From: mha23x@gmail.com   
      
   Psychology Today   
      
   Susan Newman Ph.D. Susan Newman Ph.D.   
   Singletons   
   Who is the Most Violent Person in Your Family?   
   What parents don't know (or want to believe) about their children.   
   Posted Nov 15, 2009   
      
      
      
      
      
   Source:   
   You may be surprised.   
      
   Last week twenty-year-old Jim told his mother that he has always been leery of   
   his younger, but larger brother, Andrew. Jim's cautiousness around Andrew   
   dates back to the time Andrew shoved him off a dump truck breaking both of   
   Jim's wrists. The boys    
   were six and five-years-old. The brothers have rarely seen eye-to-eye and as   
   young adults tolerate each other, are cordial, but nothing more. Their mother   
   had hoped they would be best friends at this point in their lives.   
      
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   The story was related to me by the boys' mother who is upset by her sons'   
   current relationship, but understands it better after Jim's explanation of the   
   dump truck incident. This was the first she learned that what she had believed   
   to have been an    
   accident might have been intentional-as Jim thinks. "They fought frequently as   
   kids, but I chalked their behavior up to typical sibling rivalry," she told   
   me. "Now I wonder. I never heard of sibling abuse. It would explain why Jim   
   doesn't trust Andrew."    
   In retrospect, she looks at her boys' childhoods in a different light.   
      
   Linda Mills points out in her post that "Sibling rivalry can and often does,   
   however, slide into sibling abuse, with the potential to cause serious   
   lifelong trauma and suffering." Jim and Andrew's mother labeled their frequent   
   fighting sibling rivalry,    
   but it might well have been ongoing abuse. "Sibling abuse" would explain Jim's   
   persistence in keeping his distance from Andrew and the caution he displays   
   around him. Jim keeps a keen eye on his brother's location whenever they are   
   together. "I look over    
   my shoulder to check where Andrew is. I try not to let him be too close behind   
   me," he told his mother.   
      
   Jim's story and his lifelong wariness are not so unusual. There's a fine line   
   between an accident and intentional abuse. Parents have difficulty recognizing   
   when that line has been crossed. As I point out in my post, The Dark Side of   
   Siblings, there is    
   far more sibling abuse going on than parents know. According to a report in   
   The Journal of Counseling and Development the percent of children using   
   physical aggression against siblings ranges from a low of 35 percent to a high   
   of 80 percent.   
      
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   These findings are in marked contrast to the percentages of abuse by parents   
   against children: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,   
   Administration for Children and Families reports one percent of parents   
   severely abuse their children. A    
   different national study found that 2.3 percent of parents displayed abuse   
   toward their children. That is a huge difference from the average (among   
   available studies) of between 35 and 60 percent of brothers and sisters who   
   physically abuse a sibling.    
   Most sibling abuse is neither acknowledged by parents, nor, if recognized,   
   reported to authorities.   
      
   The high instance of sibling abuse (hitting with rocks, baseball bats, shoving   
   hard enough to cause injury) led Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, authors of   
   Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family to conclude that   
   "children are the most    
   violent persons in American families." You may not agree, but hopefully all   
   parents will pay closer attention.   
      
   Related: What Difference do Siblings Make?   
      
      
      
   https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/singletons/200911/who-is-th   
   -most-violent-person-in-your-family   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)