BEHAVIOURAL and health consultant Dr Stacy Murray says there has been an increase in cases of emotional abuse being reported to the Children’s Authority.
Dr Murray, in an e-mailed response to Sunday Newsday, attributed the shift in reports from physical and sexual to emotional abuse because of the existence of the authority.
“With the increase in children protection with the policies being implemented by the government and the role of the Children’s Authority, I think people are now timid in terms of where abuse is concerned.”
She said physical abuse is easily recognised, so abusers are seeking ways to enact violence without leaving evidence.
“Physical abuse and sexual abuse will decrease, because those are measurable. Those are (types of) abuse that can be observable. If you sexually abuse a child, there can be evidence to suggest you actually abused that child. This can account for the reason why there can be an increase in emotional abuse because emotional abuse cannot be measurable.”
According to the National Society of Prevention of Child Cruelty, emotional abuse is the continued emotional mistreatment of a child. It is also referred to as psychological abuse. Emotional abuse is deliberately trying to scare, humiliate, isolate or ignore a child. Types of emotional abuse includes; humiliating or constantly criticising a child, threatening, shouting at a child or calling them names, using sarcasm to hurt a child, blaming and scapegoating, making a child perform degrading acts and being absent.
The authority, since it began work in 2015, its data shows sexual and physical abuse and neglect are the three highest categories of abuse. Over the past year, the authority said, neglect was the subject of the highest number of reports of child abuse.
[caption id="attachment_893752" align="alignnone" width="713"] Graphic showing an increase in cases of emotional abuse. - Courtesy the Children's Authority[/caption]
There has been a steady decline in the number of reports of neglect from 2015 to present, the data showed. The first four months saw a 27.5 per cent, or 407 of the 1,480 overall reported cases, being neglect. For 2020, 29.7 per cent or 1490 of the overall 5,017 reported cases were of child neglect.
As for sexual abuse, the authority saw a slight decrease from 23 per cent in 2019 to 22.6 per cent in 2020 and 22.5 per cent in 2021, up to April.
There has been an increase in reports of physical abuse, starting with just over 13 per cent in 2019 to 15.5 per cent in 2020 and over 16 per cent up to April.
In 2019 the reports of neglect made up 32 per cent, with a decrease the following year to 29.7 per cent, and 27.5 per cent this year.
For emotional abuse, it was reported to be an overall nine per cent in 2019, then increased to 12.7 per cent in 2020 and 17.2 per cent in 2021.
Murray said the abusive person will resort to name-calling rather than touching the child because the abuse is not seen; this however, plays on
