Definition of Abuse

Child abuse is one of the most common abuse in the world

Abuse is a complicated psychosocial issue that affects generous figures of adults as well as children all over the planet. This misbehaviour is categorized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) under the direction of "Other Condition That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention". Although abuse was originally described with regard to children once it first acknowledged sustained attention in the 1950s, clinicians, scientists, and researchers currently recognize that adults can suffer abuse in a quantity of various circumstances. Abuse refers to dangerous and harmful or injurious behaviour of another individual that may possibly include physical, sexual, verbal, psychological, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual mistreatment or exploitation. Abuse may coexist with neglect, which is characterized as failure to collect a dependent person's basic physical and medicinal needs, emotional or psychological deprivation, desertion. Neglect is occasionally explained as passive abuse.

The outlays of abuse to society run into billions of money yearly in America alone. They include not merely the whole expenditures of immediate medical and psychiatric treatment and medication of abused individuals but also the indirect expenses of learning difficulties, interrupted education, workforce absenteeism, and long-term health crisis of abuse survivors.

Source: The Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders, Ellen Thackery and Madeline Harris, 2002