychiatry are inadequate (Belsky). What is important, however, is finding the complex psychological interplay between children and parents (Myers). Consistently, it has been found that abusive parents are characterized by less supportive and fewer direct positive behaviors toward children and they express less positive affection to the child (Belsky). Although this psychological context is important, a social context is also significant. Poverty increases the stress of parenting, which contributes to abuse and neglect. The poor are also socially isolated, dependent on themselves both for the stresses of a low-wage work environment and for the care of the children (Martin). Social isolation and limited social ties have a direct and undeniable correlation (Belsky). All of these aspects of child abuse etiology (with individual, interpersonal, and societal variables) interact in a multipart and vague way to make simple explanations of child abuse either useless or false (Myers 135). Violence in society is common, including within families. Murders, rape, and other forms of abuse often occur as much within a home as outside of it (Oates 22). Stress, according to many academics, is one of the leading contributing factors to intra-family, domestic violence (Barth and Blythe). Stress and abuse, either to a child or to a spouse, have been positively correlated (Straus). These measures may be increasing through time as the demands of daily life in modern nations are becoming more pervasive, and the income gap is widening. Thus, stress is often a variable tightly correlated to poverty and the lack of resources to properly care for children, which is related to the concept of social isolation (Martin). Sexual abuse, like physical abuse, is closely tied to poverty (Myers 139). Those experienced in helping maltreated children have always recognized a higher concentration among the poor, with neglect and sexual abuses among the most common forms of abuse. Poverty is tied not only to stress, but also to other factors like substance abuse, single-parent family structures, and other contributing factors to abuse (Myers). According to these kinds of views that emphasize socioeconomic factors as the primary contributors to child abuse see the family as a microcosm of the state, reflect both what is good as well as what is bad about the society in which it functions (Oates 27). Rates of child abuse are not insignificant in all strata of society, from urban areas to suburban neighborhoods. However, disproportionate numbers of children that are abused do arise in the lower socioeconomic classes of modern societies. Many families use corporal punishment (defined as intentional punishment of a child with physical pain) to teach children lessons in correct versus incorrect behavior. This is often done with spanking, hand-slapping, and other forms of hitting. Some theories point to an increased risk of physical abuse in the case of children who receive corporal punishment frequently (Straus). Parents who have been physically disciplined as children are, according to some experts, to believe in the acceptability of violence as a remedy for youth misconduct. Incidentally, these parents are statistically more likely to be depressed and involved with some form of spousal abuse (Straus). The fine line between legitimate corporal punishment and physical abuse is often broken when the parent encounters resistance from the child. When the child does not comply with the punishment, or does not seem to learn from the punishment, the parent resorts to more extreme acts of violence that then can eventually harm the child (Straus). Understanding the relationship between corporal punishment, and physical abuse in this way allows researchers to focus on the long-term effects of corporal punishment, and to monitor the use of corporal punishment in populations across time, in order to more fully understand the relationship between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence within the home (Myers 147). An often-overlooked issue is that of child abuse in stepfamilies (Giles-Sims and Finkelhor 407). Although the empirical evidence from report cases indicates that stepparents are a group that is overrepresented in terms of the number of abusers, this evidence cannot account for why this should be the case (Giles-Sims and Finkelhor). However, some theories as exist to why stepparents might abuse their children more than biological parents and these theories may have some relevance to understanding their counterparts. A reported one-third of all Americans are through birth, divorce, and remarriage a part of a stepfamily (Jones). The most promising of these explanatory approaches is resource theory, which proposes that the more resources a person has command over, the more power and authority that person has. When a person has resources, the less likely he or she will be to use physical force to acquire them. Violence is then theoretically more likely to occur in cases where a person feels he or she has a right to authority but resources are insufficient to gain it without physical force (Giles-Sims and Finkelhor 411). This approach focuses on the legitimacy of the power position of stepparents. Resistance to stepparents that is characteristically seen in these kinds of family structures limits the authority of the stepparent in relation to the stepparent’s personal views of his or her rightful place in the structure, leading to physical force in order to acquire authority (Giles-Sims and Finkelhor). Resource theory is significant in that, like the case of corporal punishment, it points to a power interaction between child and parent, abused and abuser. When the child refuses to assent to, or take away from the punishment the intended lesson, this is an affront to the power position of the parent or stepparent, which must then be remedied by steps that include more invasive forms of punishment that eventually become child abuse. The fight for resources in the family often takes the form of the fight for order (that is, consistency to the values of the parent), and when resistance is encountered (whether this resistance by the child is intentional or not), abuse occurs out of necessity for the parent to maintain order and his or her picture of the ideal family structure. Resource theory has been applied to all forms and applications of violence in human relationships, and has yield interesting theoretical results (Goode). It forces researchers to question the role of the child’s resistance to punishment when studying the prevalence and nature of child abuse (Giles-Sims and Finkelhor 412). There are many different kinds of child abuse, and four are of particular categorical importance. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuses, as well as neglect, all form a broad basis on which to study the phenomenon of child abuse. Looking at abuse by means of differential definition helps with understanding the different etiologies of more specific forms of this kind of domestic violence. Pairing these different categories with an evaluation of a modern theory of abuse is particularly instructive in guiding future research into resource theory. Child abuse is a prevalent and rampant problem that even modern societies must face. The effects of such abuse are great, both to individuals and to society. Nevertheless, while the effects are significant, more important for our understanding are the causes such that abuse may be prevented. Preventing child abuse, societies do not need to trouble themselves with the quantifiable effects child abuse has on society. As more and more nations enter into modernity, they will inevitably face the same problem that countries like the United States and Great Britain have with controlling the stress and poverty that ultimately contribute in large part to extensive rates of child abuse among the lower socioeconomic classes. While trying to pinpoint the cause of child abuse to any one specific condition is hopeless, what is not hopeless is trying to understand these conditions in terms of interacting sociological and psychological factors. Works Cited Barth, R. P. and B. J. Blythe. "The Contribution of Stress to Child Abuse." The Social Service Review 57:3 (1983): 477-489. Belsky, Jay. "Etiology of Child Maltreatment: A Developmental-Ecological Analysis." Psychological Bulletin 114 (1993): 413-434. Garbarino, J. "The psychologically battered child: Towards a definition." Pediatric Annals 18 (1989): 502-504. Giles-Sims, J. and D. Finkelhor. "Child Abuse in Stepfamilies." Family Relations 33:3 (1984): 407-413. Goode, W. J. "Force and violence in the family." Journal of Marriage and the Family 33 (1971): 624-636. Jones, Anne C. "Reconstructing the Stepfamily: Old Myths, New Stories." 1 April 2003. Social Work. October 2009 . Martin, H.P. "Helping the battered child and his family." Kempe, C. H. and R. E. Helfer. The Child and His Development. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972. Myers, John E. B. Child Protection in America: Past, Present, and Future. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Oates, R. Kim. The Spectrum Of Child Abuse: Assessment, Treatment And Prevention . New York: Routledge, 1996. Schecter, M. D. and L. Roberge. "Sexual exploitation. In Child Abuse and Neglect: the Family in the Community." Kempe, R. E. Helfer & C. H. Cambrige, MA: Ballinger, 1976. Sgroi, S. M. Handbook of Clinical Intervention in Child Sexual Abuse. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982. Straus, Murray A. "Social Stress and Marital Violence in a National Sample of American Families." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 347 (1980): 229-250. Zhao, Yilu. "Cultural Divide Over Parental Discipline." The New York Times 29 May 2002: B8. Read More