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Section 10
When Children are Deprived of Their Basic Needs

Question 10 | Test | Table of Contents

The following are some comments from our Lead Nurse Planner, Nancy Pavelek, regarding Domestic Violence:

- When it comes to gender, domestic violence is not always male to female – it could be male to male, female to female, or female to male. People seeking help at domestic violence shelters or hospitals may be seeking service for same sex domestic violence. Do not assume that it is always a heterosexual couple or that it is always the male perpetrating the violence.

- Secondly, Ms. Pavelek posed the question… "Does your domestic violence shelter staff include a nurse?" Nurses are very beneficial to have on staff at domestic violence shelters. They can help with case management, psychiatric medications, untended health issues, addiction issues, and empowerment of the victim. Nurses can help connect people to the health department, get their mammogram, annual doctor visits, etc. This information is a way to start a movement toward empowering victims of domestic violence. These services can help victims to learn to take care of themselves and maybe realize that they don’t have to live this way. Being provided with this information from a nurse sends the message to the domestic violence victim that there are ways to take care of yourself.

When Children are Deprived of their Basic Needs
Margaret Varma, Ph.D.

Child abuse and wife abuse are serious social problems which have plagued man in one form or another since time immemorial. They prevail at all levels of society, running through all segments of the human race. Cases of severe abuse, as demonstrated by the study in the preceding article of this book, are found to be most rampant in families where there are serious marital problems resulting in quarrels, physical fights, and the battering of women and children. Fortunately, however, today there is a new and growing concern about child abuse and its correlation to wifebeating, and a greater interest in restoring to every child his rights as a child, and to every woman her rights as an adult.

Violence is not an isolated phenomenon; it feeds on itself. A climate of violence and physical abuse in a home permeates the relationships of all individuals involved. It is not possible to talk of child abuse without discovering a history of abuse in the families from which the abusing parents have come. A man who beats his child has been beaten as a child; a woman who beats her child has never learned to be a mother, and has, at the least, been neglected by her parents to the point that she takes out her frustration and anger on her defenseless progeny. And, of course, a man who beats or abuses his wife will do the same to his children. A wife who is abused will often turn to her child to express the rage that has been heaped upon her by a brutal spouse.

The Vicious Cycle
That it is a vicious circle, that violence begets violence, is supported by data. It has been found to be statistically true that most adults who abuse their children today had not only themselves been battered by their fathers, but had also witnessed their siblings and mothers being battered. From research material available, it seems clear that children who witness violence in their own families—children who are helpless spectators to physical and verbal violence between their parents—end up being abusive adults. Hence, statements made by researchers of child abuse and wife abuse, indicating that violence is a self-perpetuating phenomenon, seem to be true.

A Learned Behavior
The disposition to use violence is considered to be a learned behavior, and therefore, the greater a child’s exposure to violent experiences (such as witnessing the mother being beaten by the father) the greater will be his tendency to use violence as a means of social control later on in life. Research on imitative and modeling behavior points out that children generally imitate the behavior of aggressive models, and especially of the significant others in their lives. This is another reason why observation of violence in the home during childhood is detrimental to healthy child growth and personality development. The structural theory of violence gives a fuller explanation of the above with particular reference to social learning and role modeling behaviors. Hence, we have to accept the sad but realistic possibility that many of today’s children will be tomorrow’s abusing adults.

Stressful situations of neglect and abuse seem to have been rampant in the early childhood experiences of almost all criminals. Practically every researcher of child abuse has a list of names of criminals who were victims of child abuse and intrafamilial violence in their early childhoods (Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Arthur Bremmer, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Earl Ray, to name just a few). Thus we also have to accept the disturbing possibility that many of today’s abused children brought up in violent homes will grow up to be the nation’s hard core criminals.

Statistics on Child Abuse
The figures available of cases of child abuse, though not complete, are staggering. The Children’s Division of the American Humane Association estimates that 10,000 children are severely battered every year, at least 50,000 to 75,000 are sexually abused, 100,000 are emotionally neglected, and another 100,000 are physically, morally, and educationally neglected. The Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare informs us that 4,000 children are killed each year by their parents, 90,000 are beaten, injured, starved, or locked in rooms, and hundreds of thousands more are simply neglected, physically and mentally. A report by the National Institute of Child Abuse and Neglect states that one million children risk bodily harm from their parents. Though some hope arises when one reads what is being done to eradicate child abuse and wife abuse, this is just a drop in the ocean when contrasted with what remains to be done. Today it is estimated that nearly 3 million Americans grew up in violent home situations.

Child Abuse Reporting Laws
Child abuse reporting laws, which are by definition and intent case-finding devices, are perhaps a first step in insuring the child’s protection. The legal area of child abuse has been radically changed, with several states revising or introducing new laws on how best to deal with the problem of child abuse. Today, all of our 50 states have laws requiring professional workers and others to report all suspected cases, often within 24 hours. But we still do not have laws that make child abuse or wife abuse a criminal offense, except in the case of death. It seems essential that similar systems for reporting wife abuse need to be designed and implemented as well.

Desperately needed are more workers and more money so we can attack this dual problem from every direction and stop perpetuation of this senseless cruelty and harm by giving both adults and children our continued specialized treatment, care, and help. The root cause has been identified as a deterioration of family life in the United States, the breaking up of close family ties, and a prevailing pattern of violence amongst family members. Several professionals of various disciplines, using a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze the situation, have suggested that more intense work needs to be done to unify our efforts, to strengthen our child-parent ties, and to discover ways and means of getting our families back into harmonious, loving relationships based on respect and not on sexism.

Common Characteristics Among Abusing Spouses
Characteristics common among abusing spouses and parents include a lack of nurturing in their own childhoods. Authors describe abusive spouses and parents as inadequate, self-centered, hypersensitive, incompetent, anxious, impulsive, diffident, lonely, and isolated. The child-rearing of these adults seems to have been identical with what they offer their own children. The result is a life pattern of aggression and violence repeating itself from generation to generation. Abused children lacking the experience and opportunities which help develop inner controls for adult life, get into intense, senseless fits of temper, often unaware of their own brute actions. Their inadequate early childhoods and growing years make them selfish, immature adults. In fact, often these adults look to their children, or their spouse to satisfy all their own needs—and they lash out with uncontrolled, savage strength when these expectations fall short. In these types of relationships neither the children’s needs nor those of the spouses are met. The children, like the abused wives, do not lash out at the fathers/husbands, both because of physical limitations and because of feelings of guilt. For the children the anger is directed inward, but the frustrations linger and are likely to cause problems when these children are older and are in contact with other people.

We see almost daily in certain children with whom we work the devastating effects of parental strife and violence between mothers and fathers. We see a child who continually speaks in a loud, shrill voice, often merely babbling about fantasy persons in distorted activities or alternately making plaintive comments about “mommy and daddy” with tears in her eyes. Or a child whose needs for medical care for an orthopedic problem are ignored by a mother completely absorbed with fear of the man she lives with; the man refuses to leave her apartment and threatens to murder her and her child if she calls the police. Understandably preoccupied with this situation, the mother knows there is no way the police can really protect them from him, and she has little energy to devote to her child’s medical needs.

Psychological Stressors Leading to Child and Wife Abuse
Some other psychologically stressful characteristics mentioned leading to child and wife abuse are unemployment of the husband; an unwanted pregnancy; a child conceived out of wed1ock; and marriage partners of different religious faiths. It is therefore necessary that determined efforts be made to tackle the multiple social factors that influence child and wife abuse.

The National Symposium on Child Abuse enumerated eight conditions of poor child care:
· physical neglect
· emotional neglect
· educational neglect
· physical abuse
· sexual abuse
· community neglect
· moral neglect
· medical neglect
All of these conditions, or various combinations of these, exist in households where child and wife abuse exist.

When Children are Deprived of their Basic Needs
When children are deprived of their basic needs of proper food, clothing, and shelter, these deprivations automatically make them susceptible to all health hazards and stunt their normal healthy growth and development. In families where there are cases of child abuse and wife abuse, medical neglect also prevails. It is prevalent in homes which are characteristic of lack of control and defiance of authority, cruel punitive practices, excessive use of drugs and alcohol, and parental discord and violence, often resulting in the mothers being battered. Medical neglect occurs when a parent ignores the treatment needs of a child, resulting in a child who whines, is irritable, and is overly dependent. The parent responds by using physical abuse to discipline the child’s aggravating needs. Physical child abuse ranges from mild to severe injuries, and the objects used by the parent may be a hand, brush, cord, belt, or some electrical appliance.

When young children continually live in an environment reeking of family disruption, their fathers constantly physically attacking their mothers, their mothers perpetually screaming and weeping, they do not know where to go, or to whom to turn. They are denied parental love and nurturing, important needs of young children. Parental interest, concern, and empathy give the young child his first feelings of his own familiar surroundings and the confidence in the world at large. If these are not available to children when very young, they are denied satisfaction of their basic emotional needs; they do not acquire the sense of trust in their surroundings that leads up gradually to the different senses of autonomy, initiative, accomplishment, identity, intimacy, generativity and integrity laid down by Erikson as fundamental steps to healthy personality development. These children, therefore, suffer from emotional neglect as well.

A child is considered to be emotionally neglected when the parent does not provide the nurturing qualities so necessary for sound growth of personality. What this really means is that the chances that a child coming from a generally neglectful and violent home situation will receive parental support and acceptance are negligible or not, because the parents themselves come from homes where they were not valued or gratified. For no fault of his own, a child whose basic emotional needs are inadequately met, or not met at all, grows up with feelings of fear, anxiety, hostility, and suspicion that follow him to adulthood.
- Battered Women. Roy, Maria. Van Nostrand Reinhold Company: New York. 1997.

Personal Reflection Exercise Explanation
The Goal of this Home Study Course is to create a learning experience that enhances your clinical skills. We encourage you to discuss the Personal Reflection Journaling Activities, found at the end of each Section, with your colleagues. Thus, you are provided with an opportunity for a Group Discussion experience. Case Study examples might include: family background, socio-economic status, education, occupation, social/emotional issues, legal/financial issues, death/dying/health, home management, parenting, etc. as you deem appropriate. A Case Study is to be approximately 150 words in length. However, since the content of these “Personal Reflection” Journaling Exercises is intended for your future reference, they may contain confidential information and are to be applied as a “work in progress.” You will not be required to provide us with these Journaling Activities.

Personal Reflection Exercise #1
The preceding section was about the effects of when children are deprived of their basic needs. Write three case study examples regarding how you might use the content of this section in your practice.

QUESTION 10
According to the Children's Division of the American Humane Association, approximately how many children are severely battered annually? To select and enter your answer go to Test.

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