Research finds verbal abuse leaves young people at greater risk of self-harm, drug use and going to prison

Parents who shout at their children or call them “stupid” are leaving their offspring at greater risk of self-harm, drug use and ending up in jail, new research claims.

Talking harshly to children should be recognised as a form of abuse because of the huge damage it does, experts say.

The authors of a new study into such behaviour say “adult-to-child perpetration of verbal abuse … is characterised by shouting, yelling, denigrating the child, and verbal threats”.

“These types of adult actions can be as damaging to a child’s development as other currently recognised and forensically established subtypes of mistreatment such as childhood physical and sexual abuse,” the academics say in their paper in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.

  • Gloomy
    204·
    9 months ago

    How so? If the result is similar they are just different roots to the same outcome.

    The main difference is that the resilience, or the ability of a child to cope with the abuse, may vary greatly between physical abuse, sexual abuse and psychological abuse (like what the article is talking about). So a single sexual abuse is much more likley to cause Trauma, then beeing yelled at once. But beeing yelled at for years? Beeing told that you are wortheles repeatedly? That is likley to cause a lot of harm, especially because it plants a sense of “not beeing good enoth” in you that can take a lot of work to overcome once grown up.

    There is no need to rank diffent kinds of abuse against each other. We need to see them as equaly harmful for children and not trivialice them.