Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

> One 2016 study indicated that about 10 percent of non-institutionalized elders in Kingston, Ontario, and Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, reported a family member being violent toward them—defined in the study as “[being] screamed at, insulted, threatened, cursed, talked down to or physically hurt”—in the preceding six months.

I feel like we need a new word for physical violence.

When I see "violent", that's what I assume it means, and 10 percent of elders being physically attacked is a crisis.

But raising your voice one time in an argument with a parent, who might also be yelling at you, while not good, I don't see in the same category. That can still be an arrangement that's good for everyone involved to continue, if everyone can apologize and agree to do better.

I don't see physical violence in the same way. Once that line is crossed, it's probably better for the living arrangement to change.

"insulted"

The Mom in this story calls everyone "stupid" at some point or another. Doesn't mean that the relationship with every family member she calls "stupid" at some point needs to be cut off. Although she should try to stop using that word so much.

I tend to agree. There’s too much room for subjectivity in this definition for it to be a useful statistic. Physical violence is relatively unambiguous and severe, but these emotional/verbal boundaries have no clear definition. My mother got insulted the other day when I added mayo to a sandwich she made for me because she finds it distasteful.

While verbal and emotional abuse are absolutely real, there are many parts of aging that inherently feel undignified. Are they really being talked down to or insulted in all these cases, or are they just being made to hear something they don’t want to hear? Like, grandpa, we love you but it’s best for everyone if you stop driving now. Mom, stay out of my bedroom (I’m an adult now and this is my house).

It's true that this distinction is often lost now, where we recognise that words can hurt.

As someone who was rarely touched in a good or bad way in my home, yet ended up thoroughly traumatised and damaged by childhood trauma, I'm the first one to point out how insidious non-violent abuse can be, difficult to prove, and often impossible to escape.

But yes, it would still be useful and helpful to draw distinctions between hands-on, physical violence against persons, and other types. In fact it is commonplace to label vandalism and property damage as violence; sure you may take a sledgehammer and violently attack a statue in the town square, and that's plenty symbolic, but it's not assault and battery.

> Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

I think we need to bring back sticks and stones in primary school so people understand the difference.

The idea that physical abuse is the only abuse we need to take seriously needs to die absolutely immediately

Emotional abuse is persistent, real and insidious in ways that physical abuse cannot be because it does not have directly causally induced external symptoms.

I can see when someone’s being physically abused and intervene via established processes. Knowing that somebody is being emotionally abused, however, is so much harder because it requires all of the parties to acknowledge that abuse is happening. Unlike physical abuse, an emotional abuser can totally destroy your life and make you think that it’s your fault and you’re the problem.

As somebody who has dealt with both physical and emotional abuse from family, I feel like long term emotional abuse is way more harmful over the longer term and for society as a whole than physical abuse (which thankfully is almost unheard of because we made such a big deal about it over the last few decades).

>The idea that physical abuse is the only abuse we need to take seriously needs to die absolutely immediately

So does categorial groupings intended to trigger reactions by association.

On the facts, I wholeheartedly agree that emotional abuse can be worse than violence. Calling it violence obfuscates the real differences in execution, mechanism, and impact.

Abuse is bad, both emotional abuse and violent abuse.

They are very different phenomena, with different best practices for addressing them.

Conflating them all as "violence" without making distinctions just confuses things.

On the other hand, yelling or insulting someone is not automatically emotional/psychological abuse, so the GP's point stands. Not every bit of somewhat violent behavior is even problematic - human interaction is much more complex than that.

Above all else, I hope that you are in a better place now and you continue to heal.

I'm curious about the context of this reply, though. It didn't seem like they were claiming that "physical abuse is the only abuse we need to take seriously?"

Your comment suggests to me that you've never been psychologically abused.

Imagine a brutal beating that lives in your head and never stops.

We had perfectly good words for it.

If we added new words someone would come along and claim them too.

This is what happens when you move from a society which values dignity to one that values suffering.

It is also what you get when language evolution makes was for language revolution - or revolutionary language - where language modification is used as a tool to achieve a means to achieve an ideological goal. When 'language is violence' but actual violence is 'mostly peaceful' or 'context-dependent' language loses its purpose.

On the contrary it servers it's purpose perfectly and lets you know exactly what the speaker means when they use those words.

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