News Letter HOME Cybrary Contents Vol. 16, No. 12, December 2000 1. M.D. Although physical and sexual abuses are well recognized by the medical and legal systems, there has been difficulty and reluctance in addressing the issue of emotional abuse in children. This is unfortunate, because all cases of physical abuse contain a coexisting emotional component whose impact may persist long after physical injuries have healed. Furthermore children may suffer emotional injuries in the absence of physical or sexual attacks.
Emotional abuse distorts the process of attachment and affective development.
Emotional abuse also may impair the child's capacity to develop appropriate emotional responses and may lead to lifelong emotional difficulties. Some of the difficulties in evaluating and reporting emotional abuse in children have derived from a lack of consensus definitions and guidelines delineating severities. Similarly neither the American Psychiatric Association nor the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have published practice parameters on the subject of emotional abuse of children. Neither the federal government nor individual states have been able to give clear direction to child protective service agencies. The federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act 42 provides a vague definition of psychological maltreatment as a repeated pattern of caregiver behavior or extreme incidents that convey to children that they are worthless, flawed, unloved, unwanted, endangered or only of value in meeting another's needs.