Dehumanization Of Parent Child Essay

Violence affects a healthy family’s relationship, state of mind and well-being, in other words, it’s normal functions. Because of violence, children are forced to endure and cope with mental, physical and emotional trauma leading to a display of impacts on health, development, and wellbeing. The effects build up over time and can impact on every aspect of their life.  How many children and innocent lives must suffer from something unnecessary? Imagine walking into a home late at night to find a child hiding in a corner, with a bloody face and cuts all around their body saying they were self-inflicted or making up other silly excuses like falling down the stairs out of extreme fear. Up to 75% of all acts of domestic violence occurs between the ages 18-24. No child should ever see domestic violence as normal because the moment that happens a future perpetrator has been born. We need to take a stand and refuse to let domestic violence become something we ignore.

Often in these child rights movements tend to have children representative but are ran but “Despite good intentions and a deep commitment to children’s agency and authority, adults and children in this movement continue to replicate deeply structured patterns of behavior that give adults greater power (Taft, 2014, p. 460). There continues to be an unequal distribution of power between adults and children and it results in the child’s needs to be neglected. Focusing only on protection and provision does not allow us to grip an understanding of what children value as we speak on their behalf versus of listening to their wishes and present them with action opportunities

How does domestic violence between parents and parental figures affect the children who witness it? This is a question often asked by Sociologists and Psychologists alike. There have been studies that prove that children who witness domestic inter-parental violence experience mental health problems, issues with gender roles, substance abuse, the committing of crimes and suicide/suicide attempts later in their lives. This paper will explore all five of these 'effects' of domestic violence on children and show that there is evidence of a clear relationship in which increasing parental violence is associated with increasing outcome risks (Fergusson & Horwood, 1998, p.8).

According to the (Association, 2015) there is insignificant acknowledgement of parental insistence. In the last several year in the United States the countless number of children under 5 years of age are killed, nevertheless they are murdered by the hands of their parents which is a high percentage that can be equally put in separation with mother and father.

Most parents and other caregivers do not intend to hurt their children, but abuse is defined by the effect on the child, not the motivation of the parents or caregiver.Tens of thousands of children each year are traumatized by physical, sexual, and emotional abusers or by caregivers who neglect them.Child abuse as common as it is shocking. Most of us can’t imagine what would make an adult use violence against a child, and the worse the behavior is, the more unimaginable it seems. But the incidence of parents and other caregivers consciously, even willfully, committing acts that harm the very children they’re supposed to be nurturing is a sad fact of human society that cuts

The “estimated overlap of domestic violence and child abuse is 30 to 50 percent” of all cases (Henderson 321). As the child grows older and sees the violence in their household there is a possibility that the child will think that it is acceptable.

The media broadcast of parents killing their children dominates local news, also known as filicide, the criminal act parents commit against their children. According to the FBI statistics about five infants under the age of 1 are killed each week in the United States. No particular geographical location exists for this type of crimes; filicide occurs everywhere and in any place. It appears that the seasons; summer, spring, winter or fall, weekend or weekday, nothing put a halt to the crime. The research noted that the most common methods of killing by parents were with “personal weapons,” such as choking, beating, or drowning. Caucasian men and women between the age of 20 to 30 middle and lower class parents are likely to commit filicide. Three sociological theories, conflict, structural functionalism and symbolic interaction explain the different aspects of the family institution and the problem of why these types of crime occur. Observation of the family, not just the infant may detect a problem before it turns into a criminal act.

Many children are forced to live with domestic violence because one of their parents refuses to leave the relationship. In cases of women being victims of domestic violence and failing to leave the male offender, the women are also identified as offenders and are charged with failing to protect their children from avoidable harm, regardless of the limited choices they have (Friend et al., 2008). Although domestic violence occurred in 35% of the 1,248 substantiated incidents of child maltreatment, only 31 couples were investigated for exposing a child to domestic violence or not protecting their children from the violence (Coohey, 2007). In Minnesota the parent is said to endanger the child’s mental or physical health when the child is exposed to domestic violence. When police are contacted about a domestic violence incident the investigators need to consider all types of failure to protect the child, as well as the likelihood of a domestic violence incident occurring again (Coohey, 2007). In order to determine if the children will be exposed to domestic violence in the future, the investigator needs to consider many variables. Such variables include a history of domestic violence and other types of child maltreatment, a willingness by the perpetrator to change his or her behavior, and if the perpetrator has the ability to change. Domestic

Domestic violence also greatly impacts the family structure and the relationships between the members. Domestic violence threatens both the relationship between the child and their mother and the child and their father. Children who are exposed to domestic violence do not have an emotionally available parent to foster their development and have a 30-60% higher risk for being abused by the perpetrator (NCADV, 2007); when the father is the perpetrator of the violence, he often knows little about his children, their interests, and progress in school (Crosson-Tower, 2009, p. 84). The mother’s parenting style may also be damaged from domestic violence; the perpetrator may not allow the mother to take care of her children properly or soothe them when they are upset, which can cause the children to believe their mother does not care for them. When a mother is constantly traumatized by domestic violence, it can be more difficult for her to be present and attentive in her children’s lives due to depression, anxiety, and lack of sleep (Centre for children and families in the justice system, 2009). Domestic violence has an impact on the ability for a family to function. The perpetrator may sow divisions between the members of the family by turning them against each other, or favoring one child over the others. There may also be role reversals in families who experience domestic violence; parentification of the children and infantilizing of the mother may

Historically children’s health and wellbeing have been taken for granted. Individual’s belief that children were miniature adults led many people to expose children to situations that are inappropriate for children to see and experience. In the past, there were also times due to tragedy, that children were homeless, hungry, and unprotected. Even when children had parents, who were supposed to care for them and protect them, they were abused. The rise of industrialization also led to a negative shift in how children were treated.

Children are treated with respect, and do not fear emotional, verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. On the contrary, they feel safe, as they know that their parents are there to protect them and to look after their well-being. These children are given responsibilities appropriate to their age and are not expected to

The theory that best connects with the issue of family violence is systems theory. This theory entails that the “family as a system is thought to be best understood through the recognition that family members (as the parts of the system) interact with one another in such a manner that, over time, these interactions become patterned behavior” (Sutphin, McDonough, Schrenkel, 2013) Every family member that is within this family are characterized as subsystems. The main sub-systems are parent-parent, parent-child, and child-child. In most cases, what happens in the parent-parent relationship impacts both the parent-child relationship and the child-child relationship. A type of violence that can occur between the parent and parent relationship

Domestic violence affects 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men (NCADV, 2015). Although the devastating effects that domestic violence has on women are well known, there is a population of domestic violence victims that we tend to overlook. These are the children of the women and men who are in domestic violence situations. Children are the invisible victims when it comes to domestic violence. There are many statistics being thrown around when it comes to the number of children who are exposed to domestic violence; they range from as little as 200,000 to even 3-18 million (Sousa et. al., 2011). A 2001 study discovered that in 75% of the cases in their study, children were present in the home during the assaults (Hutchison & Hirschel, 2001).

The topic I have chosen for my paper is that of relationship between parents and children. Some of the points that I will be discussing are child abuse, child neglect and how it can affect a child and the relationship with the parents.

Family situations in which both parents are under mass amounts of stress and must work tediously to make ends meet are often inclined to have victims of child abuse in the home. Often because of troubled times economically parents reach a breaking point and enforce their anger onto his or her child, beating them physically. In many cases, parents take “teaching their child a lesson” to very high extremes, using the act of discipline to mask an act of physical child abuse. While many parents abuse under stress and frustration, some are too young or immature to handle the responsibilities of a child; not containing the capacity or patience to care for a young one often ends in abuse. As seen there many cases in which guardians cannot handle the tasks of parenthood, leading to acts of abuse. Whereas, there are also many cases in which parents suffer from disorders, increasing the probability of child abuse in a home.