Is Childhood Verbal Abuse as Damaging as Childhood Physical or Sexual Abuse?
A new study says yes.
A systematic review of 166 previous studies on childhood abuse has concluded that verbal abuse of children is just as damaging as childhood physical or sexual abuse.
A key attribute of childhood emotional abuse is the underlying adult-to-child perpetration of verbal abuse, which is characterized by shouting, yelling, denigrating the child, and verbal threats. These types of adult actions can be as damaging to a child’s development as other currently recognized and forensically established subtypes of maltreatment such as childhood physical and sexual abuse.
Dube, Shanta R. et al (2023). Childhood verbal abuse as a child maltreatment subtype: A systemic review of the current evidence.
Childhood verbal abuse (CVA) is a subset of emotional abuse. And what’s important to note is that it’s —
Not just yelling.
People seem to get hung up on this. That verbal abuse is yelling. But when I was little, and my father screamed that I was worthless and that I deserved nothing good to happen to me—
Ever.
He could just as well have whispered it.
And it would have done just as much damage.
According to the review:
Definitional themes for CVA include negative speech volume, tone, and speech content, and their immediate impact.
Speech volume has to do with loudness, but verbal abuse involves not only volume but tone of voice, content, and impact. So, if a parent snarls at a child and says something devastating, it’s abusive even if it’s said quietly.
So, never raising your voice isn’t the same as not being verbally abusive.
This matters.
It matters because I first read about this study on social media. And among the literally thousands of comments there were only a handful of people who actually knew what verbal abuse even was.
Because most of them thought it was just yelling.
What they weren’t getting was the denigrating part. That verbal abuse involves denigrating. That yelling is raising your voice because your child ran out in traffic. But that verbally abusing your child is raising your voice and telling your child they’re a worthless sack of shit who deserves to die —
Because they ran out in traffic.
Which is different.
And even among the people who understood verbal abuse was more than yelling, there was still a general undercurrent of —
“As long as I also compliment my child that makes it okay.”
Which isn’t true.
Intermittent verbal abuse can be just as damaging as continual verbal abuse because it leads to a push-pull dynamic that causes the child to both love and fear their parent at the same time. This dynamic is now known to lead to a disorganized attachment style in which the child learns to both seek and avoid love simultaneously.
Which fucks them up.
According to the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM):
When a child is abused, their defense system will naturally work to shield them from harm, but their attachment system will still want to be loved and cared for by the parent.
This creates an internal tug-of-war where different motivational systems are working against each other simultaneously.
This tug-of-war is the heart of disorganized attachment.
It used to be thought that disorganized attachment, which is an early precursor to both PTSD and CPTSD, was caused by consistent early childhood trauma. But what researchers now know is that disorganized attachment develops when a parent is mostly okay but intermittently traumatizes their child in some way. So, an inconsistent caretaker can be just as bad (from a developmental standpoint) as a consistently bad one.
If a parent is often loving but sometimes scary, that can be just as bad (and sometimes worse) for a developing psyche than a parent that’s consistently scary. A consistently traumatized child knows what to expect and (may) adapt. An inconsistently traumatized child never knows what to expect and therefore (may) never adapt.
This is the problem with being sometimes abusive and sometimes complimentary.
And no parent is setting out to do this. Nobody’s trying to damage their child. But what I also learned from the social media comments is that most people don’t realize the damage that’s been done to them —
Which is why they’re passing it down to their own children.
The overwhelming comment among parents who had yelled at and denigrated their children was that yelling and denigrating had also happened to them, and they had “turned out okay.”
But had they?
Because what the systemic review showed was —
It had turned them into abusers.
And they didn’t even know it.
A secondary finding of the review was that, while sexual and physical abuse had declined in recent years, verbal abuse was actually on the rise.
This says that people are still taking their frustrations out on their kids —
They’re just doing it in a more socially “acceptable” way.
Everybody knows at this point that physical and sexual abuse are wrong. That they’re abuse. But there’s still a persistent idea that yelling — even yelling terrible, hurtful things — is okay.
It’s not.
So, aside from yelling, what behaviors did the study list as being indicative of verbal abuse?
- Name-calling
- Insulting
- Intimidating
- Threatening
- Shaming
- Demeaning
- Humiliating
- Disrespecting
- Belittling
- Scolding
- Swearing
- Blaming
- Ridiculing
- Cursing
- Teasing
- Scapegoating
- Criticizing
- Putting down
- Negative prediction (predicting bad things will happen to the child)
- Negative comparison (comparing the child unfavorably to another)
All of which are meant to demean and none of which are necessary to discipline or change a behavior.
Which means they’re punitive instead of corrective.
Think of a prison vs. a rehabilitation center.
Abuse is punitive; it’s meant to hurt. Correction is helpful; it’s meant to rehabilitate. The child that runs into the street needs to learn not to run into the street.
Not that he’s a piece of shit because he ran into the street.
I mean, how helpful is that? You want the child not to run into the street so you tell them they need to change who they are? Does that actually meet your objective of getting them not to run into the street?
Or does it just teach them that they suck?
Discipline should be instructive. It should get the child to change the maladaptive behavior. And it should be narrow enough that the child actually understands what the maladaptive behavior is.
If you tell a child they suck, that implies the maladaptive behavior is them. It doesn’t get them to change the behavior, it gets them to change themselves. So, maybe they don’t run into the street anymore but maybe they don’t do anything else impulsively either.
Like throw their arms around you when you get home.
Or think you’re the greatest thing in the world.
Or treat you like you’re their hero.
Because you’re not anymore.
You’re just the person who told them they suck.
My father was verbally abusive. And you know how I feel about my father?
I hate him.
He told me I sucked when I was little because I wouldn’t share a fudgsicle with him. He screamed, right in my face, that I was selfish and that being selfish was the worst thing in the world. And that, because I was selfish, I deserved nothing good to happen to me.
Ever.
I was four.
That’s verbal abuse. And it didn’t make me a better person. It made me a very fucked up person with a personality disorder who hates my father.
Punitive.
Not corrective.
That’s verbal abuse.
And it’s not what you want for your child.
Who you love.
