Neglect Kinds of Abuses Done by Carmen, Eastman, and Georgie towards Clare

73 aggression, and achievement” p.374. Based on this definition, Carmen’s Motivation can be categorized as extrinsic motivation or social motives because the incentive of her abusive action comes from her social interaction with Clare. It includes the need for aggression towards Clare to teach and punish her on the bed wetting, the need for expressing her feeling of dislike and anger towards Clare, the need for the acknowledgement of her being the boss of the house. Those needs become her motives in being a perpetrator. The following will discuss her social motives in depth from the frame of Crosson and Tower’s models of abuse 2008, p.97. 1 To Teach and Punish Clare Carmen’s abusive actions belong to the environmentalsociologicalcultural based models, which focus on the part that the milieu, and stressors within the milieu, plays in the abuse Crosson Tower, 2008, p.97. This model analyzes Carmen’s thought or way of thinking in abusing Clare. Carmen’s abuse towards Clare is mainly caused by her thinking that Clare’s bed wetting is inappropriate and wrong in the cultural and societal point of view, because Clare’s older sisters have all stopped wetting the bed around her age. In Carmen’s mind, a child at the same age as Clare must not wet the bed and can actually control it, but Clare still deliberately wets the bed. This reason is considered a common cause in child abuse, as explained by Mersch in MedicineNet 1996-2012, “A common theme when interviewing abusive individuals is an unrealistic expectation of infant or child behaviors. Often they 74 expect developmental-milestone maturity beyond the age of the child such as toilet training” p.2. At first, Carmen just wants to solve Clare’s bed wetting problem. She tries to take her to some experts and using an alarm as well. Briscoe writes Carmen’s effort as, “She was given lots of books on bed-wetting and bladder training. At the age of five I got my first alarm system.” p.13; ch.1. Those ways do not work for Clare, “But my bed-wetting got progressively worse and my mother took me to expert after expert.” p.14; ch.1. As Clare continues to wet the bed, Carmen begins to think of punishing Clare. She thinks when Clare is afraid of the punishment, she will no longer wet the bed. In the end, punishment becomes Carmen’s choice of treatment. Unfortunately, the punishments do not solve the bed-wetting, but worsen the condition: Not only was I unable to prevent myself wetting the bed, the mere presence of my mother andor a bedtime beating made me so nervous that I sometimes emptied my bladder in front of her, which was seen as an act of defiance. p.15 – p.16; ch.1 An anxious Clare wets the bet even more often. In this case, discipline is used as the reason to give punishment. Although Carmen has a positive goal and motivation, which is to make Clare stop wetting the bed, the physical punishments border on and is indeed abuse. This is due to the punishment being aimed not to discipline Clare, but to traumatize her. 75 2 To Express Anger and Dislike Carmen actually does not hate Clare in the beginning. As explained before, she starts giving Clare abusive punishment only to stop her from wetting the bed. However, because none of her efforts are successful, she begins to lose her patience and starts to really get resent at Clare. This condition changes Carmen’s feelings toward Clare, which at first is a feeling of pity towards Clare’s wetting bed, and turns it into a feeling of dissatisfaction and anger. Briscoe writes, “I was bed-wetting ever since I knew myself. This infuriated my mother and was the cause of most of the beatings I had.” p.12; ch.1. The punishments are then no longer done to teach Clare, but became an expression of hatred towards Clare. At this point, she abuses Clare in order to expressing her anger, frustration, and dislike of Clare. In her anger and hatred at Clare, Carmen starts to see everything about Clare as bad, driving her to the conclusion that Clare is ugly. She has one more reason to hate Clare, because her ugly appearance is in contrast to Carmen’s beauty. As explained in Carmen characteristics previously, Carmen always feels that she is beautiful and that beauty is important. Her feelings can be seen from the way she despises her relatives because she feels that she is more beautiful than them. Clare is not pretty, and on top of that, she regularly wets the bed. Clare’s looks and her bed-wetting shamed Carmen. Shame can turn into anger and, in Carmen’s case, it does. She cannot accept the fact that the ugly child by Carmen’s standards who still wets the bed is her biological daughter, who she cannot easily get rid of. It makes her hate Clare even more. She expresses these