Diva Foundation

Violence against Children

Children’s status puts them into an unequal and dependent position toward adults. That is why they need cares, protection, love and safety so that they can grow independent and complete persons.

Violence against children and adolescents is a serious violation of their rights and could be generally determined as every adult’s action or inaction that puts the child’s physical and mental health at risk.

Violent experiences that have been suffered in childhood leave a profound imprint on the child’s unformed personality and often lead to reproducing the adopted model of family relations in the families of already grown children.

Children can often feel the escalation of violence on them if they have grown up in families with violence, though they do not always become direct victims of violence. Sometimes they become a “buffer” or are put into the role of the “black sheep”.

The child’s presence itself at violent scenes is considered a form of emotional violence against the child. Parents, who are engaged with the conflicts between them, are inclined to pay less attention to their children’s needs. Besides, children do not manage to comprehend the world as a secure place, their sense of trust in the beloved parents is destroyed.

Gradually, children adopt the rude violent relations as they accept their existence and take them as a natural form of reaction against pressure and coping in conflict situations. The more intensive, continuous and drastic the violence that children suffer in childhood, the more severe the consequences in their psychophysical development.

When violence happens within the family, children do not manage to build and keep their natural adherence to their parents, as they consider them threatening, dangerous and neglectful. The child forms an internal sense of itself, based on its closest relatives' cruel and impartial attitude towards it.

The child feels that it is at others' disposal and this impedes the development of normal physical and emotional self-regulation and disturbs the child's sleep, feeding, leads to acts of wounding itself. It is possible backwardness in psychomotor and physical development to set in, difficulties in communication and at school to occur.

The requirement for implicit obedience to the violator's will destroys all the attempts at taking the initiative, tolerates silence and imposes passive behaviour. Thus, children grow up, meeting difficulties in taking care for himself or herself, identifying them or in the ability of being somebody's intimate friend.

They consider the abuse to be the binding price they have to pay for their relations with another person and often get into vulnerable situations.

They usually avoid contacts, meet difficulties when making friends. They are pent, impulsive and aggressive. They often develop forms of non-adaptable behavior in puberty and adolescence - drawing in forced relations, gangs and sects, they resort to alcohol and drug abuse, trying to escape from reality, have problems with studying and their communication with coevals, they run away from home, cut classes, develop depression, anorexia and bulimia, try attempted suicide and are able of doing deviant acts.

Types of Violence against Children
Sings for Identifying Children and Adolescents in a Situation of Violence