A person who is battered, for instance, can point at the bruises on their arms and at their broken bones, and have solid evidence that something happened. But emotional abuse doesn't leave physical reminders. There are no bruises, no broken bones, no slapmarks, no welts, no scar tissue, nothing at all to indicate that anything happened, except for the incidents seared on the mind of the victim. Memory should be enough, you might say, to prove that something happened. A victim's word should be enough to validate their experiences.
Emotional abuse is easy to hide.
The perpetrator can so easily blame the victim for any verbal attack that the victim may well doubt their own sanity. An even more insidious crazymaking tactic is for the perpetrator to deny that anything painful ever happened. Or perhaps, the abuser behaves so wonderfully in public that no one could ever believe that they could behave so horribly in private. Emotional abuse is easy to blame on the victim. There is a firm belief in our society today that words cannot hurt, that if a person is brave enough they need not fear the insults or verbal rage of others, and that if they do so, they are weak and insecure, and are to blame for not being strong enough to take it.