Carisa Lee

In No­vem­ber 2020, the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty re­vealed that there was an in­crease in re­ports of emo­tion­al abuse against chil­dren dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

The oth­er re­ports made to the au­thor­i­ty about chil­dren at that time were sex­u­al and phys­i­cal abuse and ne­glect.

On Tues­day, clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist Vic­to­ria Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh said this abuse could be due to un­re­solved trau­ma in some adults.

“Their re­sponse is one of lin­ger­ing hurt, so in a way we have to con­sid­er the per­cep­tion of the per­son the abu­sive per­son,” Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh said.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s the Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme, Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh said what the world saw as ad­just­ing to the new nor­mal would be dif­fer­ent for those deal­ing with trau­ma from be­ing abused as a child. She said adults who did not deal with dam­age would find it hard to cope.

“That change and that shift in my at­tach­ment style caus­es me now to not be able to have healthy at­tach­ment when I get old­er, the self-doubt and this in­fe­ri­or­i­ty that comes out of be­ing abused as a child re­lates to un­healthy re­la­tion­ships,” she added.

Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh ex­plained that most adults with this type of hurt turn to mal­adap­tive cop­ing mech­a­nisms to sur­vive such as sub­stance abuse with the end re­sult be­ing abus­ing a child them­selves.

“That’s their nor­mal,” she said.

The clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist said when adults are guilty of deny­ing their chil­dren’s claims of abuse by an­oth­er adult or abus­ing chil­dren them­selves the ques­tion about why that ac­tion was done has to be asked.

“What had to hap­pen to you for you to be okay do­ing some­thing like this?” she said.

Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh ex­plained that she re­cent­ly had a client in her 50’s who was hav­ing epilep­tic seizures and when the cause was fleshed out, the client re­mem­bered that she had an un­cle who used to give her gifts and abuse her.

“She had for­got­ten it and it’s a re­al thing that peo­ple de­ny and re­press these kinds of mem­o­ries be­cause it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to go through as a child,” she said.

She urged par­ents to pay at­ten­tion to their chil­dren and have con­ver­sa­tions with them. She al­so called for par­ents to be­lieve chil­dren when they say they are not com­fort­able around a cer­tain adult.

Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh’s page can be found on Face­book: Vic­to­ria Siew­nar­ine-Gee­lals­ingh M.Sc. Clin­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gist.