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. The truth of the matter is that she wanted to manipulate me into remaining in the room so that she could continue her verbal attack on me as she liked. It was a dare that I could not win. This kind of abuse is especially easy to blame on a child victim, since children are immature by nature, and are often frustrating. But this is the reality of childrearing, and anyone who is even remotely considering having a child needs to think long and hard about this.