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Main Types of Maltreatment

What Are the Main Types of Maltreatment?

There are four major types of maltreatment: physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse.

Physical Abuse means physical injury as a result of punching, beating, kicking, biting, burning, shaking or otherwise harming a child. It's common the parent didn't mean to harm the child. The injury may have resulted from over-discipline or physical punishment.

Child Neglect is failure to provide for the child's basic needs. Neglect can be physical, educational, or emotional.

Physical neglect happens when a parent doesn't get health care for the child or abandons the child. It also includes forcing the child to leave home or not allowing him/her come back.

Educational neglect includes allowing the child to not go to school, not enrolling a child in school when they reach the school age, and failure to attend to a special educational need.

Emotional neglect means not responding to the child when they need affection or refusing to get child psychological care if that is needed. This also includes spouse abuse when the child is present and letting child use drugs or alcohol

Cultural values and standards of care should be considered when assessing these situations. Poverty might be the cause and it should not be overlooked.

Sexual Abuse includes fondling a child's genitals, intercourse, incest, rape, sodomy, exhibitionism, and commercial exploitation through prostitution or the production of pornographic materials. Many experts believe that sexual abuse is often not reported because of the secrecy or "conspiracy of silence" in these cases.

Emotional Abuse (psychological/verbal abuse/mental injury) includes acts that could cause serious behavioral, cognitive, emotional, or mental disorders. Sometimes the acts of parents or other caregivers alone are enough to get protective services. Proof of harm to the child is not necessarily needed. This kind of treatment includes things like locking the child in a closet or other weird forms of punishment. Less severe forms like rejection or some other form of emotional abuse are often difficult to prove. The forms of child abuse often occur in combination.

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