by Paula A

Created on: February 19, 2007   Last Updated: April 23, 2007

Last week in the news was a story of a little girl who was raped and killed by a family member, how dreadful we all say but then a month later how many of us actually remember this story?

Unfortunately this story is all familiar and as much as we like to think it doesn't happen very often child abuse is more frequent than any of us wish to realise with the statistics standing at 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 seven boys being abused.

We all gasp at the horror of the situation when a new story is told on the news, how could anyone do this to a child but it happens everyday. The NSPCC has been running its full stop campaign for some time now and I am not sure how effective it is but even if it stops one child being abused it is worth the advertising etc.
I did a search on Goggle today and it came back with 1,210,000 hits, how can we have so many sites and yet so little seems to be done?

We learn through example and repeat the patterns of our parents; we say things to our children that our parents said to us as we were growing up and also, unfortunately, sometimes also do the things which were done to us. It is very important to show our children the correct way to behave and although we are fully aware that some children still go astray most grow up to be just like their parents.

If you have been abused as a child or you know someone else who has then you will understand how it takes over your whole life, makes you feel unloved, guilty ashamed and often suicidal. It can lead to some people abusing children themselves in later life because this is what they assume is supposed to happen because it happened to them, they repeat the patterns of the person who abused them. often because we feel we are not worthy of feeling love we cannot show it either, we do not know how to relate to the people we care about and end up hurting them.
In cases where children have been severely abused it often turns out that the abuser has been abused themselves.

According to John Bowly, child and family psychiatrist, On the surface abusing individuals vary from being cold, rigid, obsessional and censorious to be very passive, unhappy and disorganised. Yet emotionally they have much in common. Among features reported as especially frequent among abusive mothers we find the following: prone to periods of intense anxiety punctuated by outbursts of violent anger, they are said to impulsive and immature. Although their dependency needs are described as exceptionally strong they are extremely distrustful

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