Effects of Abuse and Neglect on Children

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Recommended: Impact of child abuse on child development

“Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living in a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.” This is a quote from Dave Pelzer, the author famous for his autobiography “A Child Called ‘It’.” For those who do not know what the book is about, it is about his life, and how he grew up, being abused by his mother everyday. As a result of child abuse, children have to deal with psychological consequences, social difficulties, and economic difficulties later in life.

Initially, psychological consequences can be many things, but the main points are the personal feelings of a child, cognitive delay, and emotional feelings. For example, personal feelings harm the children for their whole life, unless children are able to move past what happened to them in their pasts. These personal feelings include isolation, fear, and inability to trust. Children should never have to feel that whenever they do something wrong that something is going to happen when they go home, or that children will get punished not matter what they do. Cognitive delay causes children to fall behind in school, or don’t care about school, and sometimes causes them to fail grades and have to repeat them. Emotional feelings of a child farther down the road include depression, anxiety, and can sometimes be health disorders. Depression is the feeling of being hopeless and inadequate. In explanation, depression can cause suicide and health issues. Also, anxiety makes a person uneasy, or nervous, about a situation that no one would know the outcome to, and as everyone knows, there is no possible way to know an outcome of any situation.

Secondly, this is what haunts children for the rest of their lives. This will always be with children, and whether or not they...

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...use impairs lifelong physical and mental health, slows economic and social development, happens to twenty percent of women and five to ten percent of men, and there are an estimated thirty-four thousand homicide deaths in children under fifteen. Last but not least it not only causes children to have to deal with psychological consequences, but it also causes social difficulties and economic difficulties later in life.

Works Cited

Childrens Bureau; http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/focus-areas/child-abuse-neglect "Statistics & Research." Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

Joyful Heart Foudation; http://www.joyfulheartfoundation.org/learn/child-abuse-neglect/about-issue

"Statistics & Research." Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

World Health Organization; http://www.who.int/topics/child_abuse/en/ "Child Maltreatment." WHO. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2014.

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