Emotional and psychological child abuse: notes on discourse, history, and change.

• Author: Shull, J. Robert

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 of psychological 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.

I start with two stories. The danger in doing so is repeating yet again what has become a convention in child abuse literature--beginning an article or book with an account, or several bullet-listed accounts, always sad and outrageous, of children who have been tortured, injured, or killed. Most such accounts serve only a limited purpose; they are presented solely to induce pathos or outrage in the reader, who is then prepared for the discussion that follows. The two cases I want to discuss are indeed spectacles of pain, and I take as given that they are outrageous, but rather than pornogrify these stories I want to learn from them.

The first case comes from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Elsa Speller was charged criminally for having locked her thirteen-year-old daughter in a closet for seventeen hours, naked, without food or water, and with only a bucket for a bathroom. Speller was acquitted. Among the outraged community members was the police chief, who urged, "Clearly, we cannot let one misguided verdict dissuade us from fulfilling our obligation to protect children from neglect and/or abuse of all types."(1)

The second comes from La Grande, Oregon. Patricia Muncy repeatedly visited bizarre punishments upon her daughter, among them making her eat hot peppers as a punishment for telling lies. When she chained the thirteen-year-old to a tree for two days and sawed away her long ponytail with a hunting knife, she was prosecuted, but only because in the course of securing her daughter to the tree Muncy had slapped the girl. A casework supervisor commented, "Oregonians are telling us that it's not OK for kids to be abused and neglected. It's just unfortunate that it took something like this to make people think about it."(2)

What I find interesting here is that these two cases come from opposite ends of the country yet share so much. In press coverage of the local controversies each case incited, the parent's cruelty was occasion to discuss a particular kind of child abuse: "emotional" or "psychological" child abuse. The stories share a tone of outrage, as expressed by officials who were concerned with government intervention in families for reasons of abuse. In each case, the outrage originates in the perceived failure of legal institutions to respond appropriately to the parent's cruelty: Because of policies or decisions, however "misguided," the institutions that should intervene for "abuse of all types" are immobilized because Speller and Muncy's cruelty is categorized as the problematic sort of abuse, emotional abuse. Even though the local community of Lancaster or La Grande is construed as desiring such interventions on the ground that "it's not OK for kids to be abused and neglected," their laws do not embody that desire, and so, we are left to infer, Speller and Muncy are getting away with abuse simply because it is psychological abuse.

Let me clarify, first, what I will mean when I refer to psychological or emotional abuse.(3) First, most obviously, it is a word. I will, in fact, have occasion to consider how the textuality of the word functions to mobilize the apparatuses of power/knowledge that produce controversies like the Speller and Muncy cases. Second, more importantly, emotional abuse is a point of convergence of those apparatuses. Third, closely related to the second kind of reference, psychological abuse is their shared albeit differentially treated target of knowledge and ignorance, speech and silence, recognition and refusal. That differential treatment might be called the incoherence of emotional abuse.

It is in this third sense that I will refer to psychological or emotional abuse as something done by parents to children, although I will not attempt to provide a cogent definition because I do not believe there is one, nor should there be one. Instead, I adopt the explanation of the term used in the third National Incidence Study. There, "the category of emotional abuse" is simply broken into further categories to show that it "encompasses three distinct forms of maltreatment," the first being "Close Confinement (Tying or Binding and Other Forms)": "Tortuous restriction of movement, as by tying a child's arms or legs together or binding a child to a chair, bed, or other object, or confining a child to an enclosed area (such as a closet) as a means of punishment."(4) The second is titled "Verbal or Emotional Assault": "Habitual patterns of belittling, denigrating, scapegoating, or other nonphysical forms of overtly hostile or rejecting treatment, as well as threats of other forms of maltreatment (such as threats of beating, sexual assault, abandonment, etc.)."(5) The last is, simply, "Other or Unknown Abuse":

Overtly punitive, exploitative, or abusive treatment other than those specified under other forms of abuse, or unspecified abusive treatment. This form includes attempted or potential physical or sexual assault, deliberate withholding of food, shelter, sleep, or other necessities as a form of punishment, economic exploitation, and unspecified abusive actions.(6) "Distinct" is right. Emotional abuse is one of the three forms of child abuse--physical, sexual, and emotional or psychological. Tying and binding certainly sound very physical, very body-related, but physical abuse is typically defined in child protection statutes as the nonaccidental infliction of serious physical injury, and its typical image is battering. Sexual abuse includes the whole range of behaviors that are "sexual" and inappropriate to do to a child. Emotional abuse is, simply, all the rest, the excess within child abuse after physical abuse and sexual abuse are specifically defined. Any imaginative form of cruelty visited on a child that is not a beating or a sexual contact is psychological abuse.

The Speller and Muncy cases are representative of the conflict I want to investigate in this note. (Disregard for now that each was charged with criminal law violations; my interest is in the civil child welfare law that permits a wide range of interventions, from counseling to termination of parental rights, in no case demanding a showing as high as beyond a reasonable doubt.) The conflict takes place on the sharp divide between nonlegal understandings of emotional or psychological child abuse and the legal regime that permits state intervention into families on the basis of abuse. In most states, the definition of child abuse beyond physical battering or inappropriate sexual conduct is very limited, as in this example from Alaska:

"[C]hild abuse or neglect" means the ... mental injury ... of a child under the age of 18 ...; in this paragraph, "mental injury" means an injury to the emotional well-being, or intellectual or psychological capacity of a child, as evidenced by an observable and substantial impairment in the child's ability to function....(7) Here, emotional abuse is identifiable not as the act of a parent but, rather, as an act that has achieved a specific result in the child ("observable and substantial impairment"). Outside of legal definitions, though, persists the belief that emotional abuse is something more than a legal conclusion justifying state intervention in the family, that it is something legal definitions fail to capture adequately. The frustration that some advocates and commentators feel in the Speller and Muncy cases stems from a belief that certain parental acts are themselves events of emotional abuse whether or not a child is visibly affected. What accounts for this gap? Why, despite the persistent frustration of this gap, have advocates failed to change state laws to make them more congruent with popular notions of emotional abuse? What, if anything, can advocates do to achieve the change they may desire?

To address these questions requires two critical tasks: mapping the interdiscursive production of emotional abuse and tracing its history. As Eve Sedgwick cautions, I do not intend to presume that there is a discoverable psychological abuse "as we know it today,"(8) but, rather, I seek to identify the material conditions of the incoherence of psychological abuse. In the description and historicization(9) of the present, I hope to track the relations of power and points of resistance that produce psychological abuse and create the conditions for its transformation.(10) These critical tasks should properly be broader in scope than the framing questions allow, and so I will proffer not complete answers but only notes toward answers. I may be a naif, but I think that a critical engagement with this issue and its history might yield possibilities for the advocate who is dissatisfied with the Muncy/Speller problem, and I conclude by suggesting ways shrewd advocates might attempt to manipulate the discursive system of psychological abuse to achieve some kind of social change.

1. THE INTERDISCURSIVE PRODUCTION OF EMOTIONAL ABUSE

   We seem to know a lot about emotional abuse: An estimated 532,200 children, or 7.9 per 1000 children, suffered from it in 1993,(11) 204,500 of them (3.0 children per 1000) suffering actual, demonstrable harm or incidents so severe that harm was inferred.(12) Emotional abuse rose at a greater rate...