Emotional Abuse In The Glass Castle

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Should They Stay or Should They Go? Why?

In this world there are many types of abuse or neglect that aren’t always noticed and no one really talks about. We never notice that there are many different types of abuse because we do think that it is so bad that we don’t want to look into it. Social workers specialize in removing the children from the home because they have these things in their lives. Some parents would never dream of abusing their children, and some would never call it abuse. There were several different types of abuse present in the book The Glass Castle, even evidence that the children should be removed from the home.

The biggest type thing that I picked up on in this book was neglect to the children. The definition of child …show more content…

Emotional abuse is any act including confinement, isolation, verbal assault, humiliation, intimidation, infantilization, or any other treatment that may diminish the sense of identity dignity and self-worth (ASCA.org). Examples of emotional abuse are when the father is always ‘skedaddling’ to another place in order to run away from the law, the mother will buy art supplies instead of caring for her own children, and the father spends all of the family’s money on beer. The worst thing in my opinion that he could have done to Brian was when he took him to the Green Lantern because that could have caused him some trauma knowing that his dad had brought him to a place as horrible as that and he made him give his birthday gift to a …show more content…

Domestic violence is the pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner (ASCA.org). Examples of this are when the father chased the mother down with the car and threatened to run her over (the Glass Castle page 42-44) and when the mother and father would fight and call each other names they were inflicting domestic violence against each other. There was also the time that the father and Grandma Smith got into an argument and calling each other terrible names.

Lastly, the fourth and final thing that I noticed was the worst form of abuse, sexual molestation. Sexual Molestation is defined as ‘contacts or interactions between a child and an

adult when the child is being used for sexual stimulation of the perpetrator or another person when the perpetrator or another person is in a position of power or control over the victim’ (USLEGAL.com). Examples from the text about sexual molestation from the text would have been when the grandmother was doing this to Brian or Uncle Stanley to Jeanette. The parents knew that it was happening to Brian but neither of them did anything about it so Lori had to try and stop it herself which caused a fight. Another example was when Uncle Stanley tried to sexually abuse Jeanette but when she runs outside to tell her mother what happened all she says is “Did he hurt you?” and

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