In March 2012 four-year-old Daniel Pelka was brutally murdered by his mother and her partner. As the shocking news hit the headlines it quickly became apparent that his death resulted from months of abuse and neglect. And the saddest part is, that his death could have been prevented. Failure in social care led to Daniel becoming “invisible” in a system that was in place to protect him. A serious case review found Daniel Pelka, was simply "not heard" at times and "no professional tried sufficiently hard enough" to talk to him.
He would rape me anytime I said I wasn’t in the mood. After everytime it happened, I blamed myself. I said it was my fault that I wasn’t in the mood and I should be more understanding of his needs. It continued for the entire five years I was with him. I hated it.
I remember everyone in my family all alcoholics, drug dealers, mentally disabled, violent, and involved with known gangs. The first time I was raped, I was only fourteen. My family was angry with me for turning him into the police. It made us have to move from the residence we lived at that moment. We, always moved every year anyway.
As an infant, Dahmer’s mother was extremely depressed and was eventually hospitalized for severe post partum depression. (Nichols, 2006) Between the absence of his mother and his father being completely involved in his studies, Dahmer never received any affection from either. In addition, before his fourth birthday, Dahmer had several surgical procedures and hospitalizations that have proven to cause traumatic stress later on. Dahmer’s early childhood was plagued by extreme pain
"why don't you talk to Josie anymore" Because she's forgot about me. My whole life has been one unbearable day after another, its been hours of pain, of tears, of depression. My whole life has been picked up and dropped on top of me because I don't listen to the right music, I don't wear the right clothes, im not muscular enough, my voice isn't deep enough, the list goes on and on. My whole life is over. It has been since it started.
And at these times I hated you. You’d completely crushed my hope that we’d be as close as we were. But when I found you face down in the mud after your accident, all that was out of my mind. I cried every night for weeks after that, and I could not sleep or eat. I was too full of guilt and regret.
for months afterwards when she heard a siren she would become very anxious and upset. I couldn’t even play one of my favorite video game Grand Theft Auto 3 because of the sirens in it; it made her extremely nervous and uncomfortable. She complained of terrible and vivid nightmares of the events of that day. It affected her so badly she did not return to work for six months after the 9/11. Even to this day she becomes distressed very easily; when before September 11th she was always able to stay composed.
This is because she is mentally and physically exhausted and drained where she never gives herself a break. In Erikson’s Psychosocial Development stages of Early Childhood (2 to 3 years) failure to develop a sense of personal control over psychical skills, personal control and sense of independence leads to shame and doubt. Maria may have failed in these early stages of life and now is where the dreams of being naked and ashamed are taunting
The death of a parent could possibly be the most traumatizing event during a child’s life. “The death of a parent is a shattering event for a child….it stuns, shocks, bewilders, overwhelms, and frightens the child” (Parry & Thornwall, 1992, p. 126). It can cause cognitive difficulties, denial, depression, fear that remaining parent may die, feelings of abandonment, guilt, and inability to trust (Becvar). I didn’t express all of these symptoms but a lot of them I have felt at sometime during my life. When my father died I was too young to grasp the concept of death, so it didn’t effect me mentally until I was around ten.
The scary thing is Johnson’s case in one of possibly twenty where female soldiers had suspicions deaths. Another example of how bad its getting in the military for women comes from The Huffington post “50 Facts about Sexual Assault in The US Military, "I was repeatedly drugged and raped by several of my superior officers over a nine-month period. ...There was no one I could turn to because, like so many victims of sexual assault in the military, my attackers were in my chain of command. So I kept my mouth shut." Testimony of Trina McDonald, who was 18 when she was stationed in Alaska and assaulted.” Another example was not a girl who had been sexually assaulted but a boy, “Heath X reported that he was gang raped, told he was lying, threatened, bullied, assaulted again and tried to commit suicide all during his first month in the service.