It doesn’t always equate to self-esteem, but this seems a related area.
A woman on a plane I was on recently was verbally aggressive with her child and cursed at her. I told the cabin staff and told the woman I’d report her if she persisted. She got indignant but eventually went quiet. Part of her defense was my lack of clear legal authority and we had no reference to social care guidelines. So I’ve looked up the NSPCC website which talks about emotional abuse in the following ways. For me it also links to other types of abuse such as bullying and (psychological) domestic violence.
For the purpose of the child protection system, the Department of Health employs the following definition of emotional abuse:
‘Emotional abuse is the persistent emotional ill-treatment of a child such as to cause severe and persistent adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may involve conveying to children that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate, or valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may feature age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. It may involve causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger, or the exploitation or corruption of children. Some level of emotional abuse is involved in all types of ill treatment of a child, though it may occur alone’. (Department of Health et al, 1999, p.5-6)
Garbarino et al’s influential work defines psychological maltreatment as ‘a concerted attack by an adult on a child’s development of self and social competence’ (Garbarino et al, 1986, cited in Iwaniec, 1997, p.372). They propose five categories of damaging caregiver behaviours:
- rejecting: behaviours which communicate or constitute abandonment of the child;
- isolating: preventing the child from participating in normal social interaction activities;
- terrorising: threatening the child with severe punishment, or deliberately cultivating a climate of fear or threat;
- ignoring: where the caregiver is psychologically unavailable to the child and fails to respond to the child’s behaviour; and
- corrupting: caregiver behaviour which encourages the child to develop false social values that reinforce antisocial or deviant behavioural patterns (Garbarino et al, 1986 cited in Tomison and Tucci, 1997).
Hart et al build on Garbarino et al’s typology above, identifying six categories of adult behaviour towards children considered to be emotionally abusive:
- spurning: both verbal and nonverbal degrading and rejecting of a child;
- exploiting/corrupting: encouraging children to develop behaviours that are self-destructive or mis-socialising;
- terrorising: includes behaviour that threatens or is likely to place the child or child’s loved ones in danger;
- denying emotional responsiveness: ignoring a child’s attempt to interact, or interacting without emotion;
- isolating: involves caregiver behaviours that prevent a child from interacting with children or adults outside the home; and
- mental health, medical and emotional neglect (Hart et al, 1995 cited in Geffner and Rossman, 1998, p.2).
