Damaged By Cathy Glass

How Child Abuse Hurts

Shengyi Lin

EDS371-01

Professor Amelia Rose

March 28, 2023

How Child Abuse Hurts

Damaged is written by Cathy Glass, an author from the UK. She has been a foster parent for a long time and has written many books about children who had been in her care. Just like the book’s title shows, this time Cathy tells a heartbreaking story of how she fostered an eight-year-old girl, Jodie. Cathy Glass has fostered 50 children within 20 years, but none of them had been disturbed as Jodie. In this book, Cathy features this little girl named Jodie, whose violence and aggression had persuaded five foster cares, in just 4 months. The foster system called on Cathy to take this little girl, or else they would have to put

Judy begins to have nightmares that seem to be hallucinations of past physical pain. She becomes increasingly violent towards others and herself. And the most disturbing aspect of things for Cathy and her family becomes the appearance of three alters, Amy, Reg, and an unnamed housewife. It turns out that Judy suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID – which is caused by severe abuse causing the personality to split into other identities to protect the core self. It is extremely rare for a child to be diagnosed. More worrying after the nightmares, Jodie seems to shut down. As a result, Cathy had been fighting for therapy for a long time but eventually failed because of the UK policy back then. That means Jodie must leave for a living arrangement that best serves her needs. Cathy feels terrible that Jodie must leave in such a state, but this seems to be the only choice. At the end, they got Jodie into a therapeutic unit full of other children who experienced the same thing, and it’s run by a couple who promised they would find the best solution for Jodie. That comes the end of the book. It’s a rather realistic ending instead of a fairytale one – this damaged child was not healed. However, I can clearly see that all the love that Cathy and her family put into Jodie had uncovered the emotional wounds enough, so that people could know the issues and found a way to help

While she summarized that parents addicted to alcohol or having mental illness are always unable to look after their children; when parents cannot meet most of their children’s need, and even have violent on children, this brings the most damage. “a child suffer from neglect will have had a miserable time and can arrive at my house in a very troubled state,” Cathy says (Glass, 2007, p. 20). The out-and-out naughty of them is usually the result of having no parental guide at home, therefore they were forced to use their “naughty” to seek attention from adults. Just like Jodie in the book, her dad bought her toys and sweets just to keep her silence when he was abusing her, this eventually becomes the reason why Jodie was never interested in toys and sweets. In addition, when other foster families were frightened or annoyed by Jodie, they probably chose to buy her toys and sweets to make her quiet, this further encouraged her bad