Impacts of physical and emotional abuse

Amber Brandt and Krista Wermerskirchen

Photo Assignment

3/30/15

Impacts of physical and emotional abuse

                The inspiration for our social injustice was domestic violence.  What is the truly the difference between physical and emotional abuse? 

The first picture that we have is to demonstrate the effects of physical abuse on victims.  “Boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults (Strauss, Gelles, and Smith, 1990).  Because of this, the cycle continues because these children grow up with domestic abuse of their mothers or other people that they are close to.  By seeing this when they are so young and still developing their moral compasses, they will continue the patterns of abuse.  We specifically chose to use a man of color as the abuser because they are stereotyped in our society to be violent brutes that are always the ones committing violent acts against women and children.  Blaming domestic violence on people of color has been happening throughout history, using males of color as “escape goats” instead of addressing the real issue. This was evident in the Ray Rice conviction over a video of him beating his wife that was leaked to the media.  We didn’t want to put makeup on the girl or cause her harm for our picture, so we had her cover her face.  Victims of physical abuse are often very good at hiding the tragedies of what is really going on behind closed doors.  The abuser is also often aware of where they are making marks on the victims so as not to be caught as easily. 

                We chose to also show the other side of abuse which is often overlooked and that is emotional abuse.  Emotional abuse is a lot easier to overlook because, again, victims are good at covering up their true feelings.  We chose to depict this woman with chains around her body and tape on her mouth to show that even if you are ‘only’ being emotionally abused, it physically weighs you down in all of your thoughts and actions.  Emotional abuse can also trigger PTSD in victims. PTSD can cause flashbacks, nightmares, and anxiety attacks. Anxiety attacks can cause physical harm to a person’s health.  Other ways that emotional abuse can impact the health of the victim is that the victim is more likely to self-medicate, self-inflict pain, and drink their ‘problems’ away to avoid what is really going on in the inside.  People often associate domestic violence with physical marks when the reality is emotional abuse can be just as harmful even with the absence of physical marks from the abuser.