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People who live through continuous abuse -- whether emotional abuse, domestic abuse or battering, or to sexual assault, incest or rape -- often develop a number of symptoms that, depending on the event/s they experience, and they often resemble symptoms of other psychiatric disorders. These including anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Child Abuse

What is it?

Child abuse is a pattern of mistreatment, abusive behavior, sexual abuse, or extreme neglect by a parent or another adult in authority. Adults inflict physical abuse by deliberately hitting, kicking, and beating the child. Sexual abuse includes both sexual assault and sexual exploitation. Emotional abuse includes acts of emotional cruelty that harm the child. Neglect is considered abuse when it results in harm or the threat of harm to the child's welfare and health, including actual abandonment, inadequate supervision, and denying medical care.

Children who live through long-standing abuse develop a kind of survivor's syndrome. Because their trauma is repeated , shock following the first blow evolves into sickening expectation. After being repeatedly brutalized, children may withdraw or become numb. They may try to look normal but seem zoned-out. Many abused children forget what it is to feel alive and be playful. They frequently become indifferent to pain, lack empathy, and fail to read or acknowledge their own feelings.

Repeated abuse can produce extreme, often muted rage in children. Anger rises, sometimes exploding in tantrums and violent behavior. A child may turn the rage against herself, engaging in self-mutilating and self-endangering behavior or making physically damaging suicidal acyions. She/he may enact her/his anger through continual aggressive or delinquent behavior, or "identify with the aggressor" so that she/he victimizes and humiliates other children. This kind of behavior may fluctuate with extreme passivity, as the child experiences any kind of aggression as dangerous.

Abuse shatters a child's natural sense basic trust. When the abuse persists over a long period of time, children tend to become deeply discouraged: they don't anticipate a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span. Abuse may affect a child's attitudes about other people. A child may come to believe, with good reason, that he cannot trust anyone. Children who are sexually abused may shrink from men or anyone who represents their abuse or approach them with overly-friendly advances. 

Many abused children do to carry one or two trauma-related fears well into adulthood. For example, sexually abused children may grow up to fear anal, oral or violent sex. Abuse can set in motion internal (physical) changes that can last through life. If childhood abuse is not treated, it can be the cause of a number of adult character difficulties including psychosis, violent behavior, extremes of passivity and victimization (people who were raped or incestuously abused as children are often raped again and again as adults), self-mutilation, suicidal or self-endangering behavior, and a variety of anxiety problems.

Symptoms and Signs

Although it is often hard to judge whether a child is being abused based on how the situation looks, abused children generally appear excessively aggressive or sexually provocative, and may lag behind in school. Other symptoms and signs of abuse include:

• Extreme anger, impulsiveness, fearfulness, or depression
• Sleep problems
• Exaggerated startle response
• Panic
• Irritability
• Immature or regressed behavior
• Hypervigilance.

 What you can do to help:

If you suspect that a child you know is being abused, either sexually or physically, or neglected, you must contact your local child protective services agency. It is crucial that the child's safety happen immediately before any of the other issues are considered.

It may not be clear to an outsider if a child is being treatecd with extreme corporal punishment or physical abuse. Bruises, black eyes, bloody noses, cuts, and marks that stay red for a long time, may be signs that a child is being abused.

Treatment

Often, children who have been abused need treatment to be able to talk about their pain, anger, and concerns about safety. Play therapy allows young children to reenact the traumatic events in a safe environment. Being able to build a trusting relationship with an adult during therapy in which the child will not be betrayed, exploited, or hurt, is very important for the child's mental health.

In some circumstances, involving abusive parents in the treatment of children and adolescents is also necessary to reduce the possibility that the abuse will continue and to establish a sense of safety for the child. However, if this crea less afety for the child it should not be considered. In therapy, parents may learn more effective and appropriate parenting skills. In addition, they can receive the support, understanding, and encouragement they need to be better parents.

Occasionally, medication is recommended in the early course of treatment, particularly to treat abuse-related depressions or compulsive behaviors.

Prognosis

When the person who has been abused is able to feel safe again, and when the issues are addressed effectively, childhood abuse is generally responsive to treatment.