What Do We Do About Abuse Now?
Society has progressed and regressed on the issues of child abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, emotional abuse and clergy abuse. For millennia, the acts of beating a disobedient child or wife or to have free sexual access to certain women were viewed as legal rights of husbands and fathers and other adults of a certain status in society. Slowly society began to realize that these acts were wrong. Ironically, however, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals predates the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children or the right of women to vote. When medical doctor Siegmund Freud wrote in a book, The Aetiology of Hysteria , that women with symptoms of hysteria were actually victims of incest and child sex abuse, it rocked the medical establishment and society of his time -- the late 19th century. The implications that the frequent cases of hysteria experienced by so many of the upper middle class women were caused by endemic chi...