Emotional and Psychological Child Abuse: Notes on Discourse, History, and Change

Abstract

Emotional or psychological child abuse is riven by conflict and contradiction, and the resulting incoherence makes it an unstable basis for intervention in families. J. Robert Shull asks in this note how advocates, frustrated by the relative immobility of legal institutions in cases of child abuse other than physical battering or sexual contact, could attempt to make this category of abuse a viable reason for child protection work. He traces the conditions which produce the incoherence ofpsychological abuse in several discursive domains and locates those conditions in their historical context. Finally, he concludes by suggesting strategies for advocates to identify and manipulate the relations of power and knowledge that produce the incoherence of emotional abuse.