Child Neglect Is Described As the Failure Essay

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child neglect is described as the failure of a parent or a custodian liable for the child's care to make sufficient food, clothing, protection, supervision, and/or medical care available for the child. In the United States, child neglect is the most commonly recognized type of child mistreatment and abuse. The theoretical definition of child neglect by Polansky is generally acknowledged which states child neglect as "a condition in which a caretaker responsible for the child, either deliberately or by extraordinary inattentiveness, permits the child to experience avoidable present suffering and/or fails to provide one or more of the ingredients generally deemed essential for developing a person's physical, intellectual, and emotional capacities" (Pagelow, 1984).

Mother is commonly considered as the neglectful parent. Polansky and his colleagues identified the distinctive mental characteristics of neglectful mothers and categorized them into five separate types i.e. impulse-ridden mothers, apathetic-futile mothers, mothers suffering from reactive depression, mentally retarded mothers, and psychotic mothers.

The impulse-ridden mothers have a noticeably undeveloped personality that is chiefly the result of an early emotional deprivation. Such mothers are psychologically immature and childish in their incapacities to think about the needs of others, put off satisfaction and pleasure of essential impulses, and do not possess the abilities to invest themselves in another person sensitively. Such impulse-ridden mothers mirror inadequate self-monitoring and strength of mind in a number of behavioral domains (Melton & Barry, 1994).

The apathetic-futile mothers are "discouraged, fatalistic and immobilized women" (Polansky, 1991). They tend to hold an enveloping confidence that nothing is worth doing which simply means that they have a firm clench on pointless feelings. They have a lack of contact and recognition of their own feelings which is the consequence of never-healed events in early life. They do not have pleasant interpersonal relationships which leaves them combating with loneliness. Moreover, they do not have sufficient confidence to learn and try new skills (Polansky, 1991).

Depressed mothers, on the other hand, are antagonistic, unfriendly, unsympathetic, rejecting, and unconcerned towards their children. They are especially neglectful when it comes to providing food and supervision. Such mothers also significantly lack social-communication and problem-solving skills. Mentally retarded mothers are not verbally accessible as they do not possess the ability to express their own feelings in words. They are deficient in knowing the needs of their children.

The mentioned categories also apply to other caregivers because the personality theory perspective applies to all the custodians, whether parents or not. The children are neglected and mistreated not only by their parents but also by their caretakers. This neglectful behavior is due to the caregivers' own personal experiences in their early stages of life and early histories of inadequate and insignificant parental care.

Answer 2

Physical abuse can be commonly described as the occurrence of an injury that the child/woman experiences at the hands of his/her caregiver via various non-accidental means that include "hitting with a hand, stick, strap, or other object; punching; kicking; shaking; throwing; burning; stabbing; or choking" (Giardino, 2012) to the degree that demonstrate harmful results. There is no single cause that has been attributed to describe the incidences of physical abuse. However, there are various models including interactional model, environmental-stress model and social/cultural/economic models that can help to describe the causes of physical abuse.

The interactional model clearly acknowledges that the physical abuse cannot be considered as an only incident with a single cause and single effect. This ecological model of human development and interaction signifies child as a microsystem, the family as an exosystem and the various communities that mingle together to form a social-value system as macro system. This model is usually regarded as the standard theoretical framework from which the multifarious interactions among the parent/caregiver, child, family, social situation, and cultural values that lead to the non-accidental injury of the child/woman can be approached. As all the components of the system are interactional in nature, they influence one another. Thus, when a caregiver and child interrelate around an occasion, in a specified atmosphere, it results in the occurrence of injury to the child. When maltreatment is viewed in this way, it allows us to consider the factors that the caregiver, child, and environment contribute to display the child at a risk for injury (Giardino, 2012).

The Environmental/Life Stress Model illustrates that there could be certain stressors in the environment that may make the care giving less than perfect and may exceed the limits of the coping abilities of the custodian. Straus and Kantor have been successful in finding a complex interaction between the amount of stress existing in the family setting and the caregivers' response.

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Thus, physical abuse may occur if a particular home situation comes up that contains a somewhat higher degree of tension and a baseline amount of violent behavior within it (Giardino, 2012).

Lastly, the Social/Cultural/Economic Model depicts that physical abuse is caused due to life stress, solitude, melancholy, anxiety, locus of control, parenting attitudes and alcohol/drug use. In short, the researchers have been unsuccessful in finding one profile and/or a common single characteristic that has in the physical abusers (Milner & Murphy, 1995). Social learning models, however, call attention to the role of abusive parents' own ill-treatment experiences as kids. This perspective clearly indicates that abused children gain knowledge of maladaptive corrective practices through their individual experiences of abuse and later on, as adults, replicate this behavior with their own family (Worell, 2002).

Answer 3

There are a number of causes related to sexual offending behavior. These causes include low self-respect, intimacy discrepancies, and problems having compassion for the victims, indistinct values, and abnormal sexual preferences. Men who sexually abuse children or assault women do not possess the essential skills to fulfill their desires in more socially acceptable ways (Ward, 1999, p. 298). The clinical and scientific research conducted to discover the causes of people becoming sexual abusers suggest multiple factors that interact in complex ways resulting in the development of various kinds of offenders. There are more male sexual abusers than females because the "stereotyped feminine characteristics such as submissiveness, passivity, and physical and emotional weakness make women easier to rape" (Hules, 2005). A large number of women do not know how to fight. Naturally, women are kind, sympathetic, tolerant, accommodating, and reliant. Such feminine traits make them easier to rape.

Another cause of a higher number of male sexual offenders is that men experience more aggression from adults and peers than women. However, as it is not permissible for men to express fright or melancholy, they channel such emotions into apprehension and rage. Moreover, the suppression of affection and the incapability to understand personal emotions and those of others, it becomes very difficult for boys and men to develop intimate bonds. Consequently, a majority of males satisfy all their yearnings for nearness and compassion through sexuality. According to Finkelhor and Lewis, "In sexual interactions, a man can be touched, a man can be nurtured, a man can be clingy, and a man can be close. These needs are acceptable in a sexual context. To fulfill them in this way does not diminish his manliness. The result is that when all kinds of natural human emotional needs arise, men are more likely to try to fulfill them in a sexual context" (as qtd. In Hules, 2005).

Due to the society's stereotypical perception of women being nurturers, it has become hard for all of us to imagine females being responsible for sexual abuse. However, it does happen more frequently than we consider. It is thought that abusing sexually is generally easy for males. However, it is easier for a woman to get away with. This perception that men are the chief sexual abusers is rooted in our culture due to the fact that boys are generally too uncomfortable to give testimony that they have been abused, even after they become mature. Similarly, girls who report abuse by a female are frequently not supposed as telling the truth. The society doesn't perceive sex between an adult woman and a teenage boy as risk-free, consensual and undamaging. Even though the percentages of sexual abuse by women may be small, the authentic number of such occurrences is high (Hules, 2005).

In other cultures too, this trend of ignoring female sexual offenders might not be different. Reasons are simple. Men sexually abused by a woman remain silent because they fail to make out what happened to them as sexual assault. As sexual assault is commonly analyzed as something women experience at the hands of men, the male victims go not report it. Some remain silent fearing that no one would believe them (Cook-Daniels, 1998). Therefore, whatever the society or culture is, it needs to be understood by everyone that it is not always the females who are brutalized and made victims to satisfy one's sexual desires. Men are also attacked, assaulted, molested and raped by women but as they do not want others to finger point at their masculinity, they tend to remain silent about….....

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