In his autobiography, written when he was 70 and a story all paediatricians and those who refuse to believe in psychological or emotional maltreatment should read (http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/SomethingOfMyself/myself_chap_1.html), 1907 Nobel Prize winner for literature Rudyard Kipling wrote of the abuse he suffered as a six-year-old. Kipling was the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient. His children's books, including The Jungle Book, Just So Stories and Kim, remain among the most beloved classics of children's literature. He always seemed acutely sensitive to the emotions of children, at least of upper-class English children. He was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay and, as was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister were taken to England to live with a couple who boarded children of British nationals who were serving in India. For the next six years, from October 1871 to April 1877, the two children lived with the couple, Capt Holloway, a disabled officer, once of the merchant navy, and his abusive wife, Sarah Holloway, at their house in Southsea.
Kipling forever recalled the stay with horror, and wondered ironically if the combination of cruelty and neglect which he experienced there at the hands of Mrs Holloway might not have hastened the onset of his literary life. "If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture-religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort." On one occasion he was beaten for throwing away a bad report (he could not see well and needed spectacles), and saying he had never received it and was sent to school through the streets of Southsea with the placard "liar" between his shoulders. He recalls the return of his mother from India. "She told me afterwards that when she first came up to my room to kiss me goodnight, I flung up an arm to guard off the cuff that I had been trained to expect." So physical abuse also took place; but it was the psychological maltreatment, the sense of rejection and isolation, that he would carry throughout his life, and which might have precipitated the "great darkness" of depression in his later years.
Psychological Maltreatment, an American Academy of Pediatrics report published on July 30, defines its subject as a pattern of behaviour "likely to be interpreted by a child that he or she is unloved, unwanted, or serves only instrumental purposes and/or that severely undermines the child's development and socialisation." "Unloved." "Unwanted." The defining emotions of our new century?
Psychological maltreatment has been recognised relatively recently compared with other subtypes of abuse and neglect and little is known about it except that it is the most common form of child abuse. Being not as exciting as physical or sexual abuse, the press has paid little attention to it. According to Lancet, self-report studies suggest that, in the US and the UK, eight-nine per cent of women and four per cent of men have experienced severe psychological abuse in childhood. Adult problems include social difficulties, aggression, mental health difficulties and attempted suicide.
The diagnosis is difficult, and relies on a cautious, sensitive and sensible approach by paediatricians and related healthcare, social care and teaching professionals. This requires adequately resourced services, and a philosophy of effective assessment and management, so we might just as well forget about it in T&T.
Moreover, this is not just a problem for professionals to deal with: it is a problem of the entire community-and community to me means street. Communities as a whole must define and promote good parenting, and address the inequities that lead to unhappy childhoods. That means going back to the good old days when everyone in the street looked out for a youngster. What made Kipling turn his abuse around into something positive? His abuse was short-lived, it lasted only a few years. He was given a break. At the end of every year, he was taken for the Christmas holidays to a beloved aunt and there made to feel that he was special for a month. And he always knew that his family was coming back for him. Kipling never told anyone what was happening to him. Here is his explanation, given late in his life: "Often and often afterwards, the beloved aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it."
