What is psychological violence?

Scientists speak of psychological violence when parents ...

• communicate to their child through words or gestures that they are worthless, flawed and unloved, or only show them affection when they fulfil the wishes of others.
• overload them with expectations that they cannot fulfil.
• Ignore children's needs, for example for affection or comfort.
• signalling open contempt or rejection to the child.
• Use verbal violence, for example by threatening, humiliating, frightening or exposing the child.
• subject the child to massive deprivation of love by telling them they no longer like them or refusing to talk to them for a long time.
• Allowing the child to witness violence in the couple relationship.

The «Study on the punitive behaviour of parents in Switzerland», which was conducted by the University of Fribourg on behalf of Child Protection Switzerland, revealed differences in the language regions with regard to psychological violence: mothers and fathers in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino threatened their children with beatings around three times as often, whereas in German-speaking Switzerland they practised withdrawal of love twice as often. For this study, researchers asked parents not only about their punishment behaviour, but also whether they classified it as violence. The results showed that nine out of ten mothers also categorised most forms of psychological violence as such - but one in four fathers did not consider many of them to be assault.