Child sexual abuse before the 1970s was secretive and socially unspeakable. It was only after 1970s that it became legally punishable. Toni Morrison raised this issue in her novel "The Bluest Eye" speaking about the unspeakable. Second wave feminism brought sexual abuse and violence against women to the forefront making them public and political issues.
Child abuse is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes and occurs in a range of situations and circumstances. Children are abused by people in a position of power above them. Child abuse is nothing but the oppression of the weak by the powerful. Children are weaker physically than their oppressors and so can be overpowered easily. If they are bold enough to raise their voice they are subjugated
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Children are granted no voice, no bodily integrity, and no inherent world by the adults who are their caretakers. If they are lucky like Claudia and Frieda Mac Teer, they learn resistance strategies. If they are unlucky like Pecola Breedlove they learn various kinds of disempowered responses. They internalize their oppression than identify with their oppressors and they begin to believe that their oppression is just and proper.
Emotional abuse results in psychological and social defects in the growth of a child and results in behaviour which is coarse and rude. Cholly behaves exactly in this manner.
It is easy to oppress a child because he or she is unable to resist, oppress or combat his oppression. In an oppressive environment a child reacts to the injustices against him with disempowered responses like silence, self abuse, depression, rage etc. The child knows that he has no power over his oppressors and cannot harm him, so the child finds out ways to escape from this oppression by changing himself, or accepting his oppression. Toni Morrison has assigned reasons to all child oppressors in the novel. She writes that Cholly, and Pauline had been abused during childhood. Earlier it was believed that when a child grows up in an oppressive system, his or her own position changes and he or she assumes the role of the oppressor, but studies have now proved that even those who have not faced
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The terror of the beginning of her first menstruation is symptomatic of the traumatic experience she has in life. When Pecola has her first periods she is alarmed and screams. Suddenly Pecola bolted straight up, her eyes wide with terror. A whinnying sound came from her mouth. "What's the matter with you?" Frieda stood up too. Then we both looked where Pecola was staring. Blood was running down her legs. Soon drops were on the steps. I leaped up. "Hey, you cut yourself? Look. It's all over your dress". A brownish red stain discolored the back of her dress. She kept whinnying standing with her legs far apart. Frieda said, "Oh Lordy! I know. What that is!".
Children in homes where there is abuse usually end up either, being abused themselves or being neglected. This is where they generally learn to become abusers themselves.
Emotional abuse may include screaming, yelling, biting, name-calling, lack of love/affection, and so on. Children may be emotionally scarred when the y are labeled as stupid, ugly, crazy, or unwanted. Emotional abuse includes acts of omission by the child’s primary caregivers that could cause behavioral, emotional, or mental disorders. In some cases of emotional abuse the child’s caregiver may use excessive and bizarre forms of punishment like torture, or locking a child in a dark closet. These things emphasize the need for the intervention of The Child Protective Services.
What is child abuse? From the word “abuse” we can understand that it is some sort of a maltreatment of a child, causing harm and damage both to his physical and psychological well-being. At the Federal level, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) describes child abuse and neglect as: “any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse, or exploitation, or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm.” Child abuse is a very substantial and widely spread problem in U.S. affecting children of any age, gender, race, background or income, with more than 1.8 million investigations done every year and on average, killing more than 5 children every day. The main issue of child abuse is that the abuser is usually someone a child loves or depends on (a parent, sibling, coach, neighbor, etc.), who violates child’s trust putting personal interests first, therefore official numbers of how many children suffer maltreatment might be not accurate enough as remarkable amount of these cases go unreported. Each case of child abuse is unique, with a lot of individual factors involved, nevertheless, we can distinguish some of the common causes, such as poverty, lack of education, depression, mental or physical health
This is because they have nobody to protect them, which leads to them becoming more likely to be abused. Abusers prey on vulnerable people to make their attacks easier and less of a challenge.
All young people will encounter others who may discrimate against them for many different reasons the things they are told may damage there self asteem hindering their learning and feeling of self worth. Others may abuse their power in a physical mental or emotional sense to hurt others and this is to be stopped prematurely wherever possible. It is important in the work place to stop young people abusing their own power and also being taught the importance of npote [predudising or usin g power to abuse others. This should be taught to yioung people froma young age in a person centred way.
Could mild to severe forms abuse be thought of as just another part of growing up? Throughout childhood people are faced with situations of abusive families or school year bullies that could give them this dose of reality at a young age. In Ann-Marie MacDonald’s ‘Fall on Your Knees’ and Richard Wagamese’s ‘Indian Horse’, the characters face different traumas and forms of abuse. The abuse has different effects on the characters: Materia, Francis, Kathleen, and Saul.
Child abuse is a very sensitive issue that needs to by carefully handled. Child abuse is defined as a no accidental injury or pattern of injures to a child for which there is no reasonable explanation.
The people doing it or seeing it may not even know that it is happening. Emotional abuse can change a thought of a child. A positive to a negative if you will. Then eventually many thoughts a child may have will direct to completely negative. Emotional abuse can be crippling to a child’s everyday life. Humiliation, judging, criticizing and degradation are just some forms of emotional abuse. Verbal abuse is not the same, but can identify with the silent scars as emotional abuse. These kinds of abuses will interfere with a child’s development and may be more likely to have self-esteem issues than most children. The physiological effect will ultimately damage a bond between the child, and the attacker.
Unfortunately, there are children everywhere who endure a form of abuse. Some experience emotional abuse while others experience physical abuse. Other children, like Dave Pelzer, are faced with both. Dave had to grow up in a family of two alcoholic parents. He was severely beaten and tortured by his mother and was neglected by his father. Dave had to spend his childhood in fear of his life. Although sad, his story gives others hope that they too can experience an abusive childhood and live to tell about it.
Spokesperson and leader of the Civil rights, Marther Luther King Jr., once said, “the ultimate tradegy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”Oppression has, is, and always will be part of a society and there will always be oppressors; however, it is up to the individuals being oppressed to speak up and end the oppression that occurs in a community, it is there job to identify the rights and wrongs and not let the cycle of oppression continue, it is their obligation to speak up and act, it is under their accountability to terminate oppression and not let it snare them. In the book Black Boy by Richard Wright and “Overcoming Obstacles: What Oprah Winfrey Learned From Her Childhood
Although written decades apart, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye both explore the trials and tribulations that young black girls must endure as they begin to step into womanhood. While the burdens that the protagonists in each of these texts differ in some key ways, one of the most interesting things that both Woodson and Morrison depicted was a sense of difficulty in coping with these changes, and rather than having any semblance of mastery over their circumstances, these young protagonists would instead project their emotions onto something else as they try to discover what causes their suffering.
Children are at a higher risk of becoming emotionally unstable when they are continuously being pushed, and left with little to no comfort, while being degraded by a parent.
We never know what is going through a child’s mind when being a witness of abuse, especially when they are young. When a child grows up at such horrid environment, they're view in life changes automatically making them believe that this is the way of life. As these abused children get older, they do not know how to control what they feel in the inside and end up expressing it by taking their anger out on others, simply because that’s what they have “learned” in life”. “Abused children cannot express emotions safely. As a result, the emotions get stuffed down, coming out in unexpected ways. Adult survivors of child abuse can struggle with unexplained anxiety, depression, or anger” (Child Abuse and Neglect 1).however, though, the child does not evolve into a negative environment by being abused, the path that could also lead to a young child’s mind into negativity would be witnessing any kind of abuse within the house.
It also says that he would bully the daughter by telling her if she told their parents that no one would believe her. This action really affected the child and confused her, making her shy and scared to confront the problem. Along with violence, poverty, inadequate housing, gender is also another issue that has become important and associated with child abuse, especially if the parent is single and/or poor. Unfortunately, more children are being raised in highly stressed families. Consequently child abuse and neglect is increasing dramatically.
The Bluest Eye concentrates on the key contemporary American issues: racial and sexual politics. More distinctly, the novel centres on the impact that socially constructed views of race have on gender relations within the black community. As Butler-Evans highlights, “race rather than gender had become the overriding sign for the oppression of black people” and Morrison’s novel responds to this political issue by focusing on this in correlation with the Eurocentric society setting of the novel. The racial oppression suffered by the black community shape ideas of black masculinity based on male feelings of inferiority and consequent sexual oppression of black females. Morrison systematically explores the relationship between the racial oppression of black males and sexual oppression of black females. The main focus of this essay will be an exploration of how racial oppression experienced by black males, specifically Cholly and Junior, relate to the sexual oppression they enforce on black females.