We cannot be blamed for feeling nervous when this government talks of criminalising lack of parental love. There are uber-Thatcherites in its ranks who talk up the 'big society' but blame the individual. A wheeze for dumping their failure to support parents back on them would be no surprise.
However, in proposing to criminalise emotional abuse and neglect crimes, I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Many estimable campaigning groups, such as Action for Children, have advocated such legislation.
The case for it comes from the nature as well as nurture side of the child development debate. In an astonishing admission in the Guardian last month, Robert Plomin, the country's leading genetic psychologist, admitted of the Human Genome Project's quest for genes for psychological traits of all kinds: "I've been looking for these genes for 15 years and I don't have any."
On the other side of the equation, the evidence for the role of maltreatment in causing emotional distress in general, and emotional abuse and neglect in particular, has become overwhelming. This applies as much to the extreme disturbance of psychosis (mostly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) as to more common problems such as depression and anxiety.
A definitive analysis of the 41 best studies into the impact of childhood adversity on the risk of psychosis (mostly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) was published in 2012. It broke down the role of different kinds of maltreatment. Emotional abuse meant exposure to behaviour such as harshness and name-calling from parents. Emotional neglect meant lack of love and responsiveness. Overall, in order of impact, emotional abuse increased the risk of psychosis the most (by 3.4 times, physical abuse and emotional neglect did so by 2.9, sexual abuse and bullying by peers by 2.4).
Emotional child abuse has to be banned – the science backs up our instincts (U.K.)
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