Good night Steemians, today I would like to touch a sensitive topic which is little bit spoken: Child Abuse.
This is defined as the neglect and/or aggression of any kind towards individuals under the age of 18 that causes damage to their physical and emotional health and prevents an adequate psychosocial development of the individual. The abuse not only includes episodes of physical aggression, but also psychological aggression, sexual abuse, commercial exploitation and neglect of the child. According to the WHO, at least a quarter of the world's adult population accepts having suffered some type of abuse during childhood and kept it secret for fear of reprisals.
In the short of my professional career, and before starting my postgraduate course that focuses on adult care, I was able to observe several cases of child abuse, but 2 of them were cruel enough that I still remember them.
The first one I observed when I was studying 5th year of Medicine (before graduating) and it was two brothers of 5 and 7 years old who were taken to the emergency by their grandmother who reported that the previous day the children were taken home for the mother because it was her birthday, at the time of singing the birthday the grandmother wanted to sit the elder brother in the legs and noticed that the child quickly got up with a face of pain and told her that he wanted to stand, reviewing them in the Emergency area we observed that the youngest of the brothers had a triangular burn that covered both buttocks and that had been made with an iron, and in the additional one to the burn of the gluteal region, it had the same triangular lesion in their genitals; this caused a state of confusion and indignation and even anger in the pediatric residents who evaluated the children, and immediately the R3 (senior resident) told the grandmother to explain how it had happened; to which the grandmother with a lot of sadness answered that the father of the children had done it; You can imagine the consternation that overwhelmed us all.
The grandmother explained that the 4 members of the family lived in a house where there was only a room and apparently the parents had sexual relations while the children "slept", so the children in their desire to self-discover and imitate the behaviors of the parents, made a kind of simulation of sex between them and during that act the father discovered them, and that was the reason why the father to give them "a lesson" and to learn to be "real men" burned them in places already described.
The second case also occurred while studying the career, an 8 year old girl who had been raped by her stepfather and the mother took her to the emergency claiming that the infant was playing on the roof of his house and slipped and fell on the grate of the front of his house and just "incrusted" the pointy portion of the grating in his genitals.
This is how incredible and absurd the excuses can be when justifying a case of abuse, and many times the voices that want to denounce these acts are overshadowed and buried by the fear inflicted by the aggressor and most of the time does not come out to the public light.
For that reason, in case of any abuse child that you know or that you are the victim of, Denounce it without fear!
"Violence creates more social problems than it solves." Martin Luther King.
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