Child Abuse Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Child Abuse, including details on family violence, examinations, long-term effects, psychiatrics disorders.

Inscriptions of violence: Societal and medical neglect of child abuse - impact on life and health.

Kirkengen AL

Department of Community Medicine, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway, anlui-k@online.no.

OBJECTIVE: A sickness history from General Practice will be unfolded with regard to its implicit lived meanings. This experiential matrix will be analyzed with regard to its medico-theoretical aspects. METHOD: The analysis is grounded in a phenomenology of the body. The patient Katherine Kaplan lends a particular portrait to the dynamics that are enacted in the interface between socially silenced domestic violence and the theoretical assumptions of human health as these inform the clinical practice of health care. RESULTS: By applying an understanding of sickness that transcends the mind-body split, a concealed and complex logic emerges. This logic is embedded in a nexus of the impact of childhood abuse experience and the medical disinterest in subjective experiences and their impact on selfhood and health. Its core is twofold: the violation of embodiment resulting from intra-familial abuse and existential threat, and the embodiment of violation resulting from social rules and the theoretically blinded medical gaze. CONCLUSION: A considerable medical investment, apparently conducted in a correct and consistent manner as to diagnostic and therapeutic measures, results in the complete incapacitation of a young physician.

Published 25 February 2008 in Med Health Care Philos, 11(1): 99-110.
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